It's Not Easy Being Green (New Beginnings UMC)

I opened the sermon with a clip from the movie Wicked.

It showed Elphaba right after she was born and later as a

child. In both scenes, Elphaba was

rejected by many of those who should have loved her, including

her peers, but also and especially her mother and

father. Now here's the sermon.

There is no doubt that Elphaba had challenges.

Elphaba grew up being rejected by most of the people around

her, including the people who are most responsible for loving

her and welcoming her and receiving her into the world.

Her parents, her family, her peers that were there, and her

childhood all rejecting her. Now here's one of the sad

realities of life that we tend to expect the future to be much

like the past, and so if we've experienced rejection from very

early on in our life, then we can tend to expect rejection in

the future. When we are rejected by people

who are supposed to love us, we assume that people who we want

to love us will reject us as well, or at least might reject

us. And that's the challenge, one of

the many challenges that Elphaba was facing.

There's a very real sense in which the the Wicked movies are

are a a grand adventure story of the battle of good versus evil.

There's also a sense in which the Wicked movies are a love

story, a loves, a very deep, a very personal love story.

Elphaba grows into a young woman, and she finds herself

falling in love with a young man named Fiero.

And she has a lot of fears and a lot of anxiety and a lot of

worry about that because she's green and people aren't supposed

to be green. And, and everyone that she has

wanted to love her over the years, except for a very few

exceptions, have rejected her or looked down on her or scorned

her because she's green. Because this thing about her

over which she has no control and people her rejecting her for

that. But Alphabet finds herself

falling in love with the the dashing and charming and

handsome and wealthy Fiero anyway.

And when she does, she worries. Now at this point, I'm going to

invite. I forgot to turn on the back

monitor, so I got to get that back on having grown up

rejected, I'm going to invite. Well, not the way I said that.

That might sound like Ida grew up rejected.

Ida did not grow up rejected. Her parents love her a lot.

And she'll tell you that and they'll tell you that.

But I just going to come up and sing for us.

Would you like the microphone? You can, you can.

You can hold it. And then if it works for her,

I'm going to go back and get in the sound booth before I start

the music so I can adjust the volume as needed.

But this song, the song that I just singing is called I'm Not

That Girl. And in this song, Elphaba is

wrestling with the fact that she loves Fiero, but she's afraid

that Fiero will never love her in return.

At this point, Ida Patterson beautifully sang the song I'm

Not That Girl from Wicked. Due to the technical

difficulties of getting a good live recording with the

equipment I have available, I can't include it here.

I described the details of the song later in the sermon, so I

won't get into that here either. It's a wonderful song, and I

encourage you to listen to it. You can find it easily on

YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes. Now back to the sermon.

Thank you again, Ida. She sung that three times this

morning and done a beautiful job every single time.

We have this thing within us that we long to be loved and we

want to love someone else and we want that love to be returned.

And that's part of our story. That's part of the story of

Wicked. That's part of the human story.

And, and any good story, I believe, points us to the great

story. And in the great story, the

story of God and his relationship to this world and

the people in it. There is certainly an A sense in

which that story is an epic battle of good versus evil.

But there's also a sense, and I believe a deeper sense in which

it's a love story and that the good versus evil part, most

folks that have grown up in the church, been in church for a

while, they can, they kind of sense that and see that and have

noticed that in Scripture, you know, the devil shows up and all

of these things happen and good versus evil, the love story is

in the Bible as well. And, and, and if if you've

missed it before, go back and read your Bible again.

It's there all the way from the beginning all the way through

the very end. The climax of the entire

Scripture is Jesus returning to earth to claim his bride to be

united not in a governing relationship with his people,

but in a marriage relationship with his people, a relationship

not built on force, but on love. So there's a very real sense

that we are part of this love story, the same kind of story

that Alphaba was in. Now Alphaba again, she had these

challenges. She'd been rejected so much.

She had so much pain and suffering.

It was very hard for her to believe that this man that she

loved would love her in return. And that's the tension in a lot

of romances, a lot of love stories that you read about or

see in books, TV's, movies, that sort of thing.

That tension is I love him or I love her.

Will, will He, will she returned my love.

I just don't know. The problem arises when we take

Alphabet story and how we look at how that applies to our

relationship with God or the connection that it is because

there is a tendency among humans for us to look at God the way

Alphabet looked at Fiero. He's wonderful, he's great, he's

amazing. But I'm not sure he'll love me.

I'm not sure he'll accept me. I'm not sure he'll welcome me.

And so I want to walk through those lyrics just briefly again

and talk about those, and not just in terms of, of a woman's

love for a man, but in terms of our love for God.

Hands touch, eyes meet. I, I, I'm not going to sing.

I make that promise to you now and forevermore.

I'm not going to sing to you. And I'll read the lyrics.

Hands touch, eyes meet. Sudden silence, sudden heat.

Hearts leap in a giddy whirl. If you've ever been in love, you

know that feeling that, that, that in love kind of feeling.

And every, the whole world seems like it's full of rainbows and

sunshine and unicorns and, and, and, and everything is going to

be wonderful and everything is going to be great because we're

going to be together. And it's wonderful.

It's wonderful and it's a beautiful and it always fades.

That feeling always fades. That in love feeling.

There's a biological phenomena that's going on.

That's part of that, but it, it, it, it always passes and then

and then suddenly we don't feel exactly the same way we felt

before. And we can worry that did I just

imagine it? Was it just fake?

I, I, I see this a lot in people's faith lives where they

have had a mountaintop experience with God.

Maybe it was at their baptism, maybe it was at some sort of

retreat or at camp or at vacation Bible school.

But there's this or youth group and there's this, this

mountaintop experience where God feels so close and so real and

so personal and, and, and, and people pledge their lives.

They give their lives to Jesus. They raise their hands, they

come forward, they kneel, they pray, they get baptized,

whatever they're doing to publicly say I love Jesus, I

will follow, oh, Jesus. And they feel the presence of

God in a very vivid way. And then it fades and they start

to wonder, did I just imagine it?

I see this so often. I've taken to telling people

before baptism, you know, not little kids, they don't quite

get this, but but, but teenagers and adults before baptism, look,

you know, you're feeling God's presence right now and it's a

beautiful thing and it's a wonderful thing.

There's a time when that feeling is going to fade and the devil's

going to start to whisper in your ear that it was never real

to begin with. It was all just your

imagination. All just your imagination.

The next verse, don't dream too far.

Don't lose sight of who you are. Don't remember that rush of joy.

We begin to doubt, we give it a doubt, we begin to pull back on

the dreams and the hopes that we had about our relationship with

God and what that might be and what that might look like and

where that might go. And we don't want to lose

ourselves. It's one thing to lose ourselves

to an all powerful God who loves us.

It's another thing to lose ourselves to a fantasy that

might not even be real. Every so often we long to steal

to the land of what might have been.

But that doesn't soften the ache we feel when reality sets back

in. Reality we get that emotion, we

get that high, we get that feeling and then reality comes

in and reality threatens and, and when we accept, we hear

these promises. God loves me with an everlasting

love. Jesus says I'll never leave you

or forsake you. Jesus died for us.

Jesus promises to love us and redeem us and be with us

forever. And then suddenly the God that

felt, well, maybe not suddenly, maybe gradually, but we reached

point where the God that felt so close now seems infinitely far

away. And the hope that we had for a

joy filled life with God becomes a pain filled life of heartache

and sorrow and grief and loss and disappointment and

rejection. And we begin to ask ourselves,

if God really loved me, how could all of this be happening?

How could I be experiencing this?

How could I be feeling this if God really?

And if I am feeling this, maybe it was just a fantasy.

Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe God isn't real because the

pain and the heartache and we know that's real.

It just hits US in the face over and over again.

Then we look at others who always seem to be happy with

God. How are you doing?

I'm blessed, blessed to be alive.

I love Jesus, Jesus is wonderful.

God is good all the time, all the time God is good.

And we those folks. And that seems to be their

everyday ongoing reality. And we hear these lyrics.

Blithe smile, live limb. She who's winsome, she wins him

gold hair with a gentle curl. That's the girl he'll choose.

God chose them for this joy, for this peace, for this love, for

this, this ongoing, you know, close relationship.

But apparently God didn't choose me for that.

What's wrong with me? What defect do I have?

What's broken in me? What's defective in me?

That God won't be that way with me, That God won't share that

joy and that love and that ongoing intimacy with me like he

seems to do for these other people?

Don't wish, Don't start wishing. Only wounds the heart.

I wasn't born for the Rose and the Pearl, We begin to think

that was never for me. Whatever I felt before, whether

imagined or real, that's not life now, and I have no reason

to expect that ever will be. Maybe God is real, but if God is

real, God loves other people but not me.

God welcomes and receives other people, but not me.

I'm not that girl, not that woman, not that man, not that

boy. If we approach our relationship

with Jesus with that mindset, if that's how we're thinking about

it, then we've gotten this whole story backwards and upside down.

When when we view that the risk in the relationship is that God

won't love us as much as we love him.

That that we're worried about that.

Because here's the reality in the testimony of Scripture is

that Jesus, who is God in the flesh, longs for you and would

go to great lengths. I might say any links to when

your affection, your devotion, and your love See all the risk

is on God's side here. We see it over and over and over

again in Scripture. It's not that that people are

reaching out and longing for a loving God and God is

disappointing them by rejecting them.

It's that God is reaching out for his people even though they

often reject him. But God continues to reach.

God continues to love. That story is told in so many

different ways and in so many different places in Scripture.

We're going to hit just one of them this morning, and that's in

Hosea chapter 2, where God speaking to his people through

Hosea 2 · chapter mention

the prophet Hosea, and he begins talking about his people and

then to his people. Therefore, I will now allure

her. God's the one doing the wooing

here. God's the one doing the winning.

It's not people out there trying to win God's effect.

That's paganism, by the way, that that is the the Baal

worship that's also mentioned in where, where human beings have

to do the right thing to gain God's favor.

And then if they do, they're just the right things to gain

God's favor, then they hope that that God will stay faithful and

loyal to them if they don't mess up with us.

It's the opposite. It's God trying to win our

favor. God has already loved us, and

God is trying to woo us even when we've been unfaithful.

Bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.

I will take you to be my wife forever.

I will take you for my wife and righteousness and injustice and

steadfast love and in mercy. I will take you for my wife and

faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.

This is the promise of God. This is the way the great love

story works. Not with us trying to win God's

favor and fearing that God will reject us, but with God trying

to win our love and our devotion to make us His wife.

That's the climax of Scripture, Jesus coming back to the earth

to receive his bride in love, in joy, in peace, and in devotion,

forever and ever and ever. That's the story that we're in.

To Jesus, who is God in the flesh, you are that girl, you

are that woman. You are that man.

You are that boy. You are the one that God is

longing for and calling to him. Jesus himself said no one comes

to me unless they're drawn by the Father.

God is doing the wooing. God is doing the drawing.

God is the one placing his life, his heart, on the line in the

hope that we will return that love.

And to God it's worth it. Every scar, every wound, every

sacrifice that Jesus made is worth it so that we might come

to him. Jesus loves you and longs for

you to love him too. Let's consider Mary.

It's Christmas time. Why not consider Mary, right?

Here's Mary, an ordinary girl from a little town, a little

little town of Nazareth, that when people thought of Nazareth,

they only thought negative, that Nazareth had such a bad

reputation that it was a proverb, nothing good can come

out of Nazareth. That was just the standard

thing. And and Mary grew up in

Nazareth. Nazareth was a very conservative

Jewish community and there is no doubt that she grew up longing

for and hoping for and praying for the Messiah to come.

The Messiah prophesied the one who God said God said, a

descendant of David will sit on David's throne forever.

It had been generations since the descendant of David had sat

on the throne. Herod was a Pagan king and he

was on the throne of David. But there was this promise that

Messiah would come, this king. But there is no way that Mary

ever dreamed she would be the mother of that Messiah.

God would never love her like that.

Surely God would choose the Princess.

Surely God would choose the one with the wealth, the one with

the position. Surely God would choose the one

that had the big beautiful palace and the rich clothing for

their child, for his child to be born and nestled and wrapped in

as an infant. Surely that's who God would

choose. But God chose Mary, this

ordinary girl from this small town in a backwards part of the

world, so thought everyone else, to be the mother of his son, to

be the mother of God himself. God chose her.

She never had to worry about being good enough for God.

She just, God just wanted her to love Him and be as devoted to

Him as He was to her, whether that was God presenting himself

to her through the Angel and glory or through this innocent

little baby who was resting in her arms to love and be as

devoted to Him as He was to her. And that's what he asks of all

of us now in all of this. Part of this story, actually.

Yeah. Well, I'll say it because it's

up there. We're going to get into this in

more detail next week. Part of this challenge, this,

this desire to be loved and loved as we are, not to have to

change, become a whole completely different person in

order to get the person that we love to love us, too.

Will they love us as we are? Alpha belonged for Fiera, to

love her as she was. That's where the movies end.

He loves me as I am. She loves me as I am.

That's not where the Bible story ends.

God loves you as you are. God will not leave you

unchanged. God will spend the rest of our

existence making us more and more into and like Jesus.

To think like he thought, to love like he loves to do, like

He does. We'll talk about that more next

week. God does not leave us.

God loves us just the way we are.

God does not leave us unchanged. It's not easy.

It's not easy wasn't easy for Alpha.

But to be green, the letter, to be rejected, despised and

scorned. We all have these different

things in us, these green things that lead other human beings at

times to reject us, to despise us, to scorn us.

We never have to fear that from God.

We're not the one trying to win God's love.

God has already died for us. God is the one trying to win our

love and inviting us to love him in return.

In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.