Sermon Cloud

Remember the story of Samuel, whose grateful mother dedicated him to God and took him as a youngster to the temple at Shiloh to be trained in God’s work.  God was gravely disappointed in the Israelites, who had fallen away from God’s teachings.  Worse were the sons of Eli, the old priest at Shiloh.  They should have helped bring the people back to God, but instead, were as sinful as the rest.  When the Philistines made war against the Israelites, the elders of Israel sent to Shiloh for the ark, believing that would protect them from the mighty army of the Philistines.  Hophi and Phineas, the disgraced sons of the old priest Eli, went with the ark.  The Philistines defeated the Israelites, killed Hophni and Phineas, and made off with the ark.  However, the ark was no help to them.  In fact, one tragedy after another occurred, and they returned it to Israel.  By that time, Samuel was a grown man, and was known to be the faithful prophet of Shiloh.   

I Samuel 7: 1-13

II Corinthians 3: 1-6, 17-18                                                                        10-25-09

Ebenezer

This sermon isn’t about Charles Dicken’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge, though he would make a fine topic for a Reformation Day message.  Think about it: all his life, he hoarded his money—not to live sumptuously, but just to keep it from others. A dream early one Christmas morning brought a change of heart.  He was moved by the plight of a poor family, and recognized that his greed was the cause of their poverty.  A life-long crotchety skinflint, Scrooge now was giddily generous, helping all those he met: a man re-formed, as if all his molecules had been re-arranged from a pattern of self-centeredness to one of compassion.  It was a Christmas miracle, and we are led to believe that his generosity lasted long past Christmas Day.

But I digress.  The ebenezer I have in mind came long before even the first Christmas Day.  The ark of the covenant was the portable tabernacle God commanded Moses to build to house the stone tablets where the commandments were written.  Everywhere the people went in the early days, the ark went, too.  It symbolized God’s presence to them.  They could look at it and be assured God was with them—and, that God would be with them in their future.  So it was of utmost importance for the ark to go with them to the Promised Land.  God instructed Moses’ successor, Joshua, to order the priests to carry the ark into the Jordan River.  Thanks to God’s power over nature and God’s grace to the Israelites, the river stopped flowing just long enough for the people and the ark to pass safely into Canaan.

This was the last step of their forty-year journey in the desert wilderness while God was changing—re-forming—them from a mass of people whose main point of unity was their desire to escape bondage in Egypt, into a people united in a desire to follow the God who freed them.  If forty years sounds like a long time, remember: they had to be re-formed and united in faith and action before they were equipped to take possession of their own land.  Sometimes the reforms God wants in us take a long, long time!

Years passed.  Things changed for the Israelites.  Settled into their new land God gave them, they began to take God’s blessings for granted.  Many fell away from worshiping God Almighty and turned to the gods of the Canaanites.  Even the sons of Eli, the priest of Shiloh, turned against God’s teachings.  Without God’s guidance, the people became weak, so, when the Philistines attacked, they easily defeated the Israelites, and carried off the ark of the covenant as a spoil of war.  But it was no good-luck charm for them.  It was God’s holy place, to be treated with the awe due to Israel’s God.  When one catastrophe after another struck the Philistines, they decided to rid themselves of the ark, and returned it to Israel.      

Samuel, discerning that the Israelites were finally ready to turn back to God, called them together at Mizpah for a service of repentance.  While they were there, the Philistines saw their opportunity to attack them again.  This time, however, God intervened for the Israelites and the Philistines were run off.  In thanksgiving, Samuel erected a stone monument, naming it Ebenezer.  Eben—the Hebrew word for “stone” and ezer—meaning “help.”  God is the Ebenezer—the stone of help—the rock of salvation--for the Israelites then, and for Christians today. 

All things created change.  For all we know, that stone is gravel by now.  But God, the Creator of all things, doesn’t change.  We can count on God’s presence with us--on God’s Word to guide us—on the Lord’s Supper to empower us to serve Christ—on God’s saints to model for us how to follow him.  These things don’t change.  What does change is our understanding of God, and our relationship to God.  We’ve learned that God’s not confined to a box that can be carried from place to place, or to a church—that God’s covenant extends beyond the Jews, to include us of the new covenant—that God, whose love and mercy never change, is willing to change the way God reaches out to us, in order to change our hearts.  What more will we learn as God continues to change—to re-form--us?  …

The Church—church with a capital “C”—changes, too.  Consider some of the ways the Church has changed over the centuries:

-         from a small persecuted band of disciples meeting in homes and catacombs, to the religion endorsed by the Emperor Constantine and spread by his armies throughout the civilized world;

-         from the rigid rules of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, with piety and corruption woven together, to the break-away movement of the Reformation, which sought to return to the values and principles of the earlier, more primitive church: values such as salvation based on God’s grace along; the idea that each person has access to God without an interpreter or priest and can receive God’s forgiveness without an intermediary; a simpler form of worship replacing the images and icons, the incense and stained glass of the cathedrals.

-         from holding tight to traditions no longer useful, to the reality that, to be faithful, people must apply their faith to the culture and context of their time:

• That led early Christians in Britain to institute All-Saints’ Day on the day after Hallowe’en—the same night the ancient Celts believed the souls of the dead walked the earth.
• It’s why we celebrate Jesus’ birth on December 25.  We have no idea when Jesus actually was born, but we give thanks for coming of Jesus, the light of the world, at the time of the winter solstice, which the non-Christian people of Northern Europe celebrated as the sun rises higher and there’s a bit more light with each passing day.     
• It’s the reason for our blue hymnal with many hymns new to us that express faith in languages other than English, or use rhythms unfamiliar to Christians in the US, or provide a clearer statement of Reformed theology.
• It’s even why we reach back into our faith history to recover some of the old traditions—candles, crosses, instrumental music, stained glass—that the early Protestants threw out in an excess of getting rid of everything associated with the Roman Catholic Church.

The Reformation is not a one-time event that happened on October 31, 1517, in Wittenburg, Germany.  The motto of the Reformation is “Reformed, and always being reformed, by the word of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” 

Changes, of course, are not necessarily reforms.  “Reform” indicates a re-orientation of heart and mind, as well of action.  It aims at what the passage from Corinthians envisions: And all of us, … seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.  Changed into the image of God—the image in which God created us, but which dims and diminishes in us unless we are mindful and faithful, and yet, to which we can return, with God’s help.  The church, the community, the nation, the world—all these will experience changes, but they will not be reformed, until the people—us—are re-formed in spirit.

And so, I invite you to consider your own life.  Our lives change in dramatic ways when we encounter sickness, or children leaving home, or new jobs, or the effects of political changes.  Our lives change in hardly noticeable ways as one by one, another formerly brown hair turns grey.  But reformed?  I suggest that we can, and must, cooperate with God in our own spiritual reformation.  As we continue to pray and to study God’s word, becoming more and more attuned to God’s will, we will be more and more re-shaped, re-formed into the image of God in which we were made.  If we want to see the new creation God promises, let us begin with ourselves.  As we are reformed, so will be our institutions.  Think about this: healthy things grow.  Growing things change.  Change challenges us.  Challenges cause us to trust God.  Trust leads to obedience.  Obedience makes us healthy.  And healthy things grow.

Here let us raise our ebenezer: our witness to the rock of our salvation, and a challenge to be reformed by the God who is always our stone of help.