Sermon: Reintegration (Luke 11:37-12:12) – Justin Sytsma

Good morning. It's good to be together.

This way. If you are a child, you can head

off to Kids Ministry. I see them all heading back now.

And if you are new and didn't get them registered before you

came in, you can get them registered back there.

So go ahead and do that now. And my name is Justin, and I'm

one of the pastors here at court, right?

And if you're new here, we have been going through the book of

Luke, which is if you are new to the Bible, that there's four

biographies of Jesus, Lucas, the third one, Matthew, Mark, Luke

and John. So unlike last week, Grant was

talking about this nice slow down pace of reading every

verse, which we are going to do here.

But you talk about this slow down approach of like, you know,

where it's great to these little chunks bit by bit today is kind

of the exact opposites. It's a little bit of like a a

flyby. We're going to go through all

all of this section here, but it's a big section and we're

going to struggle to go through every little bit of it with

like, you know, strong details. So one of those ones where if

you have questions, if you have thoughts, if there are things

that I'm not going to get to today, there will be some things

sending such a quest. Send us a question.

We'll try to respond to it in the podcast when we record

tomorrow morning. But we are recording tomorrow

morning. So we need it.

We need it like today or first thing tomorrow morning.

So let me pray as we begin. God, would you guide us by your

word, by your holy Spirits, that in your light we may see lights,

that in your truth, God, that we would find freedom, and that in

Your will we would discover your peace through Jesus Christ our

Lord. Amen.

Amen. So before I read the passage, I

want you to think about how you would describe yourself if

someone asked you to describe yourself.

You know, maybe you're making a dating profile or something like

that. I don't know, You know, and, and

so maybe you say things like I'm an extrovert, I'm an introvert.

Maybe you'd say you're friendly, you're compassionate, you're

agreeable, you're generous. And maybe if you were pressed

into describing some less desirable qualities, you'd, you

know, you'd say fairly like low stakes things like, yeah, I'm

messy or I'm not very punctual all the time.

Or maybe I'm a little hot headed right.

For me. I like to think of that.

I'm a fairly agreeable person. You know, I, I like to think

that I'm compassionate toward others.

Hopefully I'm not totally off base in that, but I'd like to

think of myself at least like that.

But one time. Can I share a story?

11 time I was on the phone with a telecommunications company

that shall not be named. Just pick the one that you like

the least. So I had recently broken up with

that telecommunications company in favor of another equally

culpable telecommunications conglomerates.

But I kept getting bugged by the old company as apparently I owed

them like $0.20 or something like that.

Like like my, I tried to close my account and there was like a

gap in between, you know, when, when I closed it and there was

like some interest that was accrued or something like that.

And so they were, they were hounding me for like less than a

dollar. They were, they were sending

mail, they were calling me. And I was like, the carbon

footprint on this thing is like out of control.

No, I was in the car with my friend one day and they called

and I might have lost it. I'm I I don't it doesn't happen

often. It doesn't happen.

It doesn't, but I I basically like highlighted what I just

heard you like this is ridiculous.

You're coming after me for like less than a dollar.

You're wasting all this, like all all these people power.

You're, you're sending all this mail like just the postage alone

is insane. Like, and so finally I got done

with them and I just said stop calling, close my account and

leave me alone. And then I hung up and I never

heard from them again. And there was a beautiful thing,

but I looked over at my friend and his mouth was a gate.

He was like, because like he's always known me as like mild

mannered Justin and, and he, he had never seen that side of me

before. Maybe I didn't realize how

intense my tone was. Maybe you have a story like that

where you or someone, you know, someone in your world did

something unexpected that you know doesn't seem in line with

their character and maybe changes your perspective on that

person. Today's passage has the

potential to do that for Jesus. If you're newer to faith or

you're maybe you don't know a lot about the Scriptures or the

Bible, we like to think of Jesus who is the centre of our faith.

We like to think of Jesus as this loving, compassionate

healer and teacher. But here in this passage, I'm

warning you right now, we're going to see Jesus and his

righteous anger. We're going to see indignation.

And it's going to feel a little uncomfortable at times because

the way that Jesus speaks to, in this case, the Pharisees and the

scribes or the experts in the law, the way that he speaks to

them, sometimes we're going to start to see ourselves and the

things that he's saying, and it's going to make us feel

uncomfortable. And so we just got to reckon

with that. We got to grapple with that.

And we're going to just set that standard now as we go into this

passage. So this is Luke Chapter 11,

Luke 11 · chapter mention

starting at verse 37. There's the first 37.

OK, So when Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him

to eat with him. So he went in and reclined at

the table. But the Pharisee was surprised

when he noticed that Jesus did not wash before the meal.

Then the Lord said, yeah, sorry. Then the Lord said to him, Now

then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but

inside you are full of greed and wickedness.

You foolish people. Did not the one who made the

outside make the inside also? But now As for what is inside of

you, be generous to the poor and everything will be clean to you.

Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your

mint, rue, and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect

justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the

latter without leaving the former undone.

Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important

seats in the synagogues and respectable greetings in the

marketplaces. Woe to you because you are like

unmarked graves which people walk over without knowing it.

We're going to pause there for a moment.

We're not done yet, but we're going to pause there.

So this is a good reminder. This is not some unprovoked

moment or incident for Jesus. Jesus has been fielding

questions about and criticisms and worse for the entirety of

his ministry, Some of them sincere, some of them not in

good faith whatsoever. In our passage last week, you

had some of these same types of people who were demanding a sign

from Jesus right after they had already seen a sign from Jesus.

Like some of these people are just not acting in good faith.

So he's invited to the table with these Pharisees and these

scribes, perhaps in good faith, perhaps not.

I think that maybe you can be the judge of that as we go along

here. And just as a brief reminder of

who the Pharisees are, the Pharisees were a religious and

political group. They were religious law

observers who saw it as their duty to maintain the purity of

the Jewish law and ultimately the Jewish people, because for

centuries they had been under Babylonian rule, Assyrian rule,

Greek rule, and now Roman rule. And they saw this as ultimately

God's punishment for Israel's lack of observance to the law.

I mean, it's an extension of their fidelity to God.

That was, that's how they would more rightly see it, but it

turned into something that was more about fidelity to the law

rather than to God himself. So the Pharisees, their goal is

ultimately a noble 1. So I wanna like just make sure

we have a little bit of understanding of who they are

because otherwise we can kind of turn them into a bit of a

caricature. They want to see God's Kingdom

come just like Jesus has come to do.

But the problem is, is that they want to do it through law

observance. And not just through all the

laws that we know of, like the 10 commandments and other laws

you might find in the Torah, but many other oral traditions and

other extra biblical laws that had now been codified as sort of

these little laws we all got to follow.

Not just Moses 600 plus laws. We have many hundreds more.

And it just became so extreme and hand washing was one of

these laws. So just we're clear, this is not

hand washing. Like, you know, you're washing

your hands with soap before dinner because you've been

playing out in the dirt when you're a kid or you come from

the washroom or whatever. Like germ theory was not known

for another 1800 years. So we're a long way off from our

understanding of that. This is about religious

cleansing. So I have a little picture.

You can kind of see it. So before you would sit down for

a meal, you would take some water and you kind of pour it

over your hand a couple times, pour it over your hand, both

your hands with with kind of a jug, water jug like that.

And it symbolizes that you were shedding yourself of the ritual

uncleanliness around you. One commentator says it this

way. And this is like just a a harsh

understanding of this. It's to remove the defilement

contracted by their contacts with a sinful world.

So if you came into contact, you're out doing your, you know,

doing your work in the marketplace and you come back

and you came into contact with a, a gentile, a non Jew.

You came into contact with someone who had recently come in

contact with a pig or something that is not kosher.

Like all of these things are like we, we just need to have a

coverall. So when I get back into my

house, I'm going to make sure that I rid myself of anything

that could theoretically, hypothetically make me unclean.

So again, this practice has not shown anywhere in the Hebrew

Scriptures, but it became codified overtime, first by

priests and then it became just like general practice.

Y'all gotta do this. It's just the way it is.

And the ritual in of itself might not even be a bad thing if

you frame it in the right way. It could be this sort of

beautiful practice if you, you know, see it as, you know, you,

you walk in your home or you walk into a meal place and you

want to sit down and just like, I want to let go of the things

that were, that were, you know, that I was facing at when I was

out there. Maybe you got home from a hard

day of work and you're like, I'm going to I'm going to

symbolically cleanse myself of all of the junk I just dealt

with at work and I'm going to focus on being here and present.

Like, that could be beautiful, right?

Not what this really turned into, though.

It turned into something that was more about a religious show

in many, many ways. So again, they're looking for

strict law observance as to be the way for Israel to get back

to being their own autonomous nation again, for God's Kingdom

to come. And they are willing to go to

extreme lengths to see that happen so that when they see

Jesus, this teacher, this prophet, this, this person that

they're, they are shocked that Jesus does not do this.

But it kind of makes me ask the question, why couldn't Jesus

have done it? Why didn't he do it?

Why didn't he just play along? Why didn't he play the game?

It would have been nice. You know, we all have cultural,

unwritten cultural laws and codes that we all kind of

follow, even if we don't. You know, it's like when you

walk by someone, you say, hey, how you doing?

Most of the time, you're not actually asking how they're

doing, right, unless you clarify, No, no, really, how are

you doing right? And so we all have these little

social things that we do. Jesus could have just done it.

Why didn't he? My best guess is that he wanted

to gauge their reaction for not doing an outward religious act

so that he could have a better sense of what was really going

on internally for them. And pretty quickly, very

quickly, he's able to surmise that these men do not

particularly have good intentions.

So that's when he starts his critique, which is the that they

are only concerned with what we could describe as outward

religion or outward religiosity, the appearance of religion and

spirituality. Here's what I mean.

At some point we can become so fixated on doing the right

thing, quote UN quote right thing, and we forget why we're

doing that right thing. And then it becomes only about

going through the motions of doing that right thing to the

point where you forgotten all about what the right thing is

actually supposed to be for. So for instance, you've got the

cup and you the dish and you've cleaned the outside of it

because that makes it look good. It makes it look clean, but

meanwhile you've got like days old, like Stew remnants inside

and it's disgusting but it looks good.

That's all that matters. Jesus is saying take care of

what is on the inside as well. This also might be a legitimate

critique lobbied at someone like myself who is very good at doing

like an external clean of my house on weekends.

But also if you look into my drawers or my wardrobe or my

closets, you might be very offended.

My wife sure is. Now I want to note Jesus's

antidote to this outward cleanliness.

He says be generous to the poor. Let's go back and just see that

real quick. So now do what is inside you, be

generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for

you. It's a bit of a curious

statement because in actuality, you could be generous.

You could give millions, billions of dollars away and

still it come from a place of grandstanding and coming from a

place of showing your wealth, showing your goodness for all to

see rather than the intent of your heart.

However, Jesus is saying something a little bit

different. So this is from Joel Green,

who's a commentator and he says this almsgiving then does not

correspond well with modern day notions of charity, which we

would have where you know, you give money either privately or

publicly or whatever. Almost giving was an expression

of genuine social solidarity, of embracing those in need as if

they were members of their own kin group.

So this is a lot different. This is very different from just

giving some money, kind of devoid of relationship.

He saying if you give this money, if you if you give your

these alms to these people, you are suggesting that you are one

with them because we are. His next example kind of follows

this logic. He says because they have

grandstanding, this generosity, they've given their tithes of

their all their herbs and stuff which they are supposed to do.

However, within all that, they've neglected the more

important matters of justice and the love of God.

In other words, their focus is on the outward acts rather than

the more important inner work that is supposed to take place

when we give God's justice and God's mercy and God's love. 1st

for them to experience it out here and then to extend it out

to the people around them. Then Jesus kind of highlights

their self aggrandizing nature and their self importance when

it comes to like the temple and the marketplace that they do all

of these things for the best seat in the house for respectful

conversations. And that's all they really are.

They're just kind of empty. And Jesus is saying this is not

good the way that you are acting.

And then in the final woe he gives to the Pharisees.

It's like really intense. This is it's shocking and it's

subversive. And what he is saying would have

been deeply offensive to them. He calls them unmarked graves.

So that would be automatically impure, unclean, all the things.

And you know, he says people are walking over these unmarked

graves. So you imagine there's an

unmarked grave here. You don't know what's an

unmarked grave. You by walking over the unmarked

grave, it becomes unclean. You become unclean.

And so he says you are the unmarked graves, you are unclean

yourself, and you are causing anyone who comes in contact with

you to be unclean, which is the exact opposite of what they were

trying to do. They're trying to make everyone

pure, everyone clean and buy their way.

That they're going about it by their strict law observance in

the way that they're doing it, the legalism, he says.

You are doing the exact opposites.

He's pointing out the irony in their entire way of being.

And so now Jesus turns to the experts in the law who are also

present. There's not just Pharisees,

there's scribes or other translations will say lawyer or

experts in the law who had a similar concern for law

observance. So we're going to read a little

bit about what he says to them now.

And this is probably my favorite verse.

So he says one of the experts in the law answered him.

Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.

I don't know why, I just think that's kind of funny.

It's like, yeah, that's right, Jesus replies.

And you, experts of the law, woe to you because you load people

down with burdens they could hardly carry, and you yourselves

will not lift one finger to help them.

Woe to you because you build tombs for the prophets, and it

was your ancestors who killed them.

So you testified that you approve of what your ancestors

did. They killed the prophets, and

you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his

wisdom said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of

whom they will kill and others they will persecute.

Therefore, this generation will be held responsible, held

responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed

since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to

the blood of Zachariah, who was killed between the altar and the

sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation

will be held responsible for it all.

Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the

key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered

and have hindered those who were entering.

So when Jesus went outside, the Pharisees and the teachers of

the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with

questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say.

That's Part 2 of 3. So for me, this is kind of, like

I said, one of those funny, not funny moments where you could

imagine this expert in the law trying to be civil.

He's like, teacher, these words are insulting to us.

And he's like, I haven't even started.

Now it's your turn. But I think we could summarize

Jesus's complaints toward the scribes as this He says life

with God is meant to bring life and freedom, and yet all you

scribes do is bring death and constraint.

So God life in God life, abundance, freedom, life under

this rule of their law is deaf and its constraints similar to

the Pharisees in their desire to be as pure as possible, they

have been heaping law upon law upon law.

They are creating burdens for the people and they're not even

willing to help those people, the people with those burdens.

They create barriers to connection with God and even to

the point where they themselves are excluded, Yet they are still

gatekeeping the very thing that they are themselves themselves

barred from. And then Jesus lobs another

critique of them. He says they're paying lip

service to the prophets and apostles, both of history and

contemporary, but their ancestors, their ancestors are

the ones ultimately responsible for their deaths.

This is their heritage and this is now the way that they are

living and acting. They're doing the same thing.

They're doing it. They did it to John the Baptist.

They're doing it now to Jesus. That is their heritage and that

is the way that they are living now.

This would be like paying homage to someone like Dedrick

Bonhoffer, who was executed for his dissents against Adolf

Hitler and the Nazis, all the while supporting white supremacy

and fascism. It's an incongruous and

inconsistent ideology and theology.

It doesn't work. So in A twist of irony, then

Jesus leaves the meal. And then they do the very thing

that Jesus critiqued them for doing.

They start planning and plotting and lobbying against Jesus in

the same way that he was just describing.

So now in our final movements, we see Jesus in some ways

responds to the Pharisees and the scribes.

He responds to their interactions.

And we should see Jesus's statements as being on the heels

of what has just happened. And so now this is at the

beginning of chapter 12. I think this is the first time

this whole series turning over a chapter in the middle of a

sermon. So here we are 12/1 where it

gets really fun. Meanwhile, when a crowd of many

thousands had gathered so that they were trampling on one

another, Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, saying,

Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is

hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that

will not be disclosed or hidden that will not be made known,

when what you have said in the dark will be heard in the

daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the

inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.

I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the

body and after that can do no more.

But I will show you whom you should fear.

Fear him. Who after the body has been

killed as authority to throw you into hell?

Yes, I tell you, fear him. Are not 5 sparrows sold for 2

pennies, yet not one of them is forgotten by God.

Indeed, the very hairs of your head are numbered.

Don't be afraid, you are worth more than many sparrows.

I tell you, whoever publicly acknowledges me before others,

the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of

God. But whoever disowns me before

others will be disowned before the angels of God.

And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be

forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy

Spirit will not be forgiven. I don't know what happened

there. There we go.

When you are brought before the synagogues, rulers and

authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves

or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at

the time, at that time, what you should say.

Go back. So I want to get something

really important out of the way because if you grew up in church

for a length of time, there's one verse that's probably like

glaring at you when you when you read that final section.

And it's probably the part where talks about blasphemy in the

Holy Spirits. So I'm just gonna like start

with that one, get that one out of the way so that we can like

focus on the the broader strokes of what Jesus is trying to say.

The blaspheming of the spirits is the complete its eternal

rejection of the Holy Spirit. That's all we've been confronted

by the spirits of who Jesus is and what we're called to do and

we reject that spirit continually, eternally into

eternity. This is not a one time thing.

In fact, Jesus even makes concession.

He says like, hey, I don't really care what you say about

me. He's like he gives like some

grace and some freedom. There's a message of hope for

the Pharisees and the scribes that they one day, two, could

change their minds, he says. You're not condemning yourself

to eternal fate if you have ever said something against Jesus,

though this is a grave warning. I don't want to undermine it,

because it is. I don't believe it's something

that we need to be fearful of. And T right says it this way.

He says the one sure thing about saying that if someone, but

sorry about this saying is that if someone is anxious about

having committed the sin against the Holy Spirit, the anxiety is

a clear sign that they have not. So I've had actually people from

this church come to me and say like, I, I'm worried about this.

I'm worried about things that I've said and done that may have

done. This is like the fact that

you're worried shows me that your heart is not has not done

that. So just be assured we can move

on from that. You're all in church this

morning. Chances are you're not

blaspheming the holy Spirits. You're good.

So going back to sort of the beginning there a little bit,

Jesus is interaction. It shifts from the Pharisees and

the scribes now to his disciples.

And there's so many of them that have come out of the woodwork

that apparently they're kind of like trampling on each other.

And sometimes Luke includes these details.

I'm not quite sure why. I think in this case, there's a

lot of people, number one, and perhaps it's to show kind of the

drama of the moment is increasing.

And he specifically mentions this previous interaction with

the Ferris Annie Pharisees. And he tells them to beware the

yeast of the Pharisees. If you know anything about

yeast, I don't know a lot, but I know a little bit I, I've, I was

one of those people who made sourdough during COVID.

I wish I could return to that, but just my time doesn't allow

for it. And, you know, it starts with

just like flour and water and then you put, you know, you

stick it on top of your fridge or whatever.

And all of a sudden it catches this wild yeast and it just

grows and it bubbles up and it's crazy.

Like this yeast just comes from nowhere.

And I think what Jesus is saying is you think, beware, this thing

spreads the way that the way of life that these guys know about

it will spread this this outward religiosity, it is going to

spread and it's not going to be good.

Jesus is using the negative example of these religious

leaders to show that our inner selves will always spill out.

If you go back to the kind of the first part of this verse, he

says there is nothing. There is nothing concealed that

will not be disclosed. Nothing that is hidden will not

be made known. You kind of uses a couple of

metaphors to expound on that idea.

There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed.

So even if no one ever finds out the particular thing that I've

done wrong or the thing that the specific sin that you've done

wrong or struggled with for many, many years, you've buried

it real deep. I've buried it real deep.

If no one ever finds out about that thing, it still has this

way of spilling out into our inward attitudes.

Our inward attitudes will eventually come out in other

ways. If we have greed in our hearts,

that greed will start to spill out in other ways.

That might not be as insidious as what's in here, but it will

come out. Our motivations will have

inevitably reveal themselves. So Jesus tells us to contend for

our souls. Be concerned with the state of

our inner selves. He says don't be worried about

people or forces that can only destroy your body because that's

all that they can do. He says be more focused on the

one who can destroy both body and soul.

Jesus says be fearful of the one who can destroy both body and

soul and throw you into hell. Now that word hell is Gahanna.

That's a burning garbage dump outside of Jerusalem where

centuries ago they sacrificed children to the God, the

Canaanite God, Molek. You don't need to know that, but

it's kind of interesting Gahanna came to symbolize ultimate

judgments. So a question here might be,

when we read that, when we read this section here, do we fear?

Who are we to fear? We fear God or do we fear the

adversary, the evil one, Satan? Now this is interesting because

I, I came across this, I was reading and I was like, whoa, I

don't know where I know where to go with this.

Like just real time. I don't know where to go with

this. And so I started doing a little

bit of research, as one does. So a lot of modern commentaries,

they will all say that the person being referred to here,

the person that we should fear, is God, with a minority saying

it's Satan. Now, it's worth noting it never

specifically says it's always him, him, him, he.

It doesn't say God. When you go back to the early

church history. So people that were around

several 100 years after the life and death and resurrection of

Jesus, often they will say it's gonna be inverse.

The majority will say that it is referring to Satan and that the

minority believe it is God. So I think the the flow of

Jesus's logic should actually inform how we understand this

cause this this matters. OK, this is important.

So he says don't be afraid. Where is it?

Where am I here? Don't be afraid of the person

who can kill the body and after that can do no more.

So don't be afraid of that person.

He says be afraid of the person who after your body has been

killed has authority to throw you into hell.

OK, so that's like be afraid of that person.

And then he goes into this other example, which is a lot more

positive, a lot more lighthearted.

He says, are not 5 sparrows sold for 2 pennies, yet not one of

them is forgotten by God. First time God is mentioned

there. Indeed, the very hairs of your

head are all numbered. Don't be afraid, don't be

afraid. You are worth more than many

sparrows. So I'm not just saying this

because it's the nicer interpretation that makes us

feel better. I'm saying it because it fits

the flow of Jesus's argument here.

Don't fear man, fear the evil. 1 And remember that God is with

you through all of this and everything you face, even into

persecution. He knows the numbers of hair on

your head. He is with you.

Don't be afraid, he says. I think what makes it more

confusing is that we have this language in Christianity of

fearing God, right? The word fear in both the Hebrew

and the Greek. It has this dual meaning where

on one end it means be terrified of, be afraid of, and on the

other side it means be in awe of or reverence towards.

The problem is, is that it's only dictated by context.

So we have to know based on this, be afraid of this, be

afraid of this, don't be afraid of that.

You know, so it's this very challenging thing to grapple

with. It's one of the reasons why

studying the Scriptures matters, why it's so good to do this

together, both in church here, but also I hope that you're

having conversations with your friends and family and fellow

church members afterward. Jesus is drawing our attention

with pretty sharp imagery to get our minds off of the external,

our bodies, our outward selves, and to focus on where the

internal is our soul aligned, or is it aligning with God?

Jesus was calling Israel, and today Jesus is calling us to

shed our outward religion in favor of inward renewal.

Outward religion versus inward renewal.

Another way that we could describe this is that Jesus is

calling us to live integrated lives rather than disintegrated

lives. What's the image that comes to

mind for you when you think of the word disintegrated?

For me, I think about something that kind of falls apart and

decays in my hands. You know, I, I, I had this image

of a tree log in the forest and it looks pretty sturdy.

And you step on it and it just crumbles, right?

Because it's been eaten by termites.

Or maybe it's like a towel that's been washed one too many

times or left out in the sun for too long.

And what happens? You go to like dry your body and

it just like falls apart, right? Things that disintegrate can

appear to look normal, but when you take a closer look, you'll

realize that it's falling apart. Does your life ever feel like

that? Is your life fractured in such a

precarious way that if someone pressed in a little bit that you

might realize that it's falling apart?

Do you recognize yourself? Do we recognize ourself in this

story? I think we ought to, and I don't

think it should be with the one who is saying the woes to the

people, which is often the posture that some Christians

take right, to be the one condemning and woes, when really

she we should be looking in the seat of the Pharisees because

they act like a mirror for us. All of us know what it's like to

have a version of ourselves on the outside and the exterior

that doesn't match what's happening on inside our hearts.

All of us know what it's like to try to maintain an image while

something inside us is dying and decaying.

All of us know something about disintegration, but Jesus's

words, as sharp as they are, are not meant to crush us.

And so that's why we had to go to this section here, to get to

the part where it isn't going to feel just like all condemnation.

Because there is hope. There is good news.

God has come. These words are not meant to

crush us. They are meant to call us home.

They are meant to call us into this inward renewal.

Because the integrated life that Jesus calls us to is not

something that we can achieve by just tightening up our behavior

or cleaning the outside of the cup here just a little bit more

carefully. That's not going to do it.

The integrated life is something that Jesus gives.

Think about who is speaking these words.

This is the same Jesus who is going to walk toward the cross,

completely consistent, completely whole.

His inner life of love is matching his outward action all

the way to the ends, to the cross.

And at the cross, Jesus takes on our disintegrated self, our

contradictions, our hidden motives, our fractured hearts,

all the parts of ourselves that we are scared, petrified to deal

with, to even acknowledge, to even whisper abouts.

And He exchanges all of its for his own life, whole, healed,

integrated and filled with the Spirit of God.

So the invitation this morning when we hear all of these things

is not try harder. That's just heaping more laws

upon more laws and weightiness upon weightiness.

It's not try harder, it's come closer.

It's lean in. Bring the parts of your life

that feel like that crumbling log in the forest.

Bring the things you hold together, you know, with duct

tape and a prayer. Bring the fractured pieces, the

buried sins, the things that you hope no one else sees.

Why? Because Jesus sees them and he

says fear nots, you are known, you are cherished, you are

loved, and I can make you whole. Where you are disintegrated, I

can integrate. So let's bring before God all

the parts of us that feel broken.

I think that we're scared to do that sometimes.

I I certainly AM. Let's bring those parts before

God. Let's surrender the outward

religion, the religiosity that exhausts us.

Keeping up appearance. It's exhausting.

And maybe receive the inward renewal that will restore us.

Remember, God calls us and brings us life and freedom, not

death and constraint. And may the God who knows the

number of hairs on your head completes you in His love inside

and outs. Amen.