On the 8th of July 1741, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards stepped into the pulpit of a church in Enfield Connecticut and delivered his most famous sermons, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  I say famous because this sermon, of all of his countless others, has been studied and dissected, and misunderstood since the first day it had been preached.

Edwards, who happens to be my 6th cousin, was one of the great preachers from a time in our American history known as the Great Awakening, or perhaps I should say the 1st Great Awakening.  It is always difficult to pinpoint the exact start of movements such as this but historians usually use the period of the 1730’s, and 40’s so before the American Revolution.  In fact, many historians credit the Awakening for the Revolution.

The awakening began in the south and moved up the coast by various preachers and came to New England with the preaching of Rev. Edwards in his church in Northampton.  Edwards preached this sermon there first and then was asked by the pastor of the Church in Enfield to come and preach to his congregation.  It seems they had been unmoved by the awakening thus far, and the pastor was determined that his flock would be changed.

If you have never read the sermon I would suggest that you do, however, it is filled with imagery that may sound foreign to us, but the result is the same.  The entire idea behind the awakening, as any revival, is to call people back to piety and a sense of who they are as Christians.  Edwards used the image of Hell and the final judgment of individuals as a way to bring them back.  It has been reported that people shouted “how can I be saved” during the sermon.  So moved were they that a monument has been erected in Enfield on the site of the sermon.

Historians of American religious history disagree on how man awakenings have taken place in America since that time some say three some say four, but they usually follow some period of upheavals in America like a war or some such.  From these times people do become more religious if you will, but they tend not to last long as we go back, slowly but surely, to the way we were.  But we keep going on, and we keep trying.

The great religious writer Phyllis Tickle writes about, what she calls, the 500-year rummage sale of the church.  Like the awakenings, these are historical periods of time, difficult to pinpoint, when the church takes a long hard look at itself and a sense of revision or dare I say reformation, comes to the church.  We are approaching the 500th anniversary of the last one, the Great Reformation of Martin Luther, so the feeling is we are in another period of rummaging around.

These are times of change in the Church and can be refreshing.  Just a Luther brought a much-needed reform the church cannot stay the same, just as we cannot remain the same, as things change around us.  And for many this will be a test of our faith.

In the Scripture lesson today, we hear of a time when other people’s faith was tested and a reminded that we are to hold fast to that faith, and we were told of what faith can and will do.  Faith is what gave the Israelites the strength and will to cross the Red Sea when it seemed that all hope was lost, and it was a lack of faith that made it impossible for the Egyptians to follow them.  It was faith that brought down the walls of Jericho after they had been circled seven times.

In 1992 I made my fist, of what would be many trips, to Romania.  I went there as part of a group of missionaries who had been asked by the Evangelical Church in Romania to come and help them establish seminaries and training facilities for social workers and others who would help to rebuild their country.  Romania is an amazing place and a place that I call my spiritual home for many reasons.

I had the opportunity to meet with many faithful Christians in Romania and saw the devastation that occurred when the Church got too close to the government.  Each person I encountered I asked them the same question, how did you do it?  How did you survive, not only as a Christian but as human beings in what has been described as one of the most brutal dictatorships the world has even seen?

Their answer was always the same, whether they were Evangelical or Orthodox, Christian or Jew the answer was their faith is what saw them through.  Even though the institutional church had sold its soul to the government, faith is what brought them through.  Faith is what brought them through the persecution that we do not even understand in this country.  Oh sure we claim we are persecuted as Christians in this country, but we simply have no idea what that even means.

In preparing this sermon today, I looked up the word faith in the dictionary.  There are two definitions; one is that faith is complete trust or confidence in someone or something. For a Christian, that means we have full faith and confidence in God and in His Son Jesus Christ. The other definition is a belief in something unseen or something that we cannot prove.  I believe that these go together.

As Christians, we are to have this complete faith and trust in Jesus Christ.  Not in me, not in Rev. Bill, not in the Church and certainly not in the government.  We have our faith in Jesus Christ.  We cannot prove anything about it, but we believe it, that’s faith.  We have talked, in previous sermons, about how God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, and he continues to give us His manna through his word.  Can I prove any of it?  I studied it, and continue to study as has Rev. Bill, and I cannot point to anything and say there it is, that’s faith.  But I can point to what faith is.

Faith requires some things from us besides this complete trust and confidence.  Faith compels us to love, to serve, to forgive, to care, to welcome, to feed, to clothe, to a house, to visit and all of other things that Jesus left us as an enduring example.  You have heard me say this before it is not enough to profess with our lips that we are followers of Jesus we have to confess it with our actions!  What we do is far more important than what we say, as individuals, as a Church community, and as a nation.  I want you to notice one thing about all of those things that we are commanded to do, they are all verbs, action words.

Our Christian faith requires each of us to look at each other and see nothing more than a child of God created in his image and likeness.  We can no longer look at others as their color or their religion or the supposed sin for as Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Our faith should be conservative because we conserve a faith that for 2,000 plus years has stood for equality, justice and mercy.  But our faith should also be liberal because for 2,000 plus years our faith has stood to liberate spiritual captives from their blindness and lead them to a liberating Christ that will free them from their sins.  A Christ that welcomes all with open arms and desires that we all come to love him and one another.  This is what faith is, and this is what faith does.

In 1741 Jonathan Edwards pointed out to those listening to him that hell was just around the corner.  Now we can debate what that means and trust me when I say theologians of all stripes continue this discussion, but what he is saying is the time is at hand.  We are no longer on the verge of an awakening we are in one, and I see the Church coming alive again and finding her voice and shouting at the top of her lungs for those who have no voice.  I see the Church marching together for those who cannot march.  And I see the Church, at long last advocating for those things that Jesus has commanded us to advocate for, love, mercy, justice, equality, and all the rest.

Dear ones, the time, is now and we, all of us here, are the chosen ones.  We have been called by God and given a mission.  We can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch it is time to get in the game!  This is what faith means and this is what faith requires.  Action!

In the book “The Pine Tree” by Rose Dobbs, there is a story about a pine tree that is lonely and sad because it is the only tree around with long needles instead of green leaves. It wishes to be important and noticed among the other trees in the forest. Thinking it costs nothing to wish, the pine tree wishes for gold leaves. And lo, the next morning his branches are full of shining gold leaves. However, they do not last long. A poor peddler comes along and thinking he has been blessed with the discovery of a treasure; he picks every single one of the leaves. The pine tree is devastated wishing that he had beautiful but less valuable leaves he envisions himself with glittering glass leaves. Which is what he has when he wakes in the morning. And do they shine in the sun! But near evening a storm comes up. The wind blows, and soon the pretty glass leaves are broken on the ground. Shivering in the cold wind the pine tree wishes for plentiful, lush green leaves like his neighbor trees. And in the morning he is full of such leaves….until a goat comes along and eats them all. “Oh, my!” exclaims the tree. “I wish I just had my plain old needles back. I should never have wished to be more important than the other trees in the forest! ” And by next morning his needles have returned. The birds are asking to build nests in his branches because they can be hidden by his needles. And the little pine tree welcomes them vowing to be happy and useful with all that he is. And we could add, all that God created him to be!

“Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.” Luke 12:15

According to the dictionary, Covetousness means: feeling or showing a very strong desire for something that you do not have and especially for something that belongs to someone else.  It has the additional meaning of being marked by inordinate desire for wealth or possessions or for another’s possessions as well as having a craving for possessions.  The man in the story was suffering for covetousness for sure but what about us?  Have we ever been guilty of this?

It was common for the people of the time of Jesus to bring their disputes to trusted rabbis for a decision.  As we see in this story today, Jesus refused to get involved in people’s disputes about money, but he uses the opportunity to enlighten his Apostles on what their attitude towards material possessions should be.  He has something to say to not only those who have an abundance of possessions but also to those who have few.

To those who were listening that had an abundance of possessions he told them the parable of the rich fool.  We just heard this story.  In the story, the man has been blessed with more crops than he can possibly store in the barns and other builds that he has.  His solution is to pull down those barns and build bigger ones.  He builds the bigger barns and stores all he has and feels pretty good about what he was able to accomplish.  Then an angel comes and tells him that this night he is going to die.  All that work was for nothing.

Two things stand out in this story.  He never saw beyond himself.  This parable, unlike the others that Jesus uses, is full of the words, I, me, my and mine.  These are called aggressive pronouns.  The rich fool in the story was aggressively self-centered.  When this man had an excess of goods, the one thing that never entered his mind was to share them with others.  His whole attitude was the reverse of Christianity.  Rather than denying himself he aggressively affirmed himself; rather than finding his happiness in giving he tried to conserve it by keeping.

John Wesley’s rule of life was to save all he could and give all he could.  When he was at Oxford University, he had an income of thirty pounds a year.  He lived on twenty-eight, and he gave away two.  When his income increased over the years to sixty, then ninety and then finally to one hundred and twenty, he still lived on twenty-eight, and he gave away the rest. The Romans had a saying that money was like sea-water; the more a man drank, the thirstier he became.  As long as our desire is that of the rich fool, our desire will always be to get more – and that is the reverse of Christianity.

The second point is that he never saw beyond this present world. All his plans were based on his life here in this world.  The one who never remembers that there is another world is destined some day for the grimmest of grim shocks.  We spend far too much time storing up things in our existing barns and not worrying at all about what comes next.

But Jesus also has something to say to those who have few possessions.  The one thought that Jesus forbids in this passage is an anxious thought or worry.  Jesus does not want us to live a shiftless, wild life.  There is nothing wrong with being comfortable in our life.  What Jesus said was do your best and leave the rest to God.  This takes great faith.  Just like the prayer discussion we had last week, not worrying about the future takes enormous faith.

Jesus said, “seek first the kingdom of God.” We pray in the Lord’s prayer that God’s kingdom was a place on earth where his will is as perfectly done as it is in heaven.  So what Jesus is saying here is that our lives need to bend, not to our will, but to obeying God’s will and that we need to rest easy and be content with that will for our lives.

So many people work for things and heap up things that by their very nature will not last.  Rust and mold will get to them, and they spoil.  Just like last time when we spoke about the manna that God provided to those in the wilderness.  They were only to gather what they needed if the gathered more it spoiled.

Work for things that will last forever, things that you will not leave behind when you leave this earth, but the things that you can take with you.

If we clothe our souls in the garments of honor and purity and goodness, nothing on earth can take that away from us.  If we seek the treasures of heaven, our hearts will be fixed in heaven; but if we seek the treasures of earth, our hearts will be tied to this earth – and one day we will have to say goodbye to them for as the Spanish proverb says: there are no pockets in a shroud.”

What we have just heard from the Scriptures is a very early version of what we no call the Lord’s prayer. When I call us to pray this prayer here at the Church, I usually say; “let us pray in the words our Savior taught us.” or words similar to those. Although the prayer has changed, and other Gospel record this event just a bit different, the meaning behind those words has not changed. This is in some ways the perfect prayer and the only prayer we need.

I have spent a significant portion of my ministry involved in teaching people about prayer. Notice I did not say teaching people to pray that is something you have to do all on your own. But there is a certain way that we should pray, and that is what Jesus is teaching his apostles in this Scripture today.

The prayer starts out with an address; Jesus address this prayer to God the Father. This is a classic Christian start to any prayer, just like a letter you might be writing it is important that the prayer is addressed to the right person. But I want to point out that we are addressing not some tyrannical being on some distant shore or sitting on a cloud, but we use the intimate term of father because God is a parent who delights to supply his children with what they need, not what they want, but what they need.

I always remind people that it is okay to pray for people, we do it here in church during the pastoral prayer, and I hope we do it daily in our prayers. But we pray that God’s will be done in each and every situation and in each and every life that we encounter. God knows what we need before we do and so our prayer should be for us to walk in the will of God and that God’s will, and not ours, be done. We do say, “your will be done.”

But I want to point out another thing here, the prayer beings by addressing God because before we ask for anything we have to give God the glory that God so deserves. Only when we give God the glory and put God in his rightful place in our lives will all the other things in our lives start to come together.

I like to think that I am a person of prayer. Sure I run hot and cold like most people and some days I spend time in prayer and other days it’s nothing more that “O God it’s morning again.” But I can tell when I have spent time with God and when I have not spent time with God. Maybe I am short with other people, perhaps I am aggravated all day, it could be anything. But on the days I take the time to spend with God things seems to be just a little bit better. It puts my mind and my thoughts in the right place and sets my feet on the right path.

Our prayer should cover all of life but should also focus on the present reality and our current needs. We pray “give us this day our daily bread.” This harkens back to the time in the wilderness as recorded in Exodus 16:11-21. God had led the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt, and they spent time wandering in the desert. They asked God to supply their needs, and God sent them manna. Manna was a sort of dough like substance that they would make all kinds of things out of. God warned them to take only what they needed for that day as the rest would spoil. Each morning new manna would appear, and they would gather. This required trust, faith in God that God would supply what they needed. Those who did not trust found out that what was left rotted overnight.

We pray in the present moment for current needs. Only the needs of the day should be gathered in prayer, we are not to worry about the uncertain future, but we are to live in the moment one day at a time. We trust that God will help us each day to live that day the way God wants us to live. When we do not trust God, we are saying that we know better than God, and we can do it ourselves. We pray that “Thy will be done.” And we trust in God and leave it to God.

Prayer covers past sins, and we ask for forgiveness, and we also seek the grace to forgive others and ourselves. You have heard me mention this before, and I am sure you will hear me say this again, but forgiveness is essential to the Christian life. “forgive us our debts, trespasses, sins, as we forgive those who are in debited to us, who sin against us, or who trespass against us.” We forgive because we have been forgiven!

Forgiveness is a struggle but our entire life as Christians is a struggle. Jesus never once said, and I think we tend to forget this, that if we follow the way our life will be easy. It will not be easy nor was it meant to be easy. Following the way of Christ is challenging and forgiveness is part of that journey. Forgiveness is not about the other person, and it does not matter if they accept forgiveness or not or if they apologize to you or not. Forgiveness is about you. The withholding of forgiveness darkens the soul.

Remember years ago there was a TV commercial about lungs and smoking? There would be this beautiful pink lung and then a nasty black one. Our soul can get like that when we withhold forgiveness; it darkens it just a little, and it makes the rest of our life just that much harder to deal with. When we withhold forgiveness, we give power over us to the other person or persons involved.

Shortly after the shooting incident at Virginia Tech, I was asked to travel to the campus to be part of a team of clergy that would be available to students that had been involved that day. We came from all parts of the country to be available on the quad outside of the main administration building and also to hold group sessions in the evening. On the quad was an impromptu memorial to those who had been slain that day. As I walked around the circle, I was struck by the fact that the shooter was also included, and the saying on campus was “32 are gone because one was lost.” They were not letting him off the hook, they did not forget what happened, they were saying that they were not going to allow hate to rule their lives. Holding back forgiveness leads to hate and hate leads to destruction.

Perhaps one of the most challenging parts of this prayer comes with the words, “lead us not into temptation.” Perhaps a better word here would be “trail” rather than “temptation.” Again, we have not been promised that life will be easy. We face trials each and every day and what we are asking here in this prayer is that we will not go through it alone, in fact, we never do. I want to make this point clear; God will never abandon us, EVER! God loves you; God cares for you, and God made a promise that he will never abandon us. Sure we might leave God, but God is always there, standing right beside us all along the journey. Friends will come and go in our lives, but God is the one constant, God is always there, there is nothing we can do to make him leave us or abandon us. EVER!

There is an old saying, “God answers every prayer, sometimes the answer is no.” Prayer is a conversation, a conversation between God and us and yes we have to listen God speaks to us, but we have to hear the voice.

There is a story of man who hears that the flood waters are coming. The TV news tells him to evacuate, but he says that God will protect him. As the flood waters are rising, his neighbor comes and offers to take him to a shelter. He tells the neighbor no, God will protect him. The flood waters continue to rise, and a man in a boat comes and offers to take him to safety, the man replies that he trusts in God, and God will take care of him. He ends up on the roof, and a helicopter comes, and the pilot says he will drop a rope and pull him to safety. The man says no thanks; God will protect me. Well, the man dies and standing at the pearly gates he is mad at God. He yells at God he thought God would protect him. God responds I sent you a TV newsman, a neighbor, a boat, and a helicopter what more do you want?

God speaks to us in all sorts of ways we just need to be listening for his voice. To listen to God is to listen deep within ourselves, to hear to God is to listen with our very souls. Prayer needs to be more than a laundry list of what we want or what we need; prayer is conversation. Take time to have the conversation; it will change your life.