Let us Pray - O God, light of the minds that know you, life of the souls that love you, and strength of the hearts that seek you - bless the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen
It might be good to have your bulletin stuck in your bible at one of today's readings and have the bible open to the other because I am going to refer directly to some of the verses we found there - and do a lit adlibbing as it were on those verses.
But let me start by asking you here today - how many of you like things to be orderly? To have everything well defined? To have all the loose ends wrapped up??? Come on - fess up, and put up your hands - who likes things to be under control, to be well organized? to be predictable?
There is nothing out of the ordinary in this, it is a part of human nature. You can see it very clearly wherever people go.
People, for example almost always take the same seat at school or at church, or they start dinner by always eating what they like first and leaving the rest for later or perhaps vice-versa.
If someone changes things on us - if they take our seat for example, or tell us that we should eat our peas first and our meat second, we become upset.
Most of us really believe in the saying - "there is a place for everything and everything in its place".
We believe in it because we know that if things get out of order - if we can't predict where the bedroom chair is, or where someone has left their shoes, or where the cups and saucers are, then we are likely to stub our toes in the dark of night, or spend endless minutes searching for what we need while the kettle boils dry.
It is a helpful trait - this trait of orderliness, of habit, of custom, of predictability, so helpful in fact that none us really likes being taken by surprise - except of course on birthdays and other special occasions - and even then we kind of expect, or hope, that a particular kind of surprise is coming: some gift, or party, or thing that will please us and show us that we are loved.
The human desire for orderliness and predictability is a good thing,because of it our science and technology, our agriculture and our medicine is made possible. Yet sometimes this trait, this part of human nature, gets in our way.
It is this fact that lies behind today's Old Testament Reading and today's Gospel reading.
As we heard, in verse 24 Moses gathered 70 leaders of the Israelite community together one day so that they might assist him in bearing responsibility for watching over and caring for the people of God. He calls them to go out with him to the Tent of the Ark of the Covenant which was placed outside of the rest of the camp, and to receive there from God the same gift of the Holy Spirit that he had.
And so they do. Just as planned. While there each one of them is filled with the Spirit of God and each one prophecies, each one speaks for God the words of God, words meant for the health and well being of the Israelite family.
But there is a catch.
It turns out that two of the seventy leaders did not go out to the Tent of the Ark of The Covenant.
Instead, for some unknown reason, they stayed in the camp with the rest of the people and it is there that the Spirit descends upon them, and it is there that they prophecy, and it is there that they are caught by a young man.
They are caught by him breaking the rules and regulations set down by Moses, they are caught doing things out of turn, improperly, and without due authorization, and the young man runs out to the tent of the Ark of the Covenant and he reports all that he has seen to Moses.
Joshua, who is with Moses, Joshua, who is the chosen successor to Moses, hears the young man's report at the same time Moses does, and like John the Apostle in today's Gospel reading, he attempts to put an end to the irregularity.
In verse 28 we hear him say to Moses:
"My Lord Moses, Stop Them! Stop them from disobeying you. Stop them from doing things in the way they are not supposed to do them. Stop them from defiling the Spirit of God."
My Lord, Stop Them...
How many people have we tried to stop?
How many people have we stifled because they are not doing things the way we think they should be done? Because they are not precisely following the plan that we expect them to follow?
It is a serious question.
It is a serious question because I would guess the most damaging thing that anyone of us does in the course of an average week, whether it be at your voluntary work or in a church committee, at work, or in our homes, is our attempt to ensure that everyone works at their job in the way that we believe they should.
Just as we want the shoes left at the door, and the bedroom chairs set carefully in the corners, and the cups and saucers put in the left-hand cupboard, so we want - and expect - that those who are doing the same kind of work we are doing to be known to us, and to do it in the same way as us, in the way that we sincerely believe that God wants us - and everyone else - to do it.
And that can be a major problem. Our good and natural desire for order and predictability, our sense of what is proper and right, can lead us into all manner of serious problems.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
I was in a small rural church on one of the outlying islands here in Hong Kong at one time that had a major dispute about where the rice should be placed in the kitchen prior to serving them for the annual annual supper - which by the way was truly an excellent Meal.
One woman actually left the church community because several new comers to the church had convinced the rest of the women working in the kitchen that it would be more efficient to put the rice on the counter beside the sink instead of the counter next to the refrigerator.
"It's not the right way to do it", she said. "We've never done it that way before, and I am not going to be part of doing it that way now. I won't have any part of that kind of thing. Those new people are going to ruin this church. They don't know anything. They aren't even from around here."
Sound familiar to anyone? Ever wonder what that kind of attitude does to a community? Or to a church? Or even to our own sons and daughters - who somehow can't quite do things just like the old man does....
The apostle John came up to Jesus one day. In verse 38 of today's gospel reading we hear him say:
Jesus, I was walking down the road with the rest of the disciples, and we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, we tried to stop him because we don't know who he is, we tried to stop him because he doesn't follow us.
It's like an echo isn't it - these two passages we are looking at today.
Jesus - We tried to stop him!...My Lord Moses, stop them!
What was John missing?
What was Joshua missing?
What was my lady in the kitchen serving rice missing?
What are we missing?
What are we missing when new people come into our church or our work place or club or our small group- and then leave it just as quickly as they came?
What are we missing when members of our own family tell us that we are driving them away? And when strangers tell us that they do not feel welcome in our midst?
Is the sound of grumbling heard too often in our tents? Are the expectations we place upon others to do things just so - just a little bit too much?
But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Do you think I really care if Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp instead of here? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit in them. Would that they would prophesy in the camp, and speak God's word in the tabernacle, and communicate the will of the Lord to one another while walking through the desert and when they are eating and when they are playing.
It is good to have order.
It is good to do things in certain ways.
Having customs and traditions and rules and regulations makes sense to me.
They make sense that is until they get in the way of embracing other people - until they become instruments of judgement instead of instruments of grace, until they become things that blind us to what God is doing in our midst instead of helping us to see. And then they have to prioritized - according to the simple law of the Spirit - the law of love - the law that embraces all our relations - the law that the Apostle Paul tells us in the Letter to Romans gives life..
But Jesus said to John, "Do not stop him! Do not prevent him from doing good in my name simply because he is not following you and the other disciples. He is on my side. For no-one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. Truly, I tell you, whoever give you a cup of water to drink because you bear my name will by no means lose the reward."
Whoever is not against us is for us.
Sometimes my friends when we try to work together, we end up working apart. We rip and we tear at each other because others aren't serving God in the way we want them to, because they aren't doing those things we are doing those things we think need doing and doing in a particular way.
To paraphrase Moses, We are jealous for our Lord, instead of allowing our Lord to be jealous for himself.
And sometimes when we work apart, whether this be by accident or by design, we are really working together.
Work and the service clubs, the cancer societies and the food bank volunteers, are all in one way or another, about the work of God. They each do it differently - but they each do it because they want to make a difference, because they want the human family to prosper and to be whole.
And even within our work places even within the church, where people do things differently than we expect or hope - or do different things than those things we want them to, they still do it because they care and they believe, and they still hope that it will make a difference and that God's work will be done, as do in fact we.
No matter how different we may seem to be to one another, if we are really using the name of God, the name of Jesus, in our work of helping and healing, we are working together.
Blessed are we when we understand this. And blessed is the world in which we work, and for whom we work.
The world needs us to work together - even if we work at different things or work in different ways for the same goal.
It needs the hope we offer, the food we share, the relationship with God that we have entered into.
The world needs the message we bear about our common brother and sisterhood, the word we have about our unity in the family of God, and about how God loves us and wants to help us be whole.
The world needs us.
It needs to see that we are - in fact - all related and that our relationship is one of peace - of shalom - of God's righteousness and God's love.
We are dedicated by our vows of faith and our pledges of loyalty to being loving and caring members of God's family. We are set apart by our faith - we are made holy in other words - so that our presence in the larger world and in the intimacy of our families is a life giving presence.
As Christians we have committed ourselves to doing the work God calls us to do and to seeing others in the way that God sees us, and judging others in the way that God judges us.
We can only really keep our vows and pledges, we can only be true to our commitment, we can only fill the world's need for us if we embrace one another and celebrate our common bound in God, the bound that was signed and sealed upon the cross of Christ. upon the cross of the one who said before he died, for us:
A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Greet your relations today - those in the pews ahead of you and behind you.
And greet your neighbours in the same way - and with the same signs of peace, the peace that truly only comes through the faith in the one who said: 'They who are not against us are for us'.
Praise be to the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, now and forevermore. Amen.
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