FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF ATLANTA

One Road To Renewal

Zephaniah 3:14-20, St. Mark 2:1-12

Sermon by Rev. Alastair Symington

July 15, 2007

Men and women want to be made new, times when we want that to be made new. It’s an apparent universal condition of needing to have the slate wiped clean. We’ve maybe made a decision it sounded right at the time, but it’s not gone to plan and things have got derailed and we’d love to start again or try again. All we were moving on serenely and happily and then we made some calamitous error and there looks to be no way out from the consequences or again we simply feel as though life’s been the same now for years on end – no excitement, nothing new, no challenges and no prospects and we are in the proverbial rut. Then again we long for something new in our lives, something better.

In some of the world’s greatest literature, there’s a condition which has inspired great works. Faust was fed up and wanted something new so he sold his soul to the devil. Christian in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” on the other hand wanted something new in Christ and so he set his eyes firmly on “Wicket Gate” and the glimmering light of the celestial city. Or in history it’s what made the Pilgrim fathers leave my homeland in Britain and unlikely adventurers as they were found a new community in a new land in a new world on the other side of the Atlantic. For it was something new and something better and something that offered a richer fare than the past had given them, something to raise their hopes and recreate their sense of vision. It’s one of the great strengths of the Old Testament that it deals with really important issues like this, and at the same time with people like us, and spanning a period of well over a thousand years.

This desire to be made new, to have another chance, to start again, this desire is woven through all these thousand years. It was the element that inspired the exodus from Egypt’s slavery. It was the often, repeated cry of the poet David. It was the dream of the Jews when they were exiled in a foreign land. It was the power behind some of Isaiah’s greatest ever words as he inspired a nation with a vision that the mountains and the hills would be laid low and the rough places would be made a plain. And then ordinary people like them and like us would have this for new. Think about it. Think about what it must have done for them. They would have the Glory of God revealed to them and all flesh would see it together. Hallelujah, hallelujah behold the Lord God comes to each one of you now and for the rest of your redeeming lives and that’s the way it happened, but then as men and women do and we don’t know why we are so regularly and catastrophically inept but we are, then they had fallen away again, departed from the vision. And so when Zephaniah was the preacher in his day, the people needed renewal and reenergized all over again and how much they knew their need. How much they all craved for a new day and a new start. How much they were aware that their social and material and spiritual adventures had failed them all over again so Zephaniah preached specifically to their need.

A word of liberation to people who felt trapped; a word of recreation to people who felt that life had passed them by and they had made a mess of the one chance they get. But the preacher told them “God will renew you in His love.” Don’t go down the road of seeing some brave new mystical creed. Don’t spend hours trying to work out a new philosophy for life. Don’t lie on a psychologist’s coach and waste time and money on self-analysis. The Lord will renew you. God will offer that new dimension to you. He’s done it before and he’s done it for every generation so all you have to do is go out and search for it yourself. Have a look at where you are today – your lives, your hopes, your anxieties. Have a look and see how it doesn’t work for individuals or for a society or for a nation to strike out on this world alone, that imagine that we construct the stage like little gods in control of everything. Then have a thought to yourself. Look back and see how it has been different before and how it can be different again.

Just see how people within a hole, see how they made disastrous error of judgment time after time. See how life became a burden to them and how they appear to be nothing but a fearful future to anticipate. See how in Zephaniah’s time looking back they had been slaves in Egypt. Remember the terrible days of God was materialism when people like Hosea and Amos tried to hold them back to their sense, and don’t ever forget the hours when Jerusalem was overrun and the people were put into an exile. The sound of the preacher Jeremiah rang in their ears that it hadn’t needed to be that way or look at the lives of the men and women who had gone before them. Look at King David, so revered but made so many mistakes too. David the poet king and the faithful follower of his God but David when he forgot his God, David the adulterer, David the liar, David the man whose family became unstuck around him, David and a host of others, individuals whose lives are put straight again but only when they found their way back to the throne of Christ, so God will renew you in his love. It was Zephaniah’s message to a people in disarray, to men and women in his congregation who thought that the best had been and the future was something grim for them all.

My friends here I’d like you to think that the parallel is glaringly obvious. Still people need this slate to be wiped clean. We live today in nations yours and mine I would venture to say which are often in spiritual turmoil. We pray for justice and honesty and fairness. We want the poor to be aided and the sick to be made whole and the captive to be liberated but we don’t always seem to have these as our priorities. Today we are immersed in warfare which has divided society both here and for me at home. We are voyeurs in Britain of alleged cash for privileged corruption in those who lead us in government at the very top. And we are so morally confused that we think its right, it’s something good, and it’s something desirable in our society to pay no heed to the poor, the impoverished, the imprisoned and the desperate. People want things to be different they want things to be new. Sometimes too we belong to a church which so very much needs renewal. I’m not talking specifically about you here or even about my own people home in Troon, in both of which places I know good and imaginative and faithful enterprises are imbedded into our Christian lifestyles and congregational endeavors but I think the whole church needs renewal, to have ears open enough to hear again the cry of our Lord that we go to all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that we recapture some to the passion of Pentecost, that we stop the silly divisions that have crippled us now for hundreds of years and will go on crippling us just so long as we continue to receive unwelcome divisive comments such as came from the Vatican last week.

You know if you can imagine Christ alive and in person today in our midst what in God’s name would he make of the pride and prejudice and the opinionated pomp of so much of the church’s life today? Out there beyond our walls are men and women who need Jesus Christ, and we who are Presbyterians together with those who are Catholics or Methodists or Baptists or any other denomination, we are the ones that that same Christ is asking “offer me to them now” but we don’t talk to each other. They think they’re better than us and we know we’re better than them. A church is divided and it speaks with a proud tongue but you know the pride is not in our savior, the pride is all to often in ourselves and all the while people walk past us as we squabble at least while our leaders squabble – bishops and archbishops, moderators, conveners, they all stand on their dignity and men and women couldn’t care less about them if only they knew it. For what they want is a new song, a new generosity, and a new voice and a new chance to see the living Christ and individuals it’s the same for us. You and I and our neighbors we all need times when we feel we need to be renewed. Simply to be renewed in body as we take a weekend rest or a short vacation or break, we need that and men and women and children who don’t get renewal in body are burdened in the end. For we need renewal at a much deeper level too. Maybe the young adult who has set out on the wrong career and is imprisoned in it, he needs a way out, or we made a mistake and that mistake looks as though it will cast a shadow over our whole future, or we’ve been the same and we’ve done the same for years and years on end and we wonder to ourselves if this is all that’s suppose to be in this adventure called life.

Renewal, fresh start, clean slate, new opportunity – every single word we know about and unless we’re really odd or unless we’re so detached from our surroundings that we don’t really know what life’s about, then I think every single one of us here knows what I mean and knows about these aspirations in ourselves and as people looked in the past so they look now. In Israel of old they tried sometimes to find that renewal in material things just as we do. In society we always think that more money is the answer, fewer taxes, lots more pleasures and it doesn’t work. We’re richer today they tell than we’ve ever been but we’re not happier. In the church too we have a strange attachment to things to traditions and to doctrines and to dogmas just as they did in the temple Church of Christ’s day, and these things don’t matter they don’t make us happier. Individually too, like many in the past, like the rich young man, like the wayward prodigal son, like Herod locked away in his palace and Pilot in his courtroom, like ecclesiastical princes who struck their stuff a long way from a mucky hill called Calvary, individually we try to take refuge in things and we’re not happier. Or we try to find today other creeds and more modern substitutes. It’s fascinating for me how mystic creeds and odd philosophies are all the rage in our time now. It’s because we need something to speak to our souls because we all have souls that’s the irritating thing for people who want to dismiss faith. They have a soul and they know it and that soul stirs inside us, and it needs to be fed but today many people try to do that feeding with creeds which offer nothing and demand nothing because that’s so much easier. Religion with no commitment, that’s the base of all worlds they think but it is proven as to whence that renewal genuinely comes. Zephaniah preached about it. A crowd of friends once took a cripple to confront Christ because they knew about it. The reason Christ promised old John an exile that behold he would make all things new. The track record of our faith needs very little examination. It’s there before our eyes and it’s only us who go on missing it and who go on messing things up for ourselves and for others. The Lord will renew you in his love. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. It’s an old, old word of faith but for someone here today maybe you if in any way at all there are this anxious desire inside you this moment. Maybe for you it’s a word that can mean a new start and thank God indeed that such a word is as true now as it ever has been. The Lord will renew you in his love. He really can and he really will and more than that he is the only one able to do it. Amen.

May God bless to us this preacher of his own most holy word. Unto his name be the praise and the glory.