Historic First Lutheran Church of Pasadena

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Have no doubt about it. Modern society impacts our faith in a negative way.

The overall theme of today’s entire worship service – and specifically our Scripture readings – is the faithfulness of God in keeping His promises and truly being Who He says He is.

Our First Reading today [Genesis 9:8-17] tells us about God’s interaction with Noah and his family and all His creation that survived the great flood. After that momentous event – and we’re talking about forty days and forty nights of rain – God set a beautiful rainbow in the sky. He pointed Noah to that rainbow with the promise that whenever that rainbow would be seen by God and by mankind it would be a reminder that God made a promise under oath that He would never again destroy the entire world by flood. I know it must be tough for survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma and Ike to believe it, but God has stayed faithful to that promise to this very day. And if God hasn’t broken His promise during the past 3,000+ years, He’s not going to break it now!

Our Second Reading today [Ephesians 3:14-21] contains the words of God to us through St. Paul. Paul’s’ words – which are really God’s living and active Words to us – marvel at God’s great love for us. Paul marvels at how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for us – love that literally drove Him to Calvary’s Cross so that He could draw us unto Himself – love that gives to us a power incomparable to anything else in this entire world. Those promising words are as real for us today as they were to the Christians living in Ephesus 2,000 years ago. And if God hasn’t broken His promise during these past 2,000 years, He’s not going to break it now!

And our Gospel today comes immediately on the heels of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5,000. When you read our Gospel today, perhaps you’re tempted like I am to slap the disciples upside the head and scream as loud as you possibly can, “WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE???” The disciples had just witnessed Jesus take 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish and feed a crowd that most authorities actually set at more than 10,000 people. I don’t know what kind of meals you usually eat, but 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish don’t go too far around my house. Literally just hours after witnessing first hand that great miracle, the disciples climbed back into a boat for a new destination. As they’re on their way, the wind picked up and they grew panicked. They grew even more panicked when they saw someone walking on the water towards them. Living in the day they did, they were certain that approaching form must be a ghost. Then they heard that voice – His voice – Jesus’ voice – “Take courage! It is I! Don’t be afraid!” [Mark 6:50]. Saying those words and stepping softly into their boat, the winds immediately died down. Through His Words and through His actions, Jesus proved to His disciples that He was indeed the ultimate Master of wind and wave. When we read this account, we must remind ourselves that the same is still true about Jesus, Who is the same yesterday, today and forever [Hebrews 13:8]. The fact that God is in control of this entire world is a promise. And if God hasn’t broken His promise during these past 2,000 years, He’s not going to break it now!

But there is a problem. That problem is our modern society and how it has impacted our faith. While we may treasure those promises of God in our heart and make them the very core of our faith, sometimes it’s really tough to convince our minds to consistently believe those promises.

Our society has created a venue where someone can work faithfully for one company for his entire career, carefully squirreling away funds for retirement, trusting that company to provide for him in his retirement, only to not only find a pink slip in his paycheck, but also finding that his individual retirement account has been mishandled and is basically nonexistent. That’s painful! That breaks trust! And you want us to trust the promises of God?

Our society has created a venue where two people can state their love for each other privately or publicly, using those earnest expressions as the basis of building an entire conjoined life together, only to one day have one person walk away from the other and having someone else decide legally who gets what. That’s painful! That breaks trust! And you want us to trust the promises of God?

Our society has created a venue where election after election we the people communicate by simple democratic majority vote our desires to our leaders, only to seemingly consistently have our leaders instead do what they want, creating and playing by their own rules, including missing deadlines, raising taxes and cutting programs and doing all kinds of other things that violate the ground rules established by us the people. That’s painful! That breaks trust! And you want us to trust the promises of God?

Yes, I do. And, in the end, it doesn’t really matter what I want. It’s ultimately important that that’s what God wants. And not only does God want that, but He’s gone to great lengths to ensure that we are able to trust Him.

We each know to some degree by personal experience that the trappings of society are a crap shoot, but God is not. It’s what I call the broken chair philosophy. If you line up a million chairs and sit in each one and if you get to the end, go back and start over again, and repeat that process over and over again if you have to, sooner or later you will sit in a chair that will not support your weight and will collapse, breaking your trust in its assumed promise to keep you from falling onto the ground. And that is society. It’s as if this entire society were a hard-backed canvas against which someone threw a balloon filled with paint. That paint balloon makes a horrible mess where it initially impacts but it also sends its splatter in varying degrees across the entire canvas. Sooner or later we all experience to some degree the broken venue created by our society.

But neither of those illustrations can be used when the promises of God come up in conversation. The sentence that I have said at least three times already during this sermon is “if God hasn’t broken His promise during these past 2,000 or 3,000 years, He’s not going to break it now!” Unlike that broken chair philosophy, you will never, ever put God to the test and have Him fail you. It never has happened. It never will happen.

Perhaps that’s why Reverend Thomas Chisholm, despite many broken promises created by the venue of his society was able to boast about His God: “Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed Thy Hand hath provided. Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.”

Make that not only your song, but your faith.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Pastor Christopher Schaar
Historic First Lutheran Church of Pasadena