So We, Who Are Many, Are One, a sermon based on Romans 12: 1-8 preached on 8/27/2023

I had breakfast with my friend Van Pearlberg last Tuesday morning. We were eating at Sugar Cakes on the Square, and Van was telling me about a New Year’s Eve tradition he used to enjoy, in which he’d order live lobsters, have them delivered to his house, and before cooking them, he’d line them up out in the driveway. In the driveway, each member of the family would pick one, attach a number to its shell, then the lobsters would race from one side of the driveway to the other. Whoever picked the winning lobster won, which sounds like a fun activity for the humans involved. Thinking of the lobsters and their post-race trip to the kitchen and then the dinner table, Van’s friend Terry, who was eating breakfast with us, asked, “Did the winner receive a pardon or at least a stay of execution?” “No,” Van said, “the winner went first into the pot.” Winning isn’t everything. It’s not. These days, in our culture, the pressure to win can be so great that some feel like they’re in a pot of boiling water or are headed towards it. There are those among us who wake up to the pressure and can’t sleep for fear of falling behind. Like the fictional NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, some have developed an “If you’re not first, you’re last,” mentality and have turned everything into a competition. Earlier this year when one member of the church staff went through a break-up, I wanted to be the one who offered the best advice. When I found out that Melissa Ricketts gave the best advice, I was as devastated as the one who went through the break-up because I hadn’t won the competition. That’s ridiculous. Sometimes out of a desire to win, I miss the point. In fact, psychologists are now saying that the key to a healthy, fulfilling, joy-filled life is not winning or wealth, going on fancy vacations, or working hard for big promotions, but relationships. We hear about the importance of relationships from the very beginning of the Bible. In Genesis, we learn that our Creator felt like something was missing for Adam, that he was not meant to live in the Garden alone, and so God created for him a partner. We humans were created for relationships. Husbands and wives. Mothers, fathers, and children. Friends and coworkers. Neighbors and pen pals. Sports teams, social clubs, and congregations. The Apostle Paul builds on this concept by saying that we are all like parts of a body: For as in one body, we have many members, so we who are many, are one. This is a classic teaching from the Apostle Paul. That we are like different parts of the same body is an image he uses in Romans, again in 1st Corinthians, and then twice more in Ephesians and Colossians. Four times he speaks of us as a body, as a body with many members. Each of us is different, but each one of us is dependent on the others, yet in our world today, we are not conditioned to think of ourselves as members of one body. No, in our world today, we are all fighting to be the one who gets to wear the crown. Some are so convinced that winning is the way to a fulfilling life that they’ve become notorious cheaters, abandoning decency in the hopes of getting their kids into the best colleges. There’s the actress who played Aunt Becky on the TV series Full House who served prison time for paying $500,000 to cheat her daughters into USC. Likewise, we know about Bernie Madoff who created this huge pyramid scheme to get rich by taking $65 billion from his clients. We hear of those who risk everything to win, but consider with me what happens when we lose. There’s a beautiful Disney cartoon called Inside Out. Have you seen it? It’s about a girl who’s growing up. She’s trying to come to terms with all her emotions. She wants to feel happy all the time, and a lot of the time she does feel happy. Joy is her primary emotion, but inside her head are these five cartoons representing her five emotions: There’s sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and joy. Joy is in the driver’s seat most of the time. In fact, Joy pushes Sadness out of the way because what’s the point of Sadness? That’s the basic plot of the movie. What’s the point of sadness? Who wants to feel sad? Isn’t it better to win and be happy? That’s what we often think, yet when this poor girl, the star of her hockey team, takes the shot to win the game and feels her heart break as the puck misses the goal, sadness takes over. What’s the point of sadness? She walks away from the team to be alone, tears stream down her face, and when her parents see her tears, they wrap their arms around her. My favorite TV show is one about a soccer coach named Ted Lasso. When Ted’s team loses the big game at the end of season two, he looks around at his brokenhearted locker room and says, “There’s something worse than being sad; that’s being sad and alone, and not a one of us is alone today.” My friends, we live in a culture that values winning so highly, but consider with me that there is something beautiful about losing. Constant winning leads some to think too highly of themselves, and so the Apostle Paul lifts up the value of humility, saying: By the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think. Why? It’s because when we are humble, we look outside ourselves and think with sober judgment. We accept the truth that we need each other. We know more fully that we who are many are one in the Body of Christ. Sometimes losing helps us to see it more clearly. Sometimes it’s confessing that we need help. Sara and I walk around our neighborhood every evening with our two dogs. They both drive me crazy with all their barking, but when you get out to walk a dog, you start to meet your neighbors. Thanks to walking our dogs in the evening, we know the people we live around a little better, and one young mother who lives down on the corner, we knew that she has a brand-new infant, a toddler, and a little girl going into kindergarten. Not only that, but her husband has been fighting cancer for months now, so when we saw her on our evening walk, Sara asked about this little girl going into kindergarten, and her mother said something that people so rarely say. She said, “I’m afraid she’s not ready.” Of course, she’s not. How could she be? Who has time for ABC’s with a new baby in the house and a father with cancer? Not only that, in front of their house is a yard that’s impossible to maintain because it’s like a canyon. I walk by it and thank God it’s not my front yard, but how many people do you walk by who dare to confess that they need help? “I’m fine,” that’s what I say. I say that all the time. This woman dared to be honest, and Sara took that information back to the central office of Marietta City Schools; next thing you know, this little girl’s kindergarten teacher is calling the house to assure her mom that everything is going to be OK, and the school superintendent is dropping off a Marietta onesie at the front door. When we feel like we’re losing and we dare to admit it, that’s when we know more fully that we are part of one body, that we who are many are one, yet in a culture obsessed with winning and terrified of showing any chink in the armor, we Christians must show the world that it’s OK to be broken. Paul writes: For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think. Why? If you think of yourself as an island, if you think of yourself as perfect, if you think that you’ll be rejected for not winning all the time, you might miss out on one of the greatest gifts that our God provides: being a part of a community. We, who are many, are one, and if you want to strengthen those bonds, dare to show someone that you need a little help. Dare to let someone know that your life isn’t perfect. Be bold enough to say out loud, “I’m not doing OK.” There’s a book that I love by Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove. This man, Ove, lost his wife. In the wake of her death, his world got smaller and smaller. Grief pushed him inside. He shut down, and rarely left the house, only going out to terrorize his neighbors for infractions of the neighborhood covenant. One morning, he looks out his window to see a new family moving in, yet the husband can’t back up the trailer properly. This infuriates Ove. He knocks on the car window and demands that this man hand over the keys. Ladies, if you didn’t know this already, being told to get out of driver’s seat is basically the most humiliating thing that can happen to a man, only the man relinquished the keys, Ove backed up the trailer, and a friendship that saved them all was born. Winning isn’t everything. Being able to back up a trailer isn’t everything. Being OK isn’t everything. For sometimes, it’s our brokenness and our losing that connects us. When Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world,” I hear him saying, “Don’t be conformed to the isolation that our culture is creating.” Don’t be sucked into the cult of perfection. Don’t be obsessed with winning. For humility builds bridges, and those bridges that we create can save us. Have you heard that 1 in 3 Americans suffer from loneliness, and that being lonely all day is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes. God didn’t create us to be alone. Neither did God create us for triumph at the top of the heap. If he did, he would have come as a king riding a white stallion rather than as a servant riding a gentle donkey. God created us in such a way that none of us is complete on our own. Instead, we are like parts of one body, so that we, who are many, are one. We have different gifts. We have different abilities. We were built for interdependence, which is one reason this place is so special. Here, at our church, it’s so easy to see it, that we are a body. We have gifts that differ. Not a one of us is perfect. In fact, Sunday after Sunday, we begin our time together by admitting that we are sinners in need of God’s grace. Our imperfection unites us. Our common need for a grace-filled Savior keeps us coming back. We who are many, are one. Last Sunday, I told you that we received a letter from a woman who worships with us from Capital, Montana. She asked me to thank the choir, the members of the church who distribute food, the people who project the words onto the screen, those who clean the church, and those in charge of the speakers because from all the way in Montana, she can see that this is a body with many members. We have different skills, yet we work together to serve the Lord. Not a one of us is perfect, yet we are learning to lean on each other, just as we lean on Christ Jesus, the source of our salvation. In your need, reach out to Him. In humility, reach out to each other, and be saved. Amen.

In Jesus Name, a sermon based on Romans 11: 1-2a and 29-32, preached on August 20, 2023

I’d like to begin this sermon with an announcement. If you received an email from me last Monday morning requesting a $25.00 Apple gift card for some kind of emergency, please disregard it. It didn’t come from me. Someone somewhere invented an email address using my name, took my picture off our church website, added my smiling face to the address line, and sent an email to multiple church members requesting a $25.00 gift card for a pastoral emergency. What kind of pastoral emergency requires a $25.00 gift card to Apple Music, I don’t know. The scam didn’t make sense, but attaching my name to it gave it enough credibility that more than one person went to the grocery store to buy me a gift card to Apple Music, which infuriated me and made me feel guilty for doing something I hadn’t done. It happened on Monday, so I’ve been fuming about it all week. I’ve been thinking about how not only someone tried to take advantage of the members of this church, people whom I love and care about, but they used my name to do it. Don’t try to take advantage of the members of this church, and don’t use the name of one of their pastors to do it. That’s just wrong, yet it works. To use a name gives the deception a level of legitimacy. To use a picture makes the scam harder to ignore. To hear from one of your pastors, “Please help” inspires your compassion, or maybe it obligates you to do something you wouldn’t have done, so to use my name or your name in vain violates an important standard of ethics in human society. It elevates the crime to manipulation. More than that, to use the name of the Lord in vain violates the third commandment. “Thou shalt not use the name of the Lord your God in vain,” the third commandment says. Have you ever wondered why this commandment matters? Think about it with me this morning. If it made me angry to hear that the members of this congregation were being manipulated using my name, how do you think it makes God feel when people do much worse in His? To get to the heart of our second Scripture lesson, consider with me what has been done in the name of Jesus. Here, in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, the apostle asks, Has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people. Paul is talking here about the Jews, and in this second Scripture lesson, he is instructing us in how we are to relate to them. What he’s saying is that God has not rejected them. However, for generations, Christians have. When civilizations needed someone to blame, to revile, to slander, to oppress, to discriminate against, that’s who they chose. Worse, these Christians did it in the name of Jesus. A tour of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy might feature Europe’s oldest ghetto. In Venice, it happened first that Jews were confined, literally locked in, after the sun set beginning 500 years ago, but antisemitism didn’t stop there. We remember Spain with her inquisitions lasting nearly 300 years, where Jewish people were tortured, imprisoned, and exiled by order of the Church. Such antisemitism hit its evil apex, but unfortunately not its end, with the concentration camps of Germany, so as we consider how Christians have related to Jews, let us not forget the lynching of a Jewish man right here in Marietta, Georgia, just blocks from the Big Chicken. Right here and across the globe, Jewish people have been demonized, judged, and murdered by Christians in the name of Jesus. How do you think He feels about that? We Christians must think about what we are doing all the time. We must judge our actions in light of what Scripture mandates, but especially, we must take time to think about what we do in the name of Jesus, for when we invoke the name of Jesus, there is a certain kind of power that lends itself to our actions, and so generations have grown up believing that Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes. Friends, as you well know, we follow a Jewish man and call him Savior. Yet, when Miriam Ferguson became the first female Governor of Texas in 1924, she was famous for saying, “If English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for Texas school children.” Antisemitism makes about as much sense as that statement. It doesn’t make sense now, and it didn’t make sense to the Apostle Paul, so when Rome decided to push out the Jews from their city, and gentile members of the Roman church were moving into their vacated apartments, he included in his letter to the church there this reminder: Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy… so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. What does that mean? What is Paul trying to tell us? Here’s the problem with Paul: To understand him, you have to go to seminary for three years, learn Greek, and take theology classes. After all that, maybe then you’ll understand half of what he wrote. He wrote the book of Galatians, which is five pages long, yet I own a commentary on the book of Galatians that’s more than 500 pages long, not including the glossary at the end. If a book has a glossary, it’s not easy to understand. The Apostle Paul is not easy to understand; however, if you know a little bit about him, learning his background and who he was, his important words are a little bit easier to understand. The Apostle Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, though he wasn’t one of His disciples, at least not while Jesus was alive. While Jesus was alive, and as His teachings began to spread after His resurrection, Paul made his living persecuting Christians. When one disciple named Stephen was stoned for following Jesus, Paul held the cloaks of those who stoned him, and the fledgling Christian community found out about that. Known by the followers of Jesus as a persecutor of the Church, Paul’s name was synonymous with oppression, murder, and discrimination, yet when Jesus blinded him and called him by name on the road to Damascus, the Church showed him mercy. The hallmark of Christianity is mercy. Why? Because when Jesus was alive, that’s what He did. He showed people mercy. He came not to judge the world, but to save it. He was the embodiment of God’s love. He made known the joy of salvation. He made the lame walk, set the captives free, helped the lost find their way again, and told the sinners to sin no more. That’s what He did, and I am one who was saved by His mercy. So are you. If we stop offering people the mercy we have received, have we forgotten what He did for us? That’s Paul’s point. If we stop offering to our neighbors the mercy we received, have we returned to that prison from which Christ set us free? If we, as a Church, stop offering God’s mercy, has God’s mercy dried up within us? Now maybe like you, I sometimes worry about people I see around me. I worry about those who walk by our church on Sunday morning without coming in. I worry that they may be people who wander without direction, or like sheep without a shepherd. I worry about morality. I worry about communities falling apart. What are we to say about all those in our world who don’t follow Jesus? What are we to do about all the broken people? What are we do to with all the lame and the lost, and what are we to do about the good people we know and love who don’t believe? If we are going to do anything in Jesus’ name, if we aspire to make His name known, then we must remember what it is about Him that drew us to Him in the first place. You might know that I grew up in Marietta. While I was growing up, all the churches had these big youth groups with these dynamic youth group leaders. Back then, the Methodist Church would have these alter calls. It was like a Billy Graham Crusade, especially during the summer. I went to the youth retreat one summer, and I heard that preacher calling me to leave behind my sins and to follow Jesus to avoid the fires of Hell, so I did. I left my old life behind, walked up to the altar, and prayed the sinner’s prayer. I didn’t want to be like those who are destined for damnation. I was scared into salvation, only then I got back home and started to feel like I was slipping back into sin. I worried that I wasn’t pure enough, so when I had the chance at another altar call, I went up there again and did the same thing. This process continued for years, so I’ve been saved six or seven times. That’s true. I kept reaching out for Jesus, trying to grab hold of Him and to be worthy of salvation. Then one day, I heard a preacher say that all this time, Jesus had been reaching out for me. That’s mercy. Learning that you’re loved by Jesus changes things. Following Jesus because you know He loves you is different from following Jesus because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t. Still, sometimes the Church scares people in Jesus’ name. Is that because the Church fears failing Him? Is that because we are scared we’re failing Him? My friends, we are going to keep on failing Him. I feel like I fail Him all the time. One of my favorite people to have lunch with is a rabbi named Larry Sernovitz. I invited him to our monthly clergy breakfast years ago. The first one was on zoom around Easter time back during the pandemic. I was leading the meeting, and I moved the conversation to Holy Week at our various churches. So and so was having four services on Easter. Someone else was having an Easter egg hunt. Noticing that Larry hadn’t shared, though not thinking about why, I asked him about his synagogue’s plans. He said, “Well, we certainly aren’t having an Easter egg hunt.” As our clergy group felt comfortable enough to meet in person, we met at Roswell Street Baptist Church, where breakfast casserole was on the menu. Larry asked if there was pork in the casserole. Well, there was bacon in one and sausage in the other. “I’ll have fruit,” Larry said. Later, wanting to be a little more thoughtful, I invited Larry to lunch and ordered salads for us both to eat and chicken for us both. Well, the salads came with chicken and eggs on top, and Larry can’t eat the meat of the mother with her chick. That was three strikes. All this time you might be wondering if I ever shared the Good News of Jesus Christ with my friend Larry. I can’t say that I ever preached to Larry, while again and again, as I put my foot in my mouth not just once, but three times, he certainly shared God’s mercy with me. What are we to say about the Jews? What are we to say about any group of people who doesn’t seem to follow Jesus? Show them mercy: the same mercy that saves us. Amen.

You Give Them Something to Eat, a sermon preached on August 6, 2023 based on Matthew 14: 13-21

Imagine with me that the deserted place where Jesus fed thousands of people was a place like Haiti. I traveled there with a mission team 15 years ago. It was the most poverty I’d ever seen. If you’ve been reading about the recent kidnapping of two Americans, then you know that things have only gotten worse there since then. Haiti is the kind of place that needs Jesus to come and perform a miracle like the one we just read about from the Gospel of Matthew, but God didn’t send Jesus to Haiti 15 years ago; God sent this mission team that I was in, and as we were gathering in the airport to fly to Haiti, one lady brought me a second-hand wheelchair and told me to get in. She convinced me to fake an injury so I could ride this wheelchair onto the airplane. That didn’t sound like a good idea, but I did it. I rode this wheelchair into the airport, and I remember wheeling up to the first security checkpoint, wondering if my next stop was going to be Guantanamo Bay. They just wheeled me through, however, and pushed me to my seat. It wasn’t until the next day that I understood why Jane, the mission committee chair, asked me to do this. The day after we landed, we drove out to a small village and up came a man being pushed in a wheelbarrow. When he saw this wheelchair that I’d snuck down to Haiti, he smiled ear to ear, and seeing the look on his face, I would have become a professional wheelchair smuggler right then if I’d been asked to. What I’m trying to say is that the world is broken place, and when the people were hungry and the disciples weren’t sure what to do about it, Jesus said to His disciples, “You give them something to eat.” Jesus was with them as He is with us, so let us be aware that God does miraculous things through normal people. When God told Moses basically the same thing Jesus told the disciples, the power of God was unleashed upon the earth. “I will send you to Pharoah,” God said to Moses. Not feeling up to the task, Moses tried to back out. “How will I free the people? How will I stand up to Pharoah?” God asked Moses, “What’s that in your hand?” “A staff,” Moses said. Then God said, “I’ll use that staff to defeat Pharoah.” To the disciples, Jesus said, “You give them something to eat.” When they tried to back out of it, He asked them, “What do you have?” “Five loaves and two fish.” “Well, I’ll use those five loaves and two fish to feed the crowd.” That’s how it is with God. God takes who we are and what we have in our hands to change the world. Last semester, a seminary professor asked my class, “Look in your hands. What do you have? A cell phone?” Right now, I know some of you have cell phones in your hands. I’m not blind. I’ve seen you looking, but think with me about the power of a phone. First, look this one. My friend Ken Miner, who has saved this church who knows how much money by rewiring light fixtures and replacing old bulbs with LEDs, used to work for the phone company, and he kept a bunch of old phones. Likely, this was the model that Dr. Patton used in this pulpit when phones first came to Marietta, Georgia back in 1898. Dr. Patton had one of the first telephones installed in this pulpit so that those who couldn’t come to church in person (the homebound, the disabled, the sick) could worship from their homes. What about your cell phone? Some of you have used your phones to share this worship service. Today, not using the phone lines, but the internet, this worship service gets sent out into the world, for the Lord will use us and what we have in our hands to do miraculous things if we are willing. Don’t be surprised to hear that. He will use us and what we have, no matter how humble, to do miraculous things. I’ll never forget a phone call I received from Marietta City Schools. “We’ve been distributing food from the Atlanta Food Bank, but school’s about to be out for the summer. Do you want to give the food out in your parking lot?” That happened three years ago. Since then, 250 cars have lined up in our parking lot every Tuesday to receive a meal box of produce and canned goods. We’ve distributed so many meals: hundreds, thousands, millions of meals. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves,” then fed 5,000 men, not even counting the women and children, and managed to have 12 full baskets left over. That’s the power of God at work in people, people like us, yet we don’t see ourselves as powerful, so Moses was afraid. The disciples were anxious. I get that. Life is a little bit easier if there is nothing that we can do about the suffering of the world. If there is nothing that we can do then we don’t have to step out in faith to answer the call, but I’m telling you, we’re strong enough to change the world when God works through us. Therefore, remember what happened when the disciples answered the call of Jesus, Who said to them, “You give them something to eat.” Remember what happened to Moses when he answered God’s call. Remember that when your children and grandchildren say, “I just can’t do it.” I’m now at the point in parenting children when my kids are better than me at stuff. Cece beats me in basketball every time we play. She’s 12, and I stopped taking it easy on her last year. If she pulls up for a shot too close, I’ll knock the ball out of her hands. If she dribbles in front of me, I’ll steal the ball from her. Last week, she beat me 10-2 in the first game. Then, she beat me by an even wider margin twice after that, and I’m still kind of good. Does she have any idea how good she is? I don’t think any of us does, yet the world changes when we live so God can use us. Anywhere, Lord. Anytime. Cindy Ethridge told me the most wonderful story last week. You may know that she cracked a bone in her jaw. Her husband, Charlie, rode with her straight to the ER. His vision is bad, so a friend of theirs drove. After all day in the ER, she was finally taken to a room with a roommate. Do you know that feeling? You’ve been in the ER all day, and the room they take you to has another bed with another person in it. How are you going to get any rest? Cindy was initially disappointed to have a roommate, but as she got to know this woman, she learned that her roommate was in worse shape than she was. After talking and getting to know each other, Cindy mustered up the courage to ask this woman if she’d like to pray with her. Do you know what that feels like? Before you ask, you doubt yourself. You think to yourself, “This woman doesn’t want me to pray with her.” Who am I to pray with this woman anyway? Surely, those thoughts were going through Cindy’s mind, yet she took this woman by the hand and prayed that she would feel God’s presence. My friends, like it or not, we are agents of a Mighty God. Remember that you have something to give, that God moves when we dare to give them something to eat and when we find a way to be of service. When we dare to serve the Lord, when we dare to answer the call, the world changes, and so do we. In the words of that great Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers: There’s something unique about being a member of a family that really needs you in order to function well. One of the deepest longings a person can have is to feel needed and essential. My friends, you are needed and essential. Nothing will give you greater satisfaction in this broken world than using what God has placed in your hands to defeat Pharoah or feed the masses, and there is no more miserable person than the one who thinks only of himself. On a day like today, with our big discipleship expo in Holland Hall, and with all the ministries you might get involved in printed in the most recent church newsletter, the time is right for you to take what is in your hands and to allow God to use it to transform this broken world. Amen.

Faithfulness, a sermon based on Matthew 14: 22-32 preached on July 30, 2023

This is the ninth and final sermon of this summer sermon series that’s been focused on spiritual gifts. Today, the gift we’re focused on is “faithfulness.” Who has this gift? What does it mean to be faithful? No doubt, faithfulness is a gift of the Spirit that’s hard to come by and worth taking time to celebrate. This morning, we have two Scripture lessons to help us think about the subject. The first, read by our beadle, is one that describes Joshua, who chose faith and encouraged the Israelites to do the same. It’s a well-known passage, often quoted. Back in the days when I cut grass for a living, I remember working at one Buckhead mansion where the words, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” were engraved on a granite slab right outside the front door. That’s Joshua 24: 15, the most famous line from the lesson we heard read. Joshua, who led the people after Moses, made this faithful declaration so that no one would forget the faithful God who brought them out of slavery and into the Promised Land. He said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” and all the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, who did great deeds in our sight, and protected us all along the way as we went.” In other words, they responded to Joshua by saying, “If you choose to be faithful to God, so do we.” Joshua, then, modeled faithfulness. He chose to be faithful to God. He stood up in public and made that promise, just as we’ve seen one say to another, For richer, for poorer, In sickness and in health, In joy and in sorrow. That’s what couples promise each other at a wedding. During the ceremony, two people stand before a congregation and promise to be faithful to each other. “I choose you, over and above all others,” they say. I will not falter. I will not stop choosing you. Likewise, Joshua chose God over and above all other gods. Following his example, the people did the same. Only here’s the problem: Their faithfulness didn’t last very long. In fact, Joshua dies, the people live in the Promised Land, where they’re surrounded by all these new people and all these different gods, and little by little, they fall to temptation. They abandon their convictions. Like prodigal sons, they spend their inheritance on loose living and wander far from home. In fact, by the time we get to the book of Judges, chapter 2 (That’s just two pages after our first Scripture lesson.), we read that, “The Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and worshiped the Baals; and they abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt.” The book of Judges goes on to describe how God appointed righteous men and women who were called judges to lead the people, and those faithful leaders helped, yet the book ends with this: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” All the people did what was right in their own eyes. Sound familiar? Too many of us have a hard time with faithfulness. While we are card-carrying, churchgoing, committed Christians, we are all tempted to leave the God we love and abandon the standards God has provided in this fallen world, and from time to time, we fall. We all forget what God has done in the past and wander from His presence. We don’t always do what is right, but instead do what seems right in our own eyes. As a people, we struggle with faithfulness, so even though Jesus says, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’” as long as I’ve been around, Kennesaw Mountain has remained right where it’s always been. Why? Because faithfulness is hard. We get afraid. We lose heart. We are prone to wander from the fold of God. We are like Peter. Peter might be the most popular disciple. My favorite is Thomas, who doubts, but a lot of people love Peter, who sinks. In our second Scripture lesson, the disciples were in a boat. Jesus had dismissed the crowds whom He had just fed: a crowd of five thousand, which Jesus fed with five loaves and two fish. When’s the last time you saw something like that happen? The disciples witnessed a miracle. I’m sure that such a sign inspired in the disciples some faithfulness, but their faithfulness was short-lived, for after the waves and the wind pushed them out into the sea during the night, when they saw a figure walking on the sea towards them, they didn’t assume it was Jesus coming to save them. Instead, they were terrified, saying, “It’s a ghost.” Why would they be terrified, and why would they assume that coming at them was a ghost? It’s because faithfulness is hard. The Israelites were faithful sometimes, but not all the time. The disciples were faithful sometimes, but not all the time. Here’s the point: If neither the Israelites nor the disciples were faithful all the time, we don’t have a chance at perfect, constant, unwavering faithfulness. Mortal faithfulness wavers, doesn’t it? Sometimes we feel the Spirit, and it just about seems like we believe beyond the shadow of a doubt, but send us back out into the world, and the questions start coming. We want to know why bad things happen. We want to know when our suffering will be over. I’ve had headaches so bad that if Buddha would have taken my pain away, I might have converted; then I’ve seen miracles, and I felt like I might just try and move a mountain. If you’ve ever felt the same way, then you can understand how Peter went from walking out onto the water with Jesus at one moment and then sinking down to his armpits the next. We believe, Lord; help our unbelief. That’s our prayer. To Peter, He asked, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” That’s such a good question, and it’s one that I don’t have the answer to. I don’t know why Peter doubted. I don’t really know why I doubt, but I’m standing up here in front of you to let you know that I do. I doubt. I sink. I worry. I wander. I feel full of faith one day, then full of anxiety the next. And I’m a pastor. How can a man like me be a pastor? How can one who doubts be a pastor? Let me tell you, the name to write down on your card today is not Joe Evans. The name to write down is Jesus. That’s what makes me a pastor. I point the way to the One who is faithful. That’s what makes us Christians. It’s not that we’re perfect; it’s that we know Who is. It’s not that we are perfect examples of faithfulness all the time; it’s that we know One who picks us up out of the water when we sink down into it. I hope that all of you have a card this morning. This time there’s not a box to put them in. We’ve used up all our windows, and there’s no window nor is there a box to put your card in this morning. After eight weeks of thinking of those who have been given gifts of the Spirit, don’t think too much about it today. There’s only One name worthy of being written on your card this morning. Take out your pen and your card and write down Jesus. This summer, we’ve been celebrating and giving thanks to God for those who have been given the gifts of generosity, artistic expression, encouragement, evangelism, hospitality, discernment, administration, and teaching. We’ve been thinking of people who have embodied those gifts to us, writing their names down on these cards, giving thanks to God for people who have made a difference to us using their gifts, but there’s one name that’s above every name, especially when it comes to faithfulness. That’s Jesus. Jesus is faithful. He is “the pioneer and perfector of our faith,” to use that great verse from the book of Hebrews. While our faith wavers at times, and while Peter took his eyes off Jesus, did Jesus ever take His eyes off Peter? We know that He didn’t. The first time they met, Jesus gave him the name “Peter,” which is Greek for rock. Jesus named him “Rock,” or Petros, or Peter because Jesus said that on this rock, Peter, I’ll build my church. Did Peter seem up to the task? No. But Jesus doesn’t call the qualified. Jesus qualifies the called. When Jesus called him, Peter followed. Along the way, he stumbled. His life was full of ups and downs. When Jesus called him out on the water, after a couple steps, Peter sunk. When Jesus was arrested and someone recognized Peter as a compatriot, Peter denied Him three times. Was Peter faithful? Sometimes, but that’s not the point. Jesus was faithful to Peter and Jesus is faithful to me. Friends, the first time I preached a sermon, the preacher who invited me to preach told me that my sermon was 12 minutes long, which is just the right length. That’s the only good thing he could think to say. Perfection is out of our reach. Our hope is not in attaining it. Our hope is in Jesus, Who has done what we could not do for ourselves. Therefore, when we think about spiritual gifts this morning, as you think about the spiritual gifts that God has given you, remember His faithfulness. He knows about our failures. He knows how we falter. He knows that we aren’t perfect. Remember how He was up there on the cross, and looking down at the crowd who put Him there, He said, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Do you remember that? Remember that He does not give up on you when you finally get your nerve up to try hospitality on for size, and you take some brownies over to your neighbor and she asks you if they’re gluten free, and you feel like the whole experience was a waste, and you’ll never get it right. Remember in that moment that a saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up again. Peter sunk. Jesus lifted him up. Thomas doubted. Jesus helped his unbelief. When we show up with our gifts and offer them to the world, don’t think it’s going to all go perfectly because perfection is beyond us. Don’t let a pursuit of perfection get in the way of answering the call, for we are all called to use the gifts that God has given us for the benefit of the world. Never allow perfect to get in the way of good. Never allow your fear of failure to keep you from trying, for the love and acceptance of almighty God does not hinge on our ability to be faithful. If it did, He would have given up on us back in the Garden of Eden, back at the time of the flood, back with Abraham, back with Moses, back with Joshua. The Bible is not an account of human faithfulness. Instead, the Bible is an account of human failure and the persistent faithfulness of God Who will not let us go. Our God is faithful, friends. Our Jesus is faithful. Raise your cards up one more time and say what’s written on them with me. “I am grateful for Jesus’ gift of faithfulness.” Halleluiah. Amen.