St. Andrew’s Pictou, January 29^th 2006

 

Giant of the Past?

 

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Mark 1:21-28

 

I was told that there was a problem. The parent, the teenager and I met. They were living in the house of a family member. The problem came from the fact that the teenager wanted to, and continued to smoke marijuana in the house. The owner of the house said that if the 15 year old continued to smoke marijuana in his house, he would have to leave. As a high school student he had no money nor did he have anywhere to go. His father didn’t want his son put out on the street, but the son refused to change his habit.

 

Now to have a discussion, there has to be some agreed on rules: the use of logic and respect are two that come to mind. They both seemed to be absent for one reason or another in this discussion.

 

When I described the reality he faced: “If you continue to smoke marijuana, you are going to be on the street but you have nowhere to go and no money to rent a place.”

 

His response was, “Whatever.”

 

Now “whatever” is an infuriating response, because it means absolutely nothing. To me it means that neither person is right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. “Whatever” means that there is no point to be made either way.

 

“Whatever” means absolutely nothing, except that you could say that it is a refusal to correspond. The refusal to participate could be interpreted that he has an underlying problem but refuses to name or tell us what the problem was.

 

Since this is all speculation, and we are still left with, “Whatever.”

 

Teenagers, married couples, friends, neighbours, issues we saw in the latest election all have one major thing in common: how does one person honestly communicate with integrity to another?

 

How does one person honestly communicate with integrity to another person?

 

Our Supreme Court just ruled that a swinger’s club, a place full of men and women all having sex with each other, is not breaking any laws of the land, because… no money passed hands for sexual favours.

 

Now I would agree that it is a dangerous and difficult thing to legislate morality through the courts, but we are left again with the same problem that we had with the teenager: “How does one person honestly communicate with integrity to another person?”

 

The text from Deuteronomy deals exactly with issues of morality, integrity, communication and repairs to the church, (the temple in this case.)

 

Accepted standards in the country had slipped and repairs were needed to the temple which offered a high moral challenge to the people to accomplish such a task. This text was a call to faithfulness to all who heard it.

 

The authority of the text was based on the esteem that the people had for a giant of the past: Moses, their great prophet.

 

Recalling Moses, they recognized how he risked his life to get the tablets of the law from God; it recalls the great fire, clouds majesty and awe of the event on the holy mountain.

 

The prophet Moses, this giant of the past, had the integrity and the recognized character that he could speak for God. The force of his moral character was such that as a prophet, he could even speak to the future.

 

Now what grounds this text is something that we have to understand that is different from our present existence: those people accepted the utterly unquestioned, presumed, existence and presence of God.

 

You have to understand that every way they thought and acted was based on a total assumption of the reality of God.

 

This does not mean that they were all “goody two shoes,” what it means is that even if they were immoral, they would have accepted that they had done something wrong.

 

Today it is, “Whatever.”

 

Today, we have no common belief that there is a moral law, and God is often contemptuously dismissed.

 

The question for us today is not whether Moses is a giant of the past, but whether moral integrity itself is “a giant of the past.”

 

You all know teenagers. Open up conversation. Ask them the question: “Is moral integrity a thing of the past?” (We will hope that you don’t get the answer: “Whatever.”)

 

But where “the rubber hits the road” for each of us today is: “If you and I act in our lives with moral integrity, doesn’t that make moral integrity a force for the present?”

 

If this church was a museum, wouldn’t we be consigning moral integrity be “a giant of the past?” If we in our lives act with moral integrity, doesn’t it become a force in the present? (When we make churches into museums for example, we immediately disembowel our cause, cut it off from the present and place it firmly in the past with only remote connection to the present.)

 

The text in Mark gives us a vivid picture of the high moral integrity of Jesus Christ meeting a man we might call, “Whatever.”

 

Jesus and his disciples go into the temple to teach. The words used to describe how he was seen by those in the temple are “astounded” and that he taught with “authority.”

 

He meets a man with an unclean spirit and the man challenges him and says, “I know how you are.”

 

Jesus commands the unclean spirit to come out of him. People were amazed that the man convulsed and the spirit left him. “What is this?” they asked. “A new teaching – with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

 

The people in the temple could see and perceive his power and moral authority displayed in front of them. That same integrity is what made the news of Jesus spread: “At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.”

 

Is integrity a giant of the past?

 

The word of the Lord for us today is that: when we act with integrity, integrity exists.

 

When we act with integrity, integrity becomes a giant in the present moment.

 

Like the landlord who had the $800 he carelessly left in an envelope that was returned, money included!

 

Like a gift of money received when you are in need… with no strings attached.

 

Integrity is still a powerful force in the present and for the future whenever it is used.

 

Let me give you a statement you could hear from someone you know, as well as hearing it from the media: All the churches are in decline. Nobody goes to church anymore.

 

You have all heard statements such as these.

 

Now we are considering an addition to the back of our church that will do six things:

-give us a safe stairs to the lower level, an attractive place of entry to our hall, an elevator to make it accessible, a small meeting room or parlour, an accessible washroom, and an elevator to make the lower hall accessible.

 

If we decide with God’s help to take on this task, with the power of the integrity of our belief and faith, make those statements a lie!

 

When people are saying that churches are closing down and amalgamating, we are saying

not here!

 

We are not shutting down.

 

We are not closing - we are expanding!

 

We believe in God and in the message of Jesus and we are expanding and preparing for the next 183 years as our ancestors did in the past: we believe in God and that in the end God’s purposes will finally triumph. We honour their faith and belief in God as we honour our own.

 

Whatever we do in our lives and in our church, let us make the integrity of our faith in God, a giant of the present!

 

AMEN                         Rev. Alan Stewart