Comments by John Fairless

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Haggai speaks to a community that was discouraged, downtrodden, and that faced a daunting task in the rebuilding of the temple destroyed by the Babylonians. No money, not enough people to help, lack of sufficient leadership resources…hmm, sound familiar?

God’s words through Haggai speak to practically any and every situation we might face in our congregations today. “Take courage…work, for I am with you.” God still “shakes the heavens” when they need shaking — and it’s not bad to notice that all the silver and the gold belong to God, as well. The good news is God has all the money we need to accomplish the purposes God has for us.

Of course, as the punch line to the old preacher joke goes, the bad news is “it’s all in your pockets!”

Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21
By now, we should all be pretty familiar with the computer jargon acronym, GIGO — it stands for “garbage in, garbage out.” Despite the incredible technological advances and ultra-high speed machines that are a part of our daily lives, computers still can’t think for you. They will only do exactly what you program them to do. (And, that’s a good thing, as any Terminator fan will tell you!)

Our brains function pretty much the same way, when you stop and think about it. If we are dumping negative thoughts and unhelpful information into our systems all the time, it will be almost impossible to produce a life that is positive and uplifting. GIGO when it comes to what you allow into your head and heart.

The psalmist proposes a better approach: GSIGSO. “Good Stuff In, Good Stuff Out.” Verse 5 says, “On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.” Meditate — think — ponder — analyze — appropriate. Put the good stuff in your brains, people — and you’ll be amazed at the good stuff that will come out!

Psalm 98
Of all the reasons to worship God, steadfast love and mercy certainly rank right up there!

Job 19:23-27a
This passage from Job (perhaps the Bible’s oldest book, in terms of the time it emerged from oral tradition to written form) is often used as evidence of belief in a resurrection in Hebrew scripture. That may be true, though the translation of these verses is particularly tricky.

That does not stop it from being an assertion of Job’s firm faith in the eternal purposes of God. Job had some pretty tough things to say about God’s treatment of him (see v.6 in this same passage, for example — “…know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”) But, he never did give up and he never cursed God (though he was certainly urged to do so.)

Maybe that’s the word of the Lord for us this day!

Psalm 17:1-9
More awesome descriptions of the ways that God works in our lives — God really is a God focused on the good of the Lord’s people. However, an interesting detail caught my eye: notice in v.1 that the prayer that God is able to hear is one that comes from “lips free of deceit.”

Deceit? When speaking to God? Surely none of us would hold anything back, or misrepresent our situations, or “bend the truth” when speaking to God…would we? As Psalm 19:14 teaches us — “May the words of my mouth…be acceptable in your sight.”

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
The folks who were following the way of Christ during the 30 or so years after his resurrection and ascension were evidently getting a little nervous about his promise to return and “take you to be with me” (see John 14:3.) Paul is doing a little clean-up work on just exactly how and what Jesus might have meant.

Hold on — don’t get too shook up — or, in the words of the gospel song that came many centuries later — “wait on the Lord, trust His word and be patient — have faith in God!” (Click here for Have Faith in God, by legendary Baptist hymn writer B. B. McKinney.)

Luke 20:27-38
Many are the teachings and interpretations that have sprung from these apocryphal words by Jesus. I ain’t about to get into speculation about knowing your husband or wife in heaven, or how we all may (or may not) recognize one another when we get there. I’m just taking the promise of v.38 to be the gospel truth: “Now God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for to God, all of them [us] are alive.”

That’ll do!

Sermon by Delmer Chilton

November 1 was All Saints Day. Most churches move it either to the Sunday Before or the Sunday after. If ou are observing All Saints on Nov. 6, check out last week’s sermon. If you’re not, the sermon below is based on the appointed gospel for this day. Because it also deals with life after death, it is appropriate for All Saints as well.

"Stand by Me." is a young adolescent "coming-of-age" story, based on a Stephen King novel, about four 8th grade boys in a small Maine town who have nothing in common - except the fact they don't fit in at home or school - so they hang out with each other. They sneak out of town one afternoon to go on an overnight adventure - hiking through the woods, camping out, telling ghost stories, smoking stolen cigarettes, etc. While hiking along the railroad tracks two of the boys get into an argument as to whether Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman.

Vern – Do you think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?
Teddy – Are you nuts? Of course not.
Vern – But Mighty Mouse is really strong. I was watching yesterday and Mighty Mouse picked up five elephants.
Teddy – Look, Mighty Mouse is a cartoon, and Superman is a real guy. No way a cartoon beats up a real guy.
Vern – sighs and look sad – Yeah, I guess you're right.
After a minute or two, Vern perks up and says – Bet it would be a good fight though!

Teddy and Vern asked what is, to us, a silly question. But it was, for them, a very serious matter.

In today’s Gospel lesson the Sadducees asked Jesus a very silly question about the resurrection. Obviously, they weren't seriously looking for an answer.They were trying to trap Jesus into saying something that would get him in trouble.

But many people were then and are now very serious as they struggle with the question the Sadducees raised with Jesus. "After this, what's next?" Is this life, this world, all there is? What, if anything, happens after we die? And, what does the answer to that question mean for us while we live?

My father asked a lot of questions about the Bible and traditional Christian orthodoxy. He regularly attended church, but he never joined, reserving the right to respectfully disagree with anything that made no sense to him. Resurrection was one of those things. While I was in seminary, he brought it up with me.

He said, "When I was in the army in WWII, I was on a troop ship in the Atlantic. Several of the fellers died on the trip.They wrapped the body up, prayed over him,and slid him into the ocean. Now, I reckon various fish ate the body – so how does the body come back together at the resurrection?" Before I could think of what to say, my mother, whose brother was buried at sea in the Pacific, interjected, "Lowell, you think too much. If God can make the world out of nothing, God can put them boys back together. Now leave Delmer alone."

It was years later that I realized that Daddy wasn't simply being his usual empirically obtuse self –the young men buried at sea were not the only friends he lost in the war – far from it. A few months before he died in 2004, he, for the first time, told me about one of his encounters with death in WWII. He and his squad were in the edge of a French village. They were in an abandoned house. Daddy was standing guard in a doorway. He walked down the hall to the other open door to get a light for his cigarette from Jake, guarding that door. Daddy then turned and walked back down the hall. A loud boom: then shrapnel, pieces of wooden doorjamb, and body parts fell all around him. A mortar shell had hit the doorway where he had been standing 5 seconds before. 60 years later, sitting at the kitchen table, Daddy cried, both because he had lived, and also because Jake had died. Daddy came home to the farm in North Carolina and didn't talk about the war, not to his children, and according to my mother, not to her either.

But as he began to come more and more face to face with his own mortality and a very personal encounter with eternity – he began to ask the questions that had lurked in his heart for 60 years. What happens when we die? Is this all there is? If there is a God, where is God when my world falls apart?

Though the Sadducees had asked a silly question Jesus knew there was a serious reason for it. While the Sadducees themselves didn't care about the afterlife, Jesus knew many who were listening to him did. Jesus' answer had to do with the eternality of God in the face of our, all too often, short and painful lives.

Rather than directly confront the Sadducees with their silliness, Jesus went deeper to explore the nature of life in the eternal Kingdom of God, and the importance of living by the values and promise of that Kingdom now.

The first thing Jesus does is gently make it clear that "this age," our life now, is connected to, but different from, "that age," what comes next. What the Bible calls "the Resurrection" is not simply life as we know it now going on forever and ever, amen. Life now is life dealing daily with the looming threat and reality of disease and decay – what Martin Luther called "Sin, Death, and the Devil." In this world, there is no avoiding those things, they surround us, and if we are not careful, they control us.

We try not to sin, but we do. We try not to get sick and die, but we do. And, it is in our efforts to avoid sickness and death that we too often sin, and make "deals with the devil," betraying our eternal values for time-limited survival and success. But Jesus tells us life as resurrection people is not like that. We do not have to fear decline and death. We do not have to make deals with the devil to survive. Why? Because whether in this age or the next, God is with us. Verse 38 "Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living."

Here's the tricky part: what difference does the promise of the Resurrection make in how we live our lives now? How does the eternality of God not only comfort us concerning the death of our loved ones, but also give meaning to our lives as we live, day-by-day, in this age while anticipating the age to come?

It does two things. First and most obviously, is that it removes from us the fear of death as a motivator of our actions. When self-preservation, or the preservation of our family, or the preservation of our "life-style," is removed – we are free to pursue, in the words of Philippians 4:8 "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable. . ."

without concern for what such a stand in life might cost us. Secondly, it helps us remove the artificial barriers we have built up between "us" the good, and "them" the bad, in this world. Eventually, we realize that we are all mis-fits on a journey of self-discovery that leads through us death into the true life of Shakespeare's "undiscovered country."

And so, we walk together through this age as a family of faith, of people who fit together partly because

we don't fully fit anywhere else. Knowing ourselves to be truly citizens of God's kingdom, we live by kingdom rules now – rules like "love your enemy," and "turn the other cheek," and "do unto others," and "the one who saves his life will lose it, but the one who loses life for my sake will gain it,"

Rules which seem silly and make no sense in a world ruled by death and the search for survival –but which make serious and perfect sense in a world centered on hope and faith in the never-ending love of an eternal God.

Amen and amen.

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