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October 28, 2007 Faith of Our Ancestors St. Andrews
Joel 2:23-32 Romans 3:19-28 Reformation Sunday
Over the past few months, I have mentioned several times at the cottage meetings the influence my family has had and continues to have in my life. And how Jesus’ hard words concerning leaving your blood kin behind in order to embrace the new family established in his name is difficult for me to deal with and always has been. And you just heard those words again in the Reformation dialogue. But in a very real sense we rely on the faith of our ancestors to see us through our own doubts and failings. In my own life the faith lived out by my Granny was a real presence of the Lord manifested in my hearing and seeing. Now, I am not placing her on a pedestal, at least not completely, because I know she, like all of us, had her own failings. But I could see the Kingdom by watching how she lived her life, one so in love with her Savior who continually heard his call and nurtured that relationship through prayer and regular Bible study. And that then led her out to be of service to others. And those were the things that I saw growing up as I played around and under her quilting frames and sat with her as she read the Bible. And we all have those people in our lives who have influenced us and continue to do so even if they are not with us here anymore.
The faith of our ancestors. Jewish rabbis will invoke the traditions of the elders when speaking of the texts of the Hebrew Bible. And we do the same thing when we read the Gospels. When we hear Jesus speak, we can hear echoes of the Hebrew Prophets and before. When we read the Gospels we do not know factually whether what has been written is true because we were not there, but ultimately we trust the faith of our ancestors that has been handed down to us. And our ancestors have done the same, even from the very beginning of the Holy Spirit descending upon those first believers in Jerusalem. When they locked themselves in the Upper Room out of fear - it was there in their moments of personal loss, of social disruption, of having their cherished understandings of Messiah crucified on a Roman cross – it was there that they fell back upon the faith that they had inherited, upon those words that had been spoken by their ancestors clarifying who God is and how God acts. They trusted that the words of the prophets that they first learned as children in the synagogues were God-inspired as they had been written down through the years.
Joel, the prophet, lived in a time like that, a time when people were questioning their faith in God because of the fear and disruption that had enveloped their land. It seemed as if the very earth itself had risen up to swallow them whole, that nature had been turned into the adversary himself. What in our own time is named extreme drought, rising sea levels, earthquakes, raging wild fires, Joel’s people named starvation brought on by plagues of locusts – an army that darkens the skies. Joel writes: what the chewing locust left, the gobbling locust ate; what the gobbling locust left, the munching locust ate; what the munching locust left, the chomping locust ate. The land is a moonscape. All crops have failed and worship has been brought to a standstill in the very Sanctuary of God. Trumpet the alarm on my holy mountain! It seems utterly bleak, doesn’t it? It seems as if there is no hope when you read the first part of Joel because he is being honest in what is happening around him.
But Joel does not stop there, does he? Even in the midst of this despairing picture there is this sudden turn of events. It almost gives you whiplash when you read it straight through. I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people, whoever calls ‘Help, God!,’ gets help. When people cried out that God was holding a grudge against them, that God was absent, that God was not powerful, Joel stood up to prophesy that there isn’t a day that goes by that we are not held fiercely in God’s hands. This moment of disaster in their lives simply revealed their underlying doubts and failures to trust God through all things. God had not abandoned them but had been there all along in relationship with them even through their indifference, through their lives of routine and self-preoccupation. As Eugene Peterson says, anything that disrupts our lives, our daily routine, gives us fresh opportunity to reorient our lives in faithful obedience to God. So, Joel says that deliverance is for all those who call upon the name of the Lord – those saints of God who are effectually called into relationship with the very living God. God will pour out his Holy Spirit upon all peoples.
This message of hope in the midst of fear and despair was one that these disciples had heard through the faith of their ancestors - and as they burst forth from the Upper Room with boldness to speak and preach with dynamic conviction that this very prophecy of Joel was being fulfilled in each one of them - all those constituted by Jesus to spread the good news concerning the Kingdom of God.
Down through the centuries of the church, our ancestors in the faith have trusted to God’s promise of the real presence, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit through all things that they have encountered. Symbolized in our baptisms and embodied in their lives of service, the saints of the church down through the ages have trusted to this promise to lead them to care, compassion, peacemaking, evangelism, preaching, teaching, the list goes on. When Irenaeus wrote his theological defenses of the faith in the second century, he trusted to the faith that had been handed down to the early church even though he did not see the Lord Jesus himself. When Augustine revealed the struggles of his own spiritual life and spoke of the great City of God, he trusted the faith that was handed down to him and embodied in his ancestors – the new family of God’s blessed children established in Jesus’ name. Our Reformation saints, Calvin and Knox and Martin Bucer, trusted that God’s Spirit led them in the reforming of their personal and corporate lives in the larger church.
Friends, we are in a long line of believers here, people all down through the ages who have trusted the Jesus whom they first met in the words of the gospels and who they saw embodied in the hands of loving service and peace of their new family. And that prophecy of Joel has been fulfilled here as well, for we have saints here in this particular church as well, those who have trusted God through all things in their lives – calling on the name of the God who helps and acts in love. You know their names, even if I do not. One most recently is Tom Wilbor, a saint of this church who has just this past week been fully embraced by our Lord Jesus Christ and is enjoying the presence of God along with my Granny. And that title includes all of us as well because we have been made part of the family of God and it is God’s action that makes us so. Just like Peter as he thundered forth on that Pentecost Sunday with the first sermon – proclaiming that the prophet Joel’s words were being fulfilled in them - they continue to be so as God continues to call us and infuse us with the power of the Holy Spirit in order to be his saints, as God reforms our lives continually and molds us together into his spiritual temple. A temple, a new family, that nothing can destroy as we are all gathered together into the very arms of God. This Reformation Sunday, as every Sunday, we gather together with all the saints throughout time and lift up our praise to God for we are all connected in the burning flame of the Spirit. And that will never change, no matter what may happen to this mortal frame, no matter what we face in our lives, for our God has promised by the life of his Son, our Revolutionary leader Jesus the Christ.
As the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it:
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
Diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
No matter how poor a potsherd we are and continue to be, God still meets us with his fierce love and reforms, transforms our lives. May he give us joy this day in our faith and in the new family that we are an integral part of. Amen.
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