St. Andrew’s Pictou, September 25^th 2005

 

Evidence Based Authority

Exodus 17:1-7

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21:23-32

 

People learn what they learn.

 

We lost a good man in our community this week: Truman (“Trap”) Stright. He was always cheerful, always pleasant, with a smile always offering a glass of his homemade wine. It was good to be in his company; being with Trap was never time that was wasted.

 

One day over a glass a wine he remarked curiously that his son Billy always seemed to like being around him. I said, “That is easy. Some parents curse their children, some parents bless their children. You bless. When people are blessed they want more, they come back; they enjoy the other person’s presence. You obviously bless Billy, so he comes back for more; he enjoys your company.” Trap’s parental authority was based on loving and blessing his son. From his father’s love, Billy learned that fathers bless their children.

 

People learn what they learn.

 

Whatever their experience happens to be, they learn the rules of life from the evidence of their experience.

 

If a child lives with shame, they live out their lives under the shadow of being cursed with that shame.

 

If a child is blessed, then they live out their lives in the light of being blessed.

 

Much like God, parents are to rule their family with love as the basis for their authority. We submit to our parents because they love us and what they do for and to us, is safely based in love and is done with our own best interest in mind.

 

We submit to God, because we believe that God is love, and we submit to the authority of God, because we believe that in love, God has our best interests in mind.

 

That is exactly what the people of God have one in our Exodus story: God was leading them out of bondage in Egypt to a life in the Promised Land: a land flowing with milk and honey.

 

Until now, God had lived up to his part of the bargain:

-he had provided Moses and Aaron as leaders,

-they had crossed over the Reed Sea on dry land, as the Egyptians were swamped,

-God had provided manna in the morning and quail at night for food.

 

But now, “From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of Israel… (Camped) at Rephidim…quarreled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’”

 

The people and their livestock were thirsting for water and there was none to be had.

 

They were questioning the authority of Moses being that he had led them to a place where there was no water. In a way they were saying that, “You’ve lost us! We have believed in you and followed you, but now we are not so sure!”

 

Moses does a little bit of theological damage control. He chides them for quarreling with him and testing God, but a mutiny is at hand; they contradict him and say that he is trying to kill them.

 

In anguish “Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.’”

 

In plain English, Moses was… scared for his very life!

 

You can feel the power struggle and wonder who is going to win.

 

God comes to his rescue with a plan: “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.”

 

Notice the chain of authority here: the people followed the elders, who followed Moses, who followed God.

 

(Moses) “called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord saying, ‘Is the Lord among us on not?’”

 

Are we not the same as the Israelites in this story? Don’t we and they all rely on evidence based authority?

 

You may have the title, you may have the credentials, but “we want to see the goods.”

 

Just as I wrote this I turned my head and there was Jennie and David Barnard each carrying food down to the Strights; Christian charity, compassion, hospitality, and comfort in time of grief; the evidence!

 

In his letter to the people of Philippi, Paul describes how we are to cherish the mind of Christ in ourselves as an inner authority.

 

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,”

 

There was a t-shirt slogan that went around a few years ago that said: “Question Authority.”

 

Questioning authority is hardly a new idea, just as the Israelites questioned Moses and God, so in Matthew we have the chief priests and elders questioning Jesus about his teaching and actions:

“By what authority are you doing these things, and how gave you this authority?”

 

Isn’t it interesting to see that they assume that Jesus has credentials; that someone gave him authority to do what he was doing? In asking him where he got his power, they are unwittingly giving him even more power.

 

Let it be a lesson to us that Jesus didn’t answer what appeared to be a trap disguised as a legitimate question.

 

He answered a question with a question going to the central core about the legitimacy of their authority: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven or was it of human origin?”

 

Since he had boxed them into a corner and they couldn’t answer his question, he established himself as a superior authority to them and therefore did not even need to answer their question!

 

And… he even provided more evidence that he was the one who had the authority.

 

“A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.

The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which is the two did the will of his father?”

 

They all agreed that the first son was the one who did his father’s will, so our friend and Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t go by words, he goes by action, he goes by “the evidence!”

 

Those chief priests and elders belong to the state religion and profess holiness, but Jesus slams them as being like the second son and tells them that tax collectors and prostitutes are going to the Kingdom of God ahead of them.

 

Jesus was saying that these so-called outcasts were like the first son: they didn’t profess holiness but although they suffered the contempt of society they acted with kindness and decency.

 

In saying what he did, Jesus identified who he had admired and who he identified with as being on the side of the Kingdom of God. In challenging them that they didn’t listen to John the Baptist, Jesus condemned them according to the evidence of their lives and identified that John’s baptism was from heaven.

 

People learn what they learn, and we all learn from the evidence of our experience.

 

Think of your own lives: haven’t you have all considered the evidence of who you will let into your inner circle of trust? Isn’t that how we all function?

 

But in recognizing that we, as well as Jesus, go absolutely by the evidence, we have the God-given formula of how to reach people and fill this church: we fill it with love; God will fill it with people.

 

AMEN                       Rev. Alan Stewart