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This morning, I want to talk about
our values. Think, for a second, about
what you value. How does your life
reflect that? If someone else was given
the facts of your life, detailing how you spend your time and energy, would
they say that those are your values?
Quick question – what does a 4 year
old value? Besides not listening?
What do we in Columbus value on
Saturdays in the fall?
What is valued by the country?
What about your company? What do they value? We recently learned what was valued at Wells
Fargo in the wake of their corruption scandal – we discovered that they valued
a yearly bonus more than maintaining integrity in their workplace. The question now is whether they will ever be
able to regain their once-clean reputation.
We learn about what companies value
by examining their choices. Companies or
people will often proclaim their values, but it’s much more authentic to simply
pay attention to their choices and infer their values from that. What they say and what they do doesn’t always
align.
So a good question for us, then, is
to learn what God values. If we are to
be the people of God, seeking to imitate God in all we do, we should learn what
matters to God and seek to duplicate those values in our own lives, right? If we were serious about following God, no
matter what, we’d want our lives to share the same values that God does.
So I think this reading from Exodus
is helpful because it teaches us about how God is building community with his
chosen people. He invites them up onto
the mountain to dine with him – it’s an amazing experience, and one that my
imagination can’t even begin to wrap itself around. What would it be like to eat dinner with
God? It would change you forever,
right? You’d never give in to the temptation
to go back to your old and sinful ways, right?
This story is so touching for me in
a lot of ways, because it really exposes a lot of my idols. The leaders of the community dine with God,
and then Moses goes up on the mountain for a little while, and it isn’t long
before the community is making a golden calf.
How could these people let that happen?
They’d eaten dinner with God!
Wouldn’t that be a pretty persuasive argument? How could that not shoot down any attempt to
build a god made out of gold?
But we value control. We value a god we can see and touch, one that
is safe and won’t ask too much of us.
Make a god out of gold, put it on a pedestal and it’s a pretty easy
relationship – this god won’t call you into uncomfortable and challenging
places. It won’t push you beyond your
comfort zone. It’s safe.
We know the real God isn’t like
that, but we have some urge in our hearts to control God, to be in charge. We value control. God calls us to give that up, but it’s
hard.
So this passage from Exodus shows
us what we value. What does God value?
It’s amazing that in Mark, we learn
about what Jesus does the night before he is wrongly put to death. Here is Jesus, the most innocent and perfect
man that ever lived, and the authorities of the church(!!!!) are trying to have
him put to death for challenging their own comfort levels. It’s a tragic story, but it reveals to us the
depths of God’s love, showing us how patient and kind he really is.
And here, the night before he is
wrongly put to death, Jesus isn’t out appealing his sentence, trying to
distance himself from his fate, doing anything to avoid death. No, he shows that he values community above
all else by sitting down with his friends at a dinner, gathering them around the
table, and breaking bread together.
Jesus shows that in his last moments as a free man before his wrongful
death, he wants to build community through sharing a meal together. He wants to bring people together and let
them be transformed by being in a community centered around the living
God. He wants them to be together, not
isolated and going through life alone, unprepared for whatever storms may
come. Jesus knows that there is much
coming that the disciples cannot predict or understand, and he wants them to
face these challenges together, rather than as disparate souls, alone against
the world.
So God values building
Christ-centered community. God values
people coming together to share resources, to break bread together. God values this, and so should we.
So my question this morning, is how
are you building community? How does
this value live itself out in your life?
Are you reaching out to those around you? It’s so easy to isolate ourselves – we have
so much to do, and we’re often exhausted, and it’s easier to just get home,
close the doors and relax.
But that’s not our call. Our call is to reach out to those around us,
even those who might betray and hurt us, and be in community with them, so that
we might all be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit. That is what God values.
And so should we.
Let us pray
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