Who Gave Himself a Ransom for All

Scripture Lessons: Jeremiah 8: 18 – 9: 1 and 1 Timothy 2: 1-7 Sermon Title: Who Gave Himself a Ransom for All Preached on September 22, 2019 Just before the Prayers of the People we sang “There is a Balm in Gilead.” This great hymn is based on our First Scripture Lesson from the book of Jeremiah, where in desperation the Prophet mourns on behalf of God for the people saying: My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? We emphasize such themes this Sunday morning on behalf of our brothers and sisters who are still cheering for the University of Tennessee. Not really. This is Scripture. It’s not about College football, but I have been struck this season by the Vols. We don’t watch much college football in our house, however, back when we lived in Tennessee, we were all UT fans. When you live in Tennessee you have to be. Since moving here, we haven’t been overt about it, for obvious reasons. This has been a difficult season. The first game this season was a loss against Georgia State, who’s only even had a football team since 2010. You might have heard, that on the day of that game a boat outside the stadium caught fire and sank in the Tennessee River. It’s been said that UT’s game plan for the game was on that boat. Then the Vols were defeated by Bingham Young University, a historically Mormon school, not considered a football powerhouse, from Salt Lake City. After that game a friend of mine sent me a picture of a Mormon missionary in white shirt and dark pants, narrowly outrunning a Tennessee defenseman, which was a good illustration for the second defeat of the season. Then last week, even though Tennessee was victorious against Chattanooga, still a friend sent me a picture of a man at the Georgia game dressed in a Vols jersey with a bag over his head, embarrassed to show his face. You can imagine that after yesterday’s loss to Florida, there were many in Knoxville, not singing “Rocky Top,” but asking, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Will we ever win again? When will we be out of our misery? Those are all good and important questions, and I’m sure that these are the questions the players on the Marietta High School football team who have been recruited by the University of Tennessee are asking, but such questions bring me to a point that I believe Scripture makes, a lesson so counter cultural as to be radically surprising, namely, that winning isn’t everything. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Certainly, I have, because I’ve lost at a lot of things, and my Mother especially, tried to comfort me by telling me that it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. I never believed her. Sometimes I still don’t. However, I hope you’ll hear me out, especially giving the state of youth sports today. For as sports become a more and more important part of the lives of our children and grandchildren and as more and more parents sacrifice their free time, driving hours in the car for travel baseball, travel soccer, or travel volleyball, it becomes important to consider what our kids are learning about the importance of victory. When some parents take their kids out of school for competitions, what are we teaching them? When their schedules are so packed, what are they learning from us about the importance of rest? As Sunday becomes a day for tournaments, what place has religion in the hierarchy of importance? While I know that the lessons of teamwork, practice, physical fitness, and hard work are lessons that all parents need to teach their kids, I’m worried that we are also teaching them that winning is all that truly matters, when we serve a Lord who taught that the path to salvation is not through victory, but surrender. We read in 1st Timothy: There is one God; There is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, Who gave himself a ransom for all. This section of 1st Timothy, our Second Scripture Lesson goes a long way, using just a few phrases, to describe who this Christ whom we follow is and what he has done for us. Scripture testifies to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who sat not on a throne, but died on a Cross to save us from our sins. Rather than rubbing shoulders with princes, he ate with sinners and still welcomes, even the likes of us. While he could have avoided suffering, he embraced it, and he teaches that the only way to conquer all is to give everything you have to those whom you love. According to the Apostle Paul, in the eyes of Christ, all our earthly winning is losing. He was bold to say, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” We protestants know, by emphasizing such words, that you can’t earn God’s love or God’s salvation, you just must accept God’s grace. Why then do we spend so much time helping our kids become winners? I worry that we are saying one thing, while doing another, when the truth is so much better than the lie that they may be picking up, because I don’t love our children because of what they’ve won. I love them because they’re mine. I might like it, but I don’t need them to win. I just want them to be fully who God created them to be, however in our world of constant competition, that’s easier said than done. I was enjoying some Palmetto Cheese the other day, and I remembered the story of the people who started making it. Maybe you’ve had Palmetto Cheese. It’s the best store-bought pimento cheese you can buy, made by a small business out of Pawley’s Island started by a couple who runs a small inn on the beach. When they bought the inn, they focused on the dining room right away. I read all this in an interview, that they bought the inn and noticed that the dining room was stuck in some strange patterns. Once a week they had Thai night. Maybe like me, you like Thai food, but I don’t think anyone goes to Pawley’s Island looking for it. The women who cooked in the dining room certainly hadn’t been trained in Thai cooking, and so this couple who bought the inn encouraged the cooks in the kitchen to prepare the food they knew. Soon enough, good low country fare was coming out of the kitchen, including the best pimento cheese money can buy, but first this couple had to accept the reality that an inn on Pawley’s Island is just fine being who they were meant to be. That’s a hard lesson to learn, because we live our lives in a competition where we’re judged according to someone else’s rules. There are competitions on TV where they decide who’s the best chef but remember: you don’t have to win one on one of those shows to make food worth eating. There are people who make the cover of the magazine, but you don’t have to look like one of them to be beautiful. There are all kinds of different churches in this world, but we don’t have to be like any of them, we can just be us. As a church we get caught in the same cycle of winning; thinking we have to compete with great big churches in Atlanta who have guitars and drums and lights and sound, but does anyone really drive up to our antebellum sanctuary expecting us to be like one of them? No! God created us and God loves us, and we don’t have to win every competition to be a great church or to gain God’s love. All we have to do is accept God’s grace. This is such a difficult truth to accept, however, because we’ve been taught to believe that second place is the first looser. Now that might be true in sports, but sports are different than real life, and the Kingdom of God has plenty of room on the medal platform. 1st Timothy urges us to pray for everyone. “Everyone” might sound like too many to us, in this culture of winning. If everyone gets a trophy then what does a trophy really even mean? I get it. But Scripture calls on us to pray “For kings and all who are in high positions,” not only pray for the politicians we voted for because they’re all God’s children, too. According to 1st Timothy, God our Savior, “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” “Everyone” sounds like a lot of people, but maybe that’s only because we’ve gotten so used to this idea that only a small number of people are worthy of acceptance and praise, only a set number of people ever get to make the team or get in the game, when in the Kingdom of God everyone is somebody and all have a seat at the table with the King. Back to the University of Tennessee Volunteers: did you see the shirts that the marching band wore last Saturday? It was college colors day at Altamonte Elementary School in Altamonte Springs, Florida. One 4th grade student didn’t have a college shirt to wear, so he wore an orange shirt, drew UT on a piece of paper and safety pinned it to his shirt. Some kids in the cafeteria noticed and made fun of him, of course. That’s what kids do. It’s wrong, but they do it. If you don’t have the right shirt or the right shoes you take your place on the outside the bounds of popularity. Having been rejected, this child was devastated of course. When his teacher saw the look on his face, she tried to affirm him and lift him up, and gradually, word got out about the child and this shirt he’d made. Somehow or another, eventually, word made it all the way to the University of Tennessee and their Pride of the Southland Marching Band, who took his design and mass produced it. Every one of them wearing an orange shirt just like the one that this kid made for himself. Our kids need to hear that story too. They need to hear about the balm our God provides in the moment of rejection. And of the Shepherd who walks beside us even when we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Of the arms of the Almighty who is the wind beneath the wings of eagles. Because so often it is when we have surely been defeated that we finally reach out to the One who has gained the victory, by giving himself as a ransom for all. Let’s stop teaching our children to go after glory, that they might give the glory to God. Amen.