Sermon: "Adjusting Our Vision"

1st in the "Visioneering" series.
Delivered November 8, 2009 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Exodus 34:1-7

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It's so exciting. We've done this with missionaries. We've done this with our brothers and sisters, our children, our friends... sending them to the ends of the earth, sending them into seminary. It is part of what we do. It's part of who we are. Andy just shared how he got involved. He and Eileen... second week here, "Come to Central," and have stayed ever since. Think about your first time that you came to Central. Now at least the first time you came willingly, okay. Think about that time.

There are all kinds of reasons that bring us here into fellowship. For some of us, I've talked to you, it was the fact that your first child was born, and you felt the need to raise them up right. And as I've heard from you, you felt like you needed to get them baptized or christened or dedicated... whatever your tradition was before you came here, you know, you wanted to have that established in life for your child... get to a place where there is good Sunday school, a good foundation so that they could be shaped for the future.

Some of you came because of a life crisis... something really went wrong. And you needed a place where you could think about that, a place where you could think things over and heal, and so you came here, and you found a place where you had the space and support to heal. Some of you just were new to Baltimore, and you figured, "This is a great place to meet some people. Church is part of my life; let me go there, find a church where I can meet some folks."

Some of you found your former church to be a bad fit. That was hurting you in a particular way. You felt out of sync and you were looking for something different and you found that here. Maybe you were a follower of Christ and you were looking for a good place to grow along with other Christians. You wanted inspiring worship and good teaching and programs for children and youth, and so you came here.

Maybe you weren't a Christian at all, at that point. Maybe you came because you had some spiritual questions. You were asking some questions about who God is. You were seeking answers and you figured, "Well, church can be part of that search for me." And so you came with those questions and have been asking those questions. And maybe it wasn't your idea to come at all. Maybe it was your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, maybe even your children who wanted to come here and you just made the decision to lovingly support them in that choice. There are all kinds of reasons that we've come here.

And then you got here, and I hope that Central has been a place where you've been able to heal, ask questions, make friends, get good teaching, experience inspiring worship, and have good offerings for your children. I really desire that for each one of us. But if you stay here for a while, you'll realize we don't just exist to be a place where you can heal, ask questions, make friends, get good teaching, experience inspiring worship, and have good offerings for kids. That we exist for something more than that.

If we existed just for that, to be a nice place to be, we could operate more like a country club. Now of course, it wouldn't be a very good country club because we don't have a pool, we don't have a golf course, we don't have a fine restaurant. So it would be sort of a cheesy country club, but maybe we could operate that way. But we don't. We don't make our decisions, we don't set our direction just to serve us.

If you've been here for a while, you've realized that our mission is actually quite different than that. It's quite different than just trying to be a nice place to be. Our mission is written out on the concourse. On the other side of the concourse near the sanctuary we have our mission statement that says, "The mission of Central Presbyterian Church is moving people toward Christ by being a community of faith, which loves, encourages, and equips people in Christ, then sending them out to serve." That is why we exist. That's what our purpose is.

Now don't get me wrong. I want Central to be a place where you can heal and ask questions, make good friends, get good teaching, and experience inspiring worship and have good offerings for your children, but our purpose must be more than just being a great place to be. Our purpose in all of that is to equip you and to motivate you and to prepare you in Christ so that you can then go out into the world whether it's immediately outside this building, in your neighborhood, or to the very ends of the earth, that you can share Christ and serve other people in the name of Christ. That is what we're all about.

Now why bother with that? Why is that our mission? Where does that mission come from? Well today, we're beginning our outreach emphasis weeks... three weeks where we're focusing in on our calling to reach out in Jesus' name from here to the ends of the earth. We call it "Visioneering," seeing the world through God's eyes, and then joining him on what's on his heart because our purpose as a church begins and ends with the heart of God. Nothing else can define who we are except what's on God's heart for this world and how he has chosen to use us in what he's doing. And so today, we're going to take a look at that.

We're going to go all the way back to the time of Moses. The people of Israel, the Hebrews, at the time of Moses had a strong ethnic identity. They knew who they were, and they knew something of promises God had made to them. They had a certain religious identity, but they had no land... nothing to call their own. Instead, they were slaves in the land of Egypt, living a harsh and hopeless life... hundreds of thousands of them. Then God uses Moses to deliver Israel from Egypt. All kinds of miracles happen to pry them free from the political powers of Egypt. It wasn't military power that frees them; it's God's direct intervention that attacks the very foundation of Egyptian society and religion.

And after miracle after miracle, they finally say, "Get out of this place. We don't want any part of you." And so they leave, but the pharaoh has second thoughts about it, and so even as they leave Egypt and begin to taste their freedom, the armies of Pharaoh start to chase them and finally Israel finds themselves backed up against the Red Sea, the armies of Pharaoh coming at them. And it seems hopeless again when God sovereignly does another miracle. He parts the waters of the Red Sea and the people of Israel go through safely, and then those same waters come over in judgment on the armies of Pharaoh. And at that point, fully and finally the danger of Egypt is behind them. They no longer have to fear that power.

And so they go into the desert with God, and in the desert, God makes a covenant with them. He establishes a relationship where he says, "This is the kind of God I'm going to be to you, and this is what I expect from you in our relationship." This covenant is expressed a lot of different ways, but the very heart of it were the ten words that we focused on back in the summer... the Ten Commandments that are at the heart of this covenant relationship with God, this almost like marriage between God and a people.

Immediately after making that covenant, Israel breaks it... breaks it in a hideous fashion. As soon as Moses is outside the camp, they make images of god, golden calves. Just about the first thing they do as soon as Moses' shadow is away from the camp, and they break one of the laws which is, "You will not make any images of me." And so God brings judgment and God threatens the entire annihilation of the entire people.

And so in chapter 33 of Exodus, we find Moses praying prostrate before God, pleading with God that he not destroy the whole nation. Moses intercedes with God, asks God to hold back with judgment, and God hears Moses' prayer. So chapter 33 ends with Moses saying, "God, after all this, show me your glory. I want to know you even better." And so what we're going to read next in the first seven verses of chapter 34, is God's answer to this prayer of Moses, "God, I want to see your glory." So what we're going to read is God revealing himself, revealing his glory. He says, "I can't reveal myself to you face to face, but I will reveal to you all that you can survive." And these are the words that describe that.

So let's go now to chapter 34, verses 1-7, in the book of Exodus. That's page 82 in the pew Bible in front of you, and that way you can also see some of the verses in chapter 33, if you want to go back to that. Chapter 34.

"The Lord said to Moses, 'Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. Be ready in the morning, and then come up on Mount Sinai. Present yourself to me there on top of the mountain. No one is to come with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain; not even the flocks and herds may graze in front of the mountain.' So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning, as the Lord had commanded him; and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands.

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, 'The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.'"

Let's pray: Lord, as we look closely at your Word, open our eyes. That's what these weeks are about. Open our eyes to who you are, what you're doing in the world so that we might join you. For we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

Moses asked God, "Show me your glory. Reveal to me more of who you are." And God answers him with a number of manifestations, physical things we can't experience right now, but then with these words that reveal his character... just a few sentences. The words we read here are about 3,500 years old. At the moment these words were spoken to Moses, the pyramids had already mostly been built and were dotting the Egyptian landscape. But it is 100-200 years before Tutankhamen was born. In China, it was the Bronze Age and the Shang Dynasty. But it's 1,700 years before the start of the Great Wall, 1,700 years before the invention of paper. It is 1,000 years before the pinnacle of the life of the city of Athens. One thousand years before Plato when these words are spoken.

These words go back to the very roots of what we understand about what it means to know the one God. Now people had an experience of God before this. Abraham walked with God 500 years before this moment, but this is the first moment where this history with God actually gets written down in some fashion. Maybe it's edited in all other times later in the history, but the very core of what we have here is written down for the first time within a short period of time of when we're actually seeing this happen.

So this is the first. This is the beginning of the revelation, the written revelation upon which Judaism and now Christianity has been built. This is what God, as close to face-to-face as Moses could survive, this is what God reveals about himself, these words. He reveals two things about himself. He reveals that he's a God of compassion, and he reveals that he's a God of justice.

Now I'm going to take them in the opposite order from the way he presents it to Moses for the sake of our study this morning. I'm going to take the second part first because he says in verse 7, that he is a just God who will not, does not let the guilty go unpunished. In fact, it even talks about the fact that even the third and fourth generations are punished for the sins of their parents.

Now this is a Semitic idiom. It's not like we're supposed to look at a bad situation and say, "Okay, this is a bad set of parents, so the next generation for sure bad, the third generation... yep, it's going to be bad, but maybe this is the one where it stops. For some it's going to go to the fourth generation." We're not supposed to count generations there. What's behind it is this understanding that evil brings consequences that go multi-generationally. This is the way God has built the world. Deliberately, it is part of the character of God that this is the way evil impacts the world. It destroys and it destroys in multi-generations.

Evil has a lingering impact. We can see it all the time. It affects generations of people. So alcoholism can ruin the lives of children who never actually drink themselves. A parent goes to jail, and this can hurt the development and future of children. If we ruin our health, it affects our unborn children. If we pollute our land, our children and our grandchildren's health and welfare will be affected.

We cannot stop that process. It is written into creation. It is part of the balances that God has there that reflects his very nature. It's the way the world is. It's the way God made it. In this life and beyond this life evil has consequences. We can't do what we want with our bodies, with our lives. We can't mistreat people. We can't abuse the environment. We can't ignore God and ignore the way God has designed the way life should be lived without consequences. Naturally and supernaturally, in this life and eternally, God is the judge of sin. It's what he reveals about himself. It will not go unpunished.

We're often really uncomfortable with this part of the character of God, but what we have to understand is that right here at the very start of our written record of dealings with God, and then all through the Bible to the very end of the New Testament, the message is the same. Evil is serious. Evil is deadly. God is a just God and no one ultimately gets away with anything.

And this would be terribly bad news for us all if it wasn't for the prior sentences that Moses heard from the same mouth of God. Verses 6 and 7, "The Lord, the Lord... " Those two words are there that we translate "the Lord, the Lord" is actually the name that God revealed, "YHWH, YHWH...Jehovah, Jehovah."

"The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin."

This is the other half of the story where God reveals himself to Moses when he says to Moses, "You want to know what I'm really like? You want to see my glory... my glory? My glory is that I'm a compassionate God. You want to glory in something? Glory in that."

The word there talks about the womb of a mother, and so just like a mother is so concerned about the welfare of her offspring, God has that same understanding of our weakness of humanity and our same concern about our welfare as a mother would have for her own children. He has compassion. He is a gracious God. He is someone who is kind, even to people who have no claim on him, even to enemies or strangers. He is a gracious God, slow to anger, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving... forgiving wickedness, forgiving even rebellion, forgiving sin.

"Moses, you want to know who I am. You want to know my glory. I am a forgiving God. I am a just God and will hold people accountable, but before I will even tell you that, I will tell you first that I am making a way for forgiveness."

That's incredibly good news! Right there in the core of who God reveals himself to be, he reveals himself to be a God of grace and compassion, love and forgiveness. Now there are two words in that verse I haven't mentioned yet. There is a phrase in there that say abounding in love and faithfulness. That's what it says in the TNIV. If you went to the New American Standard version, you would find, "... abounding in loving kindness and truth."

There are two words behind this. The first word there, the one that's translated love is "hesed" ...to love, loving kindness, steadfast love, loyal love, covenant faithfulness, unfailing kindness, devotion. "Moses, you want to know who I am. I am the God who is steadfastly loving and devoted to my creation." The second word is "emeth," a word that means faithfulness, truth, trustworthy, dependable, certain not to be false. "Moses, I'm abounding in hesed and emeth, loving kindness and truth.

"Moses, this is who I am. You want to see my glory. This is who I am. I will steadfastly love you no matter what. I am devoted to you and will be unfailingly kind. You can depend on me. I am loyal. I am faithful. What I tell you will be true. You will never, ever be sorry that you've trusted me." They are amazing words! These amazing words helped shape the future of Israel and ultimately have shaped the world. These words are repeated again and again as Israel reminds themselves that this is what God is like...a God who abounds in love and faithfulness. You can depend upon this being true about God, and so as Israel experienced all kinds of different things in their walk with God, they came back again and again. We can understand this because God is a God of love, faithfulness and justice.

I want to go through just some places where these ideas come up. The first one is in Nehemiah. I mean, there are plenty of other places. These are just the ones I've selected.

Nehemiah, chapter 9, verse 17, "They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them."

Psalm 86, verse 15, "But you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness."

Psalm 103, verse 8, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love."

Psalm 145, verses 8-9, "The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made."

Joel, chapter 2, verse 13, "Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity."

Then in the book of Jonah, chapter 4, verse 2. Here Jonah is saying, "God, this is why I didn't want to go to Nineveh. I didn't want to go to the non-Israelis and preach this message because this is what I know about you." He prayed to the Lord, "Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

It's used in other places. I want to focus though on one other place that it's used. It's used in the New Testament, and it comes out in the book of John, the gospel of John, chapter 1. I'm going to read verses 16-18.

"Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only [Son], who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, he has made him known. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."

Those two words, grace and truth, hearken all the way back to those very first words that Moses heard when God revealed himself. This is who I am, a God abounding in love and faithfulness, a God abounding in loving kindness and truth. Grace and truth... hesed and emeth.

What God revealed in his name to Moses, the very thing that reveals his beauty and his glory to Moses, the thing that reveals his very heart is given to us in Jesus Christ because Jesus, the one and only Son who is in himself God, and is in closest relationship with the Father, he has made him known. What has he made known about God? Grace and truth, steadfast love, unfailing kindness, absolute truth, a faithfulness we can absolutely depend on in the flesh. What God revealed about himself, and what's brought to full conclusion in Jesus is that God is a lover who loves so deeply that he dies for a people who have no claim on him.

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. In the flesh, Jesus Christ lives that out among us and brings it to conclusion. God has never been different than this. God will never be different than this. This is who God is, the God who revealed himself most fully in Jesus Christ, a God of compassion, a God of grace, a God of justice, but a God who is abounding in love and faithfulness and will forgive our sin.

There is a dark world out there, a world that is actually experiencing the consequences of being separated from God, who is experiencing the generation after generation results of the brokenness and judgment upon sin. There is a whole world out there that is experiencing that, and they need to know this about God that he can forgive it and bring a change.

Our purpose as the Church universal and as Central Presbyterian Church, in particular, is defined and determined by this very message about God, this very reality about the character of God. There is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness who maintains love to thousands, and who forgives wickedness, rebellion and sin. There is good news for a world that otherwise is under judgment.

So we're to experience that compassion and grace. That is our calling. That is our identity. That's our purpose is to experience that. Then we're supposed to proclaim that from the housetops, to the very ends of the earth, "Earth, hear this message. The brokenness you see, the judgment you see, the hopelessness this is part of, there is a God who has compassion and is full of a loyal, steadfast devotion that will change everything." And we're to live every moment of our lives in the glory of that unbelievable love. God, show us your glory, and to step into it. And then we're to reflect that love to the people around us.

What's our purpose? What's Presbyterian... Central Presbyterian Church? That is who we are. That is who you are because that is who God is.

Let's pray: Lord, Moses asked that you might reveal yourself even more deeply to him, and that's what we ask. That you will reveal yourself more deeply to us so that we might experience this reality of your compassion and grace, your abounding love and faithfulness and then proclaim that and demonstrate that and live that and experience that in a broken and needy world. For we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org