Pastor’s Message
This will be my final message prior to my retirement and I have wrestled with what my final message to the good people of Zion’s Union Church should be. Since one of my main efforts in my ministry amongst you has been regular Bible study, I thought for this final message I would try to give you a capsule summary of the entire Bible in just a few short paragraphs.
The Bible begins by answering one of the age-old questions of science and philosophy: How did we get here? Why do we exist? The opening words of the Bible say: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . .” (Genesis 1:1). And that first chapter of the Bible concludes with these words: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Everything that exists—this unimaginably huge universe in which we find ourselves—is not here by accident as many scientists think, but here for a purpose. We get an early glimpse of that purpose when Genesis says, “So God created humankind in his image . . . God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth . . . ” (Gen. 1:27-28).
Thus, God invited humankind to join in God’s work! The first humans were given a command to care for God’s good earth and create new life just as God did. You might not ever have paused to consider that in creating a child parents are sharing in God’s work of creating new life! We were made to be like God in many ways. And yet, at the dawn of human history, things go badly wrong. Not content to be creatures obedient to God, we attempted to become gods ourselves. Discontent to be co-workers with God, we rebelled, disobeyed, and tried to take the world into our own hands. The first man and woman produced children, and then one of those children committed the world’s first murder by killing his own brother. Thus, our history of violence and bloodletting begins.
Skim the latest headlines, read any book on world history, and you will see why we cannot argue the fact that the human race is in a state of sin. The second through sixth chapters of Genesis tell the sad story. The precious gift of free will that God gave us, which separated us from all other animals and made us human, we misused to disobey and rebel against God. And here at the beginning of the 21st century, we don’t seem to be making much moral progress. The century that just closed was the cruelest and bloodiest in our history. One thing that distinguishes Christians from most other people is that we are at least honest enough to confess our sin and admit that we are in need of redemption. Even when we set out to do good, we often cause harm. We try to set the world right with our armies and power, but often cause an even bigger mess. With best intentions we launch forth to spread democracy only to often create mayhem among the nations we want to save.
Our sin is not just private and personal, but systemic and social and political. The great British writer and newspaper columnist G. K. Chesterton was once asked to submit an essay on the theme “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?” Chesterton sent back a two-sentence article: “What’s wrong with the world? Me.” That is one of the most realistic assessments I have ever heard. We bemoan all the terrorists and mass murderers and pedophiles who make headlines every day and we cry out, “What’s wrong with these people?” We need to sometimes soberly remind ourselves that the capacity for evil lies within each and every one of us. As Genesis 8:21 says, “The inclination of the human heart is evil from youth.” We can only begin to purge the world of evil by purging the evil in our own hearts.
God responded to our continuing disobedience by entering into a sacred covenant with us. God takes two childless senior citizens—Abraham and Sarah—and promises to bring forth from them a great nation that shall be a blessing to all the nations on earth: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Thus the nation of Israel was born to be “a light to the nations.” All that God asks of Israel, for its part of the bargain, is to “worship the Lord your God” and to have no other gods before him. And so God gave the people of Israel the Torah containing the Ten Commandments as a guide for living their lives as God intends.
I won’t bore you with all the details (you can read Exodus through Malachi on your own), but once again things did not work out as God intended. The rest of the Old Testament is the sordid story of humanity’s continued rebellion against God. God gave us the Law, God sent many prophets to warn us when we were going astray from the Law, but we continued to disobey God’s Law and killed the prophets sent to warn us. Do you see a pattern here?
Then came God’s New Covenant (New Testament). The Gospel Truth—the “Good News”—is that God did not punish us with what we deserve. 2,000 years ago, in the “fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4), God “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Risking everything, God humbled himself and became incarnate among us, literally became one of us in Jesus Christ in order to more fully communicate his will and his love to us.
Apparently there is no limit to God’s determination to love us, forgive us, and save us from ourselves. Our ultimate means of salvation has a face and a name. And his name is Jesus, from the Hebrew Yeshua, which means “He will save.” In the face of all the fear and uncertainty we see in the world around us today, we can be certain of only one thing: God loves us and will never stop trying to re-make us in his image in order to bring about the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen!
My final prayer for all of you, and my final admonition to you, is that you will continue to faithfully spread this good news of God in Jesus Christ as you have so faithfully done for nearly 200 years in this place so appropriately named “Zion”—God’s shining community on a hill.
This will be my final message prior to my retirement and I have wrestled with what my final message to the good people of Zion’s Union Church should be. Since one of my main efforts in my ministry amongst you has been regular Bible study, I thought for this final message I would try to give you a capsule summary of the entire Bible in just a few short paragraphs.
The Bible begins by answering one of the age-old questions of science and philosophy: How did we get here? Why do we exist? The opening words of the Bible say: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . .” (Genesis 1:1). And that first chapter of the Bible concludes with these words: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Everything that exists—this unimaginably huge universe in which we find ourselves—is not here by accident as many scientists think, but here for a purpose. We get an early glimpse of that purpose when Genesis says, “So God created humankind in his image . . . God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth . . . ” (Gen. 1:27-28).
Thus, God invited humankind to join in God’s work! The first humans were given a command to care for God’s good earth and create new life just as God did. You might not ever have paused to consider that in creating a child parents are sharing in God’s work of creating new life! We were made to be like God in many ways. And yet, at the dawn of human history, things go badly wrong. Not content to be creatures obedient to God, we attempted to become gods ourselves. Discontent to be co-workers with God, we rebelled, disobeyed, and tried to take the world into our own hands. The first man and woman produced children, and then one of those children committed the world’s first murder by killing his own brother. Thus, our history of violence and bloodletting begins.
Skim the latest headlines, read any book on world history, and you will see why we cannot argue the fact that the human race is in a state of sin. The second through sixth chapters of Genesis tell the sad story. The precious gift of free will that God gave us, which separated us from all other animals and made us human, we misused to disobey and rebel against God. And here at the beginning of the 21st century, we don’t seem to be making much moral progress. The century that just closed was the cruelest and bloodiest in our history. One thing that distinguishes Christians from most other people is that we are at least honest enough to confess our sin and admit that we are in need of redemption. Even when we set out to do good, we often cause harm. We try to set the world right with our armies and power, but often cause an even bigger mess. With best intentions we launch forth to spread democracy only to often create mayhem among the nations we want to save.
Our sin is not just private and personal, but systemic and social and political. The great British writer and newspaper columnist G. K. Chesterton was once asked to submit an essay on the theme “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?” Chesterton sent back a two-sentence article: “What’s wrong with the world? Me.” That is one of the most realistic assessments I have ever heard. We bemoan all the terrorists and mass murderers and pedophiles who make headlines every day and we cry out, “What’s wrong with these people?” We need to sometimes soberly remind ourselves that the capacity for evil lies within each and every one of us. As Genesis 8:21 says, “The inclination of the human heart is evil from youth.” We can only begin to purge the world of evil by purging the evil in our own hearts.
God responded to our continuing disobedience by entering into a sacred covenant with us. God takes two childless senior citizens—Abraham and Sarah—and promises to bring forth from them a great nation that shall be a blessing to all the nations on earth: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Thus the nation of Israel was born to be “a light to the nations.” All that God asks of Israel, for its part of the bargain, is to “worship the Lord your God” and to have no other gods before him. And so God gave the people of Israel the Torah containing the Ten Commandments as a guide for living their lives as God intends.
I won’t bore you with all the details (you can read Exodus through Malachi on your own), but once again things did not work out as God intended. The rest of the Old Testament is the sordid story of humanity’s continued rebellion against God. God gave us the Law, God sent many prophets to warn us when we were going astray from the Law, but we continued to disobey God’s Law and killed the prophets sent to warn us. Do you see a pattern here?
Then came God’s New Covenant (New Testament). The Gospel Truth—the “Good News”—is that God did not punish us with what we deserve. 2,000 years ago, in the “fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4), God “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Risking everything, God humbled himself and became incarnate among us, literally became one of us in Jesus Christ in order to more fully communicate his will and his love to us.
Apparently there is no limit to God’s determination to love us, forgive us, and save us from ourselves. Our ultimate means of salvation has a face and a name. And his name is Jesus, from the Hebrew Yeshua, which means “He will save.” In the face of all the fear and uncertainty we see in the world around us today, we can be certain of only one thing: God loves us and will never stop trying to re-make us in his image in order to bring about the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen!
My final prayer for all of you, and my final admonition to you, is that you will continue to faithfully spread this good news of God in Jesus Christ as you have so faithfully done for nearly 200 years in this place so appropriately named “Zion”—God’s shining community on a hill.