Sermons
Sunday, September 7, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.
Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church
Psalm 149:1–5
1 Samuel 16:1, 6–12
Luke 1:26–38
The very qualities which make us what we are constitute our special approach to God and our potential use for him. Each [one] is created for the fulfillment of a unique purpose.
Maurice S. Friedman
Watching 3-D movies fascinates me. I don’t understand how it works but am intrigued that—just by putting on a special pair of glasses—what otherwise would appear in a flat, two-dimensional way suddenly takes on the depth of three dimensions. Objects come flying towards your face; spaceships seem to fly out into the theater; insects buzz in front of your nose. Sometimes when you take the glasses off, the movie on the screen is a clear picture, but without depth. Sometimes you take the glasses off and the film is blurred.
From various stories of the Bible, God seems to see in 3-D, as if wearing those special glasses all the time. What I mean is that, at times when we see only two dimensions, God sees more. As we just heard from the book of Samuel, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
This was said in the midst of the process the prophet Samuel was using to find a new ruler to replace King Saul. God sent Samuel to a man named Jesse, who had many sons. Samuel thought the very first son he met, who was tall and handsome, was the candidate to become king. But God said, “Do not look on his appearance or the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” Six more sons each came before Samuel, and about each one he heard God say, “Not this one.” He then asked Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” The father said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” Samuel said, “Send for him.” So the youngest—David—appeared, and Samuel heard God say, “This is the one.” God did not call any of the sons that father Jesse or Samuel assumed would be chosen.
It is often the case that we do not see ourselves the way God sees us. The way God works in the world to extend love, increase justice, and secure peace is through people. We are God’s instruments to carry out God’s purposes. Each of us is called to discern what specifically it is God wants us to do and then offer ourselves as God’s servants. But we do not necessarily think of ourselves as the best candidates for God to use. This type of reaction is not new. There are a number of biblical characters who also were surprised and doubtful when God chose them for a specific purpose.
Think about the call to Moses from God to free the Hebrew people from oppression under the Egyptians. Moses’ response was, “You’ve got the wrong guy. Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free my people from slavery?” Even though God then reassured Moses he was not alone—that God was with him—and even though God granted Moses power to perform miracles, Moses still protested: “But God, I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.” Moses was referring to the fact that he stuttered. God responded by giving Moses his brother Aaron to do the talking. And God stuck with his choice of Moses in spite of Moses’ protests.
The prophet Jeremiah also protested when God called him to be a prophet (Jeremiah 1:4–8). He, like Moses, said he was not a good speaker. He used the excuse that he was too young. Yet God promised to provide Jeremiah with the ability and words he would need.
We ourselves may be guilty of resisting God’s call to us, because we have already determined we are not good speakers or in some other way are not qualified enough or don’t have enough clout or are too young or too old or don’t have the right connections . . .
The president of World Vision, Richard Stearns, fell into this trap for a time. He confesses in his book, The Hole in Our Gospel, that when he was twenty-six years old, just two years out of business school, a missionary who worked for World Relief asked Richard if he had ever considered serving full-time in missions work and that World Relief might be able to use someone like him. Richard awkwardly explained he really hadn’t thought of it, that his business degree didn’t seem a good background for mission work. Instead, in the twenty years that followed, Richard climbed the corporate ladder and deepened his business and management skills. He and his wife would sometimes talk of going to the mission field when they retired, but he would laugh at the idea, because he felt he would be the absolute worst missionary in the world. He wrote,
As I saw it, I had no useful skills at all. Didn’t missionaries have to speak multiple languages, know to improve crop yields, perform surgeries with a machete? I was so klutzy that when asked to even hang a picture, I was tempted to make a call from the Yellow Pages. I really had a passion for missions and for helping the poor, but I just didn’t think I had anything to offer besides a monthly check. I completely failed to see the “loaves and fishes” God had given me, even though they were right under my own nose.
Richard then names the gifts that he later recognized that God had given him for mission work, all of which he eventually did use once he said yes to being president of World Vision:
Others, including God, saw those gifts in Richard before he did.
We need special eyeglasses to see others and ourselves as God does. Let’s start with Moses. God has heard the painful lament of the Hebrew people enslaved under Pharaoh and wants to free them. God looks around for who on earth would be the best leader to do just that. He remembers a man who was born a Hebrew while Hebrew baby boys were being killed by Pharaoh. His mother saved Moses’ life by putting her baby in a basket to float on the river in her hopes someone would find him and take him in. The one who discovers him as a baby and takes him home is none other than Pharaoh’s daughter. So Moses grows up in the household of the Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh. He becomes a foster child of wealth, educated with Pharaoh’s children. In Pharaoh’s palace, he acquired a trained and disciplined intellect as well as an insider’s understanding of the workings of power (Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope, p. 27).
Psychologist Wilfried Daim speculated on what it must have been like for an “intruder from below” to grow up under Pharaoh’s nose. Imagine how a palace teacher would treat a pupil who was more intelligent than Pharaoh’s own sons. “The teacher was bound to falsify, by lowering, his pupil’s grades, thus preserving the belief that intelligence was a hereditary endowment in the royal blood” (Wilfried Daim, “The First Revolutionary,” The Center Magazine, September–October 1972, pp. 38–39). Though we don’t have details about what happened in Pharaoh’s house, we know that a small stranger to the family grew up lacking in self-confidence. He became an angry young man who stuttered.
Wilfried Daim says, “Revolutionaries who are themselves in some sense members of the ruling classes typically solve their personal problems by identifying themselves with the lower classes. . . . All such revolutionaries, when struggling for the equality of the oppressed, fight for their own equality. And they oppose an entire social system in order to establish a new system that will not repeat the injustices of the old” (pp. 38–39). We know that when Moses as an adult saw his people, the Hebrews, suffering from harsh, forced labor, he was in anguish. When he saw an Egyptian strike a Hebrew, he became so enraged he killed the Egyptian. Then he had to flee to save his own life from having committed such a crime. He ended up being a shepherd with much time for quiet reflection.
Now if we didn’t know the whole biblical story, we might look at Moses and only see a foster child who grew up insecure, becoming an adult murderer who needed serious help with anger management. But what God saw was the making of a revolutionary who had deep compassion for the Hebrews, a yearning for their justice, a passion for their liberation. He also had an established relationship with Pharaoh, understood Pharaoh’s ways, and took time to wait, reflect, and listen to hear God’s word. Who better for God to choose than Moses to become the liberator of the Hebrew people?
In a similar way we can look at the Apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul. God wanted to spread the Christian faith. Whom should he send to proclaim the gospel to people far and wide? Would we ever have thought of Paul? Through our own eyes we may have simply seen in Saul, before his conversion to the Christian faith, a tyrant who persecuted and killed Christians. But what God saw in Saul/Paul
was a zealot with a brilliant mind, a deep knowledge of Jewish theology, and a gift for scholarship and writing. He was also a Roman citizen, something that played heavily in his various arrests and imprisonments, leading him ultimately to Rome for his trial. God used every dimension of Paul’s abilities and circumstances after his conversion on the road to Damascus. Even his imprisonment turned out to be a “talent” used by God, as Paul wrote most of his letters from his prison cells. (Richard Stearns, p. 264)
Sometimes just the position we fill—being in a particular place at a particular time in a particular role—can be used by God. In the biblical book of Esther, we see how God used a queen to save the entire Jewish race.
Most of us have a lot more to offer than we give ourselves credit for. When we think of what we have to offer God, we need to think of not just our abilities, but our personalities, our passions, pursuits, knowledge, life experiences, relationships, networks, and roles. Even our woundedness, our places of suffering, may be the very vehicle God uses in us to serve others. Whatever we find lacking in ourselves, God will either develop in us or recruit others to do. Or it may be that in God’s eyes, we are not really lacking in what is needed.
We are called to give all of ourselves to God as servants—our talents, our time, our resources, including money. Perhaps most important of all for us to offer is our yes, our complete willingness for God to work with and through us. God wants our yes.
We don’t know much of anything about Mary that would help us know why God chose her to be the mother of Jesus. I’ve heard speculation that perhaps God may have invited other young women to fill the role of being the mother of Jesus before her, and she was the first to say yes. Her yes was all God needed. Priest Richard Rohr wrote,
Her kind of yes (Luke 1:38) does not come easily to us. It always requires that we let down some of our boundaries, and none of us like to do that. . . . Mary’s kind of yes is an assent that comes from the deep self. (Note that no preconditions or worthiness are required.) Mary somehow is able to calmly, wonderfully trust that Someone Else is in charge. All she asks is one simple clarifying question (Luke 1:34). Not if but how, and then she trusts the how even though it would seem quite unlikely. Her yes is pure and simple in its motivation, open-ended in intent, and calm in confidence. (Richard Rohr, “Mary, Model of Openness,” devotion for 2 August 2014)
Listen for God’s particular call to you. God sees in you ways for you to accomplish God’s purposes beyond what you may imagine. God is able to accomplish far more through you than you think. Let your response to God’s call not be, “Wait, I can’t do that,” or “No, God, because of this . . .” Let your response to God be, like it was for Mary, “Yes.”
Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church
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