It's Not Easy Being Green (Chester 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.

I don't know about you, but if I was one of the kids, I would

have run as soon as the rocks raised up off the ground.

It's enough. I'm out of here.

Elphaba had a lot of challenges. She was rejected from the time

she was born because she was different.

She was born with this bright green skin.

No one understood why, no one seemed to even ask why.

They just knew she was different.

They decided she was unacceptable and almost everyone

rejected her, from family to peers to to most folks she met.

But Alphaba was a human being and, and like most human beings,

she grew up and she fell in love.

And the man that she loved, Fiero, seemed to only have eyes

for, You know, the the prom queen, Miss Popular Galinda the

Good Witch. And well, she wasn't.

Never mind, we'll just stick with Galinda for now.

I'll try to avoid too many spoilers, but as as Alphaba fell

in love with Fiero, she still faced all these challenges.

She had been rejected so many times by so many people

throughout her entire life that her fear really was that Fiero,

whom she loved, would reject her too.

There's lots of reasons for that.

She had experienced so much rejection.

We tend to expect out of the future what we've received in

the past, and what Alphabet had received was rejection.

And that's what she expected. And so even as she found herself

falling for Fiero, she also found herself afraid that Fiero

would not reciprocate, that he would not return her love.

I'm going to grab my notes. Silly me.

I thought, I can do this without my notes.

I'm a nut. Oh, yeah.

It is that right time. OK.

That love, that fear that she had, it is beautifully expressed

in a song that we're going to have sung for Up.

Yeah. There we go.

That's my problem. I didn't move my slides fast

enough in a song sung to us by Ida Patterson.

I'm not that girl, Ida. She is the girl that's singing

and she's going to come up and and share full, Full disclosure.

Ida's my cousin and she sings beautifully and I'm not

unbiased, but it's still true. She sings beautifully and I'm so

glad she was able to to step in and sing this this week for us.

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

Not That Girl from Wicked. Due to the technical

difficulties faculties 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. I told you that was beautiful,

Ida. Thank you, thank you as Alphabus

sings that song and in the movie, expressing her her

heart's desire for Fiero, but feeling, fearing that she's not

that girl, the girl that he would love, that he would be

willing to devote his life to. So the movie Wicked and is is a

movie. It's it's a battle of good

versus evil, but it's also a love story.

And like every great story, every good story, every good

story, even the good love stories, if you're not a love

story fan, you know it's all right.

But even the love stories point to the great story.

And I almost have to say at this point that especially the good

love stories point to the great story, because there's a lot of

ways in which this story of Alphabus love for Fiero is very

much like the story of our relationship with God.

And and if that sounds weird to you, then then go back and read

your Bible again, because there are many places throughout

Scripture which describes the relationship between God and the

people of this earth as a love story.

Elena read a portion of that this morning in Hosea where God

talks about alluring his bride, his his, his people into the

wilderness. And that one day she would, she

would no longer call him master, but husband, and she would know

him and love him. And the relationship would be 1

of love and faithfulness and joy and peace.

And there are many other passages like that.

The climax of the entire scripture is Jesus coming back

to earth to receive His bride who is US.

The relationship between God and his people.

The story of God's relationship with his people is a love story,

and often we treat it like Alphaba thinks of Fiero with

that fear that am I good enough, am I enough?

Is God really going to love me? Is God really going to care for

me? Let's go through the lyrics,

just just for a moment. I don't worry, I'm not going to

sing. I promise.

I have made that covenant with you.

I will never sing to you. Hands touch, eyes meet.

Sudden silence, sudden heat. Hearts leap in a giddy whirl.

I'm not sure everyone, In fact, I'm I'm pretty confident.

Not everyone who is a Christian has had that kind of experience

with God, but it's also not uncommon.

Many people have that in the early stages, when they first

become aware, when they first really feel the presence of God.

And maybe it's in a Sunday school, maybe it's at a Bible

study, maybe it's at camp, maybe it's at another time and another

place. But God feels so present.

God feels so real. Maybe it's in baptism that that

you can feel like you can reach out and touch him and there's a

a warmth in your heart and a lightness in your spirit and A

and a brightness in your eyes. And you think, This is why I

follow Jesus. And then time passes and that

fades and you begin to wonder. You begin to wonder, have I

dreamt at all? Don't dream too far.

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

And there's a cautiousness that creeps into our relationship

with God. Did I just imagine it?

I mean, it felt real, but, you know, was it real?

Was God really there? Was it just a dream?

Can I really lose myself to this one who might really just be a

fabrication of my own imagination?

And the story continues, 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.

One of the challenges that comes in the life of almost every

follower of Jesus is that initial rush of joy.

Again, whether it happens at baptism, at camp, at VBF,

wherever that happened, that initial rush of joy at being in

a relationship with this God who loves me infinitely fades.

And reality creeps in and there's pain and there's

heartache, and things aren't working out the way they

expected to. And if God really loved me, how

can this kind of stuff be happening?

I've had people say that to me after years of giving

sacrificially to care for other people in the name of Jesus and

bad stuff just keeps piling on and one thing after another and

they say is it? I thought God loved me.

Why is life like this if God loves me?

Blythe smile lithe limb. She's who's winsome.

She wins him gold hair with a gentle curl.

That's the girl he'll choose. Part of our mind then tells us

if we were just better than this bad stuff wouldn't be happening

if if we were just a different person, a better person.

There's people like we see on on the TV or the movies or or or

singing the songs on Spotify and iTunes that always just sounds

so joyful and always seem to just their eyes just seem to

fill with tears when they think of their relationship with God.

They must be doing something right that I'm not doing.

There must be something wrong with me, something wrong along

with my relationship with God, because I don't feel that way.

And maybe I'm not the one that God loves.

Don't wish, don't start wishing only wounds the heart.

I wasn't born for the Rose and the Pearl.

And we tell ourselves to let go of the dream, let go of the

wish, let go of the hope. It's safer that way.

It's safer that way. It's much harder to be

disappointed when things don't work out the way we wish than it

is to not have any wishes to. It's a lot safer just to not

have to let go of the wishes, to let go of the dreams, to let go

of those kind of hopes and just say, you know what, life is

going to be bad. And if I expect it to be bad, I

won't be disappointed. If I imagine there's some kind

of all powerful God that is all loving that will take over and

guard and protect and care for me, then then it doesn't happen

and all of this pain happens instead.

That's too much to bear. We we can easily end up treating

our relationship with God like a Disney movie, like God is, is

Prince Charming. And, and if we're just pretty

enough or beautiful enough or, or whatever, then, then, then

God will fall in love and save us from our mass and take us

away from the awfulness that we're in.

But if we think about our relationship with God that way,

we're getting the story backwards and upside downs.

When we approach Jesus in the same way as we the, the, the,

you know, we approach the, the, the one person approaches their

love interest in the romantic movie we're getting, we're

getting the story backwards and upside down.

If we approach Jesus with the fear that we're going to be

rejected because we're good, not good enough, we're getting it

backwards and we're getting it upside down.

Let's go back to I'm just going to warn you with the clock

stopped. It's a very dangerous thing to

turn me loose with a sermon and a broken clock at the same time

or a dead battery at the same time.

I'm trying to keep track of my phone here.

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

great lengths to when your affection, devotion, and love.

That's the reality of it. Let's look at Hosea again.

God, this is God speaking. Therefore I will now allure her.

God is the one drawing us in. Jesus himself said that no one

comes to me unless they've been drawn by the Father.

And I will bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to

her. And I will take you.

He's now switched to speaking directly to us.

I will take you for my wife forever.

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

steadfast love. And in mercy.

I will take you for my wife and faithfulness.

And you will know the Lord. See, the one who really has to

worry about being rejected in this relationship is God.

God's the one who from the beginning of time itself has

been doing everything he could to draw his people to him to to

woo them to him, to bring them into this same level of love

that he already has for us. And when our worry is, oh, I'm

not good enough and God will reject me, we've got it all

wrong. We're backwards and we're upside

down because time and time and time again it is God who has

laid out his heart, who has laid down his life and been rejected,

but he keeps laying out his heart and he keeps laying down

his life. The Jesus who is God in the

flesh. To that Jesus you are that girl.

You are that woman. You are that boy.

You are that man. You are the 1 He has been

longing for your whole life, your whole life, and he will do

almost anything to win your love.

We know He'll lay down your life.

Lay down his life. Said that wrong.

Lay down his life to win your love.

He longs for you. Consider Mary, in all of this

Christmas time may be a good thing to do.

There have been prophecies of the Messiah for generations.

The king that would come from the line of David in the House

of David, the greatest king in the minds of the people of

Israel in their history, the greatest King David.

And God had promised David, one of his descendants would always

sit on the throne. But it had been generations

since the descendant of David had sat on the throne and, and,

and every Jewish person in Israel was waiting for the

Messiah, hoping for the Messiah, believing that one day the

Messiah would be born. But you'll never convince me

that Mary ever thought that she would be that girl that would

give birth to the Messiah. God would choose a rich

Princess. God would choose someone known

for their wealth and their beauty, for their station and

society, for their beauty, for their power, for their

influence. That's who God would choose to

give birth to the Messiah. Someone who lived in a palace,

someone had courtier courtiers around them, someone who was

filled with grace and and and beauty and admired by all.

And who was Mary? Mary was an ordinary girl from a

small town that no one really thought much of, neither the

town or the girl. But that's who God shows this

ordinary girl to give birth and be the mother of his

extraordinary son. And it's the same way with us.

God's not out looking for Princess and princesses.

God's out looking for ordinary people.

Bible says God's Spirit hovers across the earth, searching the

earth for people who will be faithful to him.

He's simply longing for us to love him with the same fidelity

and the same hope and the same joy and the same passion with

which He loves us. Now, I put this in parentheses

because I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because we're

running out of time. And I knew we would because I

always do. By the time I get to the last

slide in this whole thing, God's not going to leave us unchanged.

One of the one of the one of the messages that we see that are

that's in in, you know, love stories, books, TV, movies,

whatever is, is is this longing for someone to love me just as I

am and God loves us just as we are.

But but the other side of that is kind of the the part that the

books and TV's and movies often misses, that longing.

Love me just the way I am and I'm just always going to be that

way and you're always going to love me.

The reality is God. We cannot be in relationship

with God without God changing us.

God loves us just the way we are, but He's not going to leave

us that way. The longer we're in relationship

with Him, the more and more He makes us into and the likeness

of His Son so that we can love like Jesus loved we can think

like Jesus thinks. We're going to talk a little bit

more about that next week, but I just wanted to mention it here

today. The story that we're in as human

beings is a grand adventure of a battle between the forces of

good and the forces of evil. But much more than that, it's a

love story and it's a love story and which we do not have to

fight to win the love of the King.

It's a love story in which the King will lay down his life to

win our love and our devotion and our faithfulness and

loyalty. You are the man, you are the

woman, you are that girl, you are that boy whom Jesus loves

with his whole life. In Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.