Sunday, July 28, 2024

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 136:1-9
Ephesians 3:14-21
Mark 6:45-56

Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good; for his loving kindness endures forever.

I have been reading a pile of commentaries on the book of Proverbs as I have been preparing a new study for our adult Sunday school class that will begin in January. I sat with a pile last night, looking at the books I still need to read, wondering if I am planning unnecessary work. I’ve had the question during the preparation for other studies. Proverbs is a little different; it has been difficult to decide how to approach a book that is so unique and full of wisdom. Though the authors have approached the book in different ways, they all have similar thoughts and come to similar conclusions. Overall, they have more in common than not. I confess that I am a little overwhelmed as I try to decide how we will deal with such a treasure chest of wisdom, but I am glad I am reading so many commentaries; the repetition has helped build my appreciation for this incredible book.

Repetition helps us to learn. Children learn math through flash cards. They learn how to spell by practicing the words over and over again. They learn the dates and places of history by repeating them over and over again. Bible memorization programs use repetition to remember the verses. They recommend writing the text on a note card to carry in your pocket to take out and read while you are waiting in line. They suggest putting a sticky note on your bathroom mirror and on the front of the refrigerator. You learn that text because you read and reread it each time you look in the mirror or open the refrigerator. Eventually that text is written on your heart, not by osmosis, but by repeating it in your mind and mouth.

God wants us to learn something very important in today’s Psalm. The psalmist repeats over and over again “for his loving kindness endures forever.” God’s lovingkindness endures forever. This is a message we need to know. It needs to be written on our hearts. So, as we read this psalm, we hear it over and over again. It makes sense in today’s passage that talks about God’s goodness, His good works, the goodness of the world He has created. He did all this because His loving kindness endures forever. He is God of gods and Lord of lords because His loving kindness endures forever.

Psalm 136 is called “The Great Hallel.” Hallel is related to the word hallelujah, so this is a psalm of thanksgiving and eternal (forever) praise. It is a psalm that tells the redemptive history of Israel. Martin Luther says that we should sing and preach of God and His wonderful works. He is gracious and merciful. This psalm is nothing but grace, not human works or doctrines which are not deserving of this worship.

This psalm reminds us (repeatedly!) of God’s covenant loyalty. God is committed to honoring His covenant with His people. All we have and all we do is centered on the endless love of God. God was and is forever reliable, kind, trustworthy, faithful and loving to His people. The psalm moves from creation in our verses in this week’s lectionary to the redemption of God’s people. The psalm recounts the creation and acts in history through which God demonstrated His enduring love and covenant loyalty. There is an order to world God created. It is not random.

There is a word in this passage that is very hard to translate into English, so there is a long list of similar though different words that are used. The Hebrew word is “chesed” which is often translated “steadfast love” or “lovingkindness” or “mercy”. The word can also mean love, kindness, unfailing love, great love, loving, kindnesses, unfailing kindness, acts of devotion, devotion, favor, approval, devout, faithful, faithfully, glory, good favor, grace, kind, kindly, loyal, merciful, well. These all give us a sense of the word, but it leaves out something important. It is a word that is best kept in its Hebrew form, like we do with the word “Amen.” It is actually refers to a loving loyalty based on a covenantal relationship. God’s chesed comes to us because He has established a bond between Himself and His people. When we share that chesed with others, we do so because we are in a relationship with them, but even more so because we are in a relationship with Him.

God’s chesed endures forever. There is no word in the Hebrew for the word “endures”; the word is added to the text in English so that we will understand that this is about the ongoingness of God’s lovingkindness. The Hebrew is better translated “never fails.” A bible scholar has retranslated the passage, “Because forever is His loyalty.” God will do what He has said He will do because He has established us as His people in a covenantal relationship. This is about God’s faithfulness to His promises. He is the God of gods, the Lord of lords. He has done good things for His people. He created the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon. He kept His promise to Abraham by saving His people from Egypt. He delivered them into the Promised Land, just as He promised. He remembers His people, saves us from our adversaries, and provides for us. He is good and He deserves our thanks and praise. This is a matter of trust; we can trust God because forever is His loyalty. God’s hesed endures forever.

Chesed is a word that is filled with promise. God promised to be faithful to the covenants He made with His people forever, even while it is impossible for us to be faithful to Him.

Our psalm text for today is only the first nine verses, and it makes less sense when you look at the rest of the Psalm. The psalmist goes on to talk about smiting the first born of the Egyptians, and then smiting and slewing kings. He is telling the story of how God moved Israel’s enemies and oppressors out of the way so that He could lead His people to the Promised Land, but smiting and slewing doesn’t sound very loving and kind.

The Psalm tells the story of God and His people, but ultimately it is about God’s faithfulness. My studies of the book of Proverbs is helping me decide how we will study it. Will we take it verse by verse? Will we divide it by themes? When we look at the book as a whole, we discover that God’s wisdom relates not only to the heavenly things, but to our relationships, which all begin with Him. Psalm 136 teaches us that God’s enduring covenantal love for His people is the foundation of everything in our lives.

It is good that we spend time studying the scriptures, because the more we know, the more it is written on our hearts, the more it helps us through times of difficulty. As we keep God’s Word close, we keep God close, and we walk more firmly in His ways. It isn’t always easy. Some of the stories of God are hard to believe. They are outside our human experience. They are impossible scientifically. We know we can’t make a few loaves of bread and a few fish feed thousands of people like Jesus did in last week’s gospel lesson; if we could, there wouldn’t be people starving in our neighborhoods.

One of the most surprising lines of scripture is found in today’s Gospel passage. Mark tells us “their hearts were hardened.” How could they have lived and worked and walked with Jesus for so long, about two years at this point, and not believe Jesus could do miraculous things? The passage ties their hard hearts with their misunderstanding about the feeding of the five thousand. What did they believe happened on that hillside that day? Did they, like so many in today’s world, simply downplay the miracle because they could not explain it?

The conclusion from last week’s text in my pastor’s sermon is that God uses our hands to do His work, but we can take that to an extreme, can’t we. There are some, even in the Church, who have suggested that Jesus did not really feed more than five thousand people with just five loaves and two fish. They insist that others had food available on that hillside that day, like a modern potluck meal that miraculously feeds everyone. In this way all were fed. They suggest that there is no reason to make this story supernatural in character. Perhaps the disciples had a similar mindset. This theory doesn’t explain how they ended up with twelve full baskets of leftovers, though.

This miracle is so beyond our natural experience that it isn’t surprising that we moderns want to diminish the miraculous aspect because we have a more thorough understanding of science and the world. Intellectually we know that five loaves and two fish cannot feed more than five thousand people. We also know that a church potluck dinner can be miraculous in the way a crowd is left stuffed and satisfied because everyone contributes to the meal, so why not believe this could explain the story?

Did the disciples believe? The miraculous things that Jesus was doing would be hard for anyone to believe, even those who saw it with their own eyes! We might have science, but they knew that a loaf of bread only went so far. Their response to other miracles was just as incredulous. They were frightened when He walked on water. They were amazed when the winds died down after He got into the boat. They had a hard time believing the things they were experiencing with Jesus. Mark tells us that they marveled because didn’t understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

We think of hard hearts in terms of rejection, not unbelief. Take, for example, the story of Pharaoh. His heart was hardened against the God of Moses. He didn’t believe, and his hard heart caused him to harm God’s people. How could the disciples have hard hearts and still follow Jesus? They didn’t reject Him; they simply did not know what to believe. We have similarly hard hearts when it comes to God’s miraculous work in our lives, often finding some physical, earthly explanation for the miraculous rather than believing that God could and would do such a thing. We are more similar to those who opposed Jesus than we would like to admit because we argue about Jesus’ work because it does not fit our understanding of the world.

God’s chesed is exhibited in the relationship between Jesus and His disciples. They had hard hearts, just like the Pharisees, but that didn’t stop Jesus from showing them who He is. He didn’t abandon them in their misunderstanding. He continued to pull them in His wake, knowing that they would one day have the Holy Spirit to make it all clear. He continued to let them witness His power as He healed the sick.

When the boat arrived on the other shore, people immediately recognized Him and ran to get the sick. People were drawn to Him wherever He went, laying their sick in His path so that they would be healed. Many even believed that all they needed was to touch the edge of His cloak and they begged Him to let them do so. “And as many as touched him were made well.” They seemed to believe in Jesus more than Jesus’ disciples. What is amazing is that the disciples had experienced the same power as they healed and cast out demons around the countryside!

We see human unfaithfulness in today’s Gospel lesson. The disciples were excited but exhausted by their experience, as we saw in last week’s lesson. They returned to Jesus with stories about all the wonderful things they did. Jesus tried to find a place for them to rest, but the crowds followed them. They weren’t just attracted to Jesus anymore; now they knew the disciples had power, too. Jesus met those crowds with compassion and teaching, and then miraculously fed them. How could there ever be any doubt in the hearts of the disciples?

Thankfully, God does not cast us away. Jesus continued to walk with the disciples at His side, loving them even though they did not really know Him. That lovingkindness, that chesed, is not conditional. There is nothing we can do to earn it or expect it from God. It is given freely because God made a covenant with us. He loves us and we are bound to Him because of that covenant, not because we have done anything to deserve it. He offers Himself for us to know, to love, to trust and we are called as His people to respond to His chesed with joy and praise.

We need the encouragement of this text. We are no different than human beings have been since the beginning of time. We need to hear repeatedly that God loves us. He loves us from the Garden of Eden to the end of the world. Unfortunately, it did not take very long for Adam and Eve to mess things up in this beautiful world that God created; they failed to trust in the Word of the Lord, and were cast out of the garden. They lived long lives, tilling the soil and working hard. They were obedient to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, but the sons they bore lived at odds with one another, until Cain murdered Abel. He became a restless wanderer, sent away from the presence of God for the evil he did to his brother.

Adam and Eve had more children, but as time passed the generations of men became more and more wicked in the sight of God. Things became so nasty that God regretted creating mankind and He decided to destroy the world. However, there was one who found favor in the eyes of God. Noah was a righteous man, a man who lived in a right relationship with God the Creator. God told Noah to build a large boat, an ark, and to fill the ark with every kind of animal. God was planning to send a great flood to cover the entire earth, to destroy that which had become so evil and destructive. God loved humankind despite our inability to live according to His Word; He showed the grace to spare Noah and His family so that humankind could continue on the earth when the floodwaters dried.

Noah obeyed God’s command, despite the absurdity of the request. After all, how can one man possibly build an ark large enough to hold so many for so long? We visited the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky this summer. They built the ark as best they could according to the instructions found in the Bible. It is HUGE! They explained at the very beginning that they took “arktistic license” because some of the instructions and contents had to be interpreted according to modern understanding. What impressed me most as I marveled at the size and workmanship was the unbelievable reality that eight people built the ark. The upright beams that held up the decks were several stories tall and too large to wrap your arms around. How could eight people fell, move, and install such large pieces of wood? God certainly helped, but it still seems impossible.

We can laugh about the absurdity of it when we listen to Bill Cosby’s skit about Noah. “Whoompa, whoompa, whoompa, whoompa. God: ‘Noah!’ Noah: ‘Somebody call?’ Whoompa, whoompa, whoompa. God: ‘Noah!’ Noah: ‘Who is that?’ God: ‘It’s the Lord, Noah.’ Noah: ‘Right! Where are you? What you want? I’ve been good.’ God: ‘I want you to build an Ark.’ Noah: ‘Right! Whats an Ark?’ God: ‘Get some wood build it 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits.’ Noah: ‘Right! What’s a cubit?’ God: ‘Let’s see a cubit... I used to know what a cubit was. Well don’t worry about that Noah. When you get that done go out into the world and collect all of the animals in the world by twos, male and female, and put them into the ark.’ Noah: ‘Right! Who is this really? What’s going on? How come you want me to do all these weird things?’ God: ‘I’m going to destroy the world.’ Noah: ‘Right! Am I on Candid Camera?’”

In the skit, Bill Cosby talks about the response of those in his neighborhood. What will they think? The Bible tells us that men ridiculed Noah for such a silly project. God gave Noah the strength to persevere and when the ark was finished, God helped Noah to fill it with the good things of His creation. When the time was right, God closed the doors of the ark so that Noah and his family would stay dry and safe.

Imagine what it would have been like for both the eight people on the ark as well as those who were drowning outside. After all, those screaming men and women were neighbors, friends and even family. Even though they were wicked, it must have been quite difficult to let them die without trying to help in some way. But God knew that the only way to save mankind was to begin anew. It rained for forty days and forty nights until even the highest mountains were covered with water. The waters stayed for one hundred and fifty days.

God remembered Noah and his family. He stopped the rain and blew across the waters. Noah sent a raven and a dove to see if the waters had receded. The raven flew back and forth until the water dried, but the dove returned. A second time Noah sent the dove it returned with an olive leaf. The third time the dove did not return. The ark came to rest on dry ground and God ordered Noah and his family to leave the ark to reestablish the earth. The animals were freed, and Noah built an altar of thanksgiving to God for His mercy. Then God promised to never destroy the earth by water again. Then God established a new covenant with His people. This might seem like a horrific story to those who don’t believe. How could God destroy the world and all those people? But it was out of His grace that He saved Noah and reestablished the earth. He loved us so much that He remained faithful to His promises. It was chesed that saved Noah, Israel, and us today.

We need to hear repeatedly that God loves us. He has loved us from the Garden of Eden until the end of the world. Unfortunately, it did not take very long for us to mess things up. The entire Bible is filled with the stories of how God’s people were unfaithful to Him. And though God’s people repeatedly returned to their wicked ways, generation after generation, God remained faithful to His covenant promises. We deserve nothing but His wrath, yet as we wait patiently for the final fulfillment of all God’s promises at the end of days because we know that God is loyal to us now and forever.

In today’s Epistle lesson, Paul responded to the incredible acts of God in his life, in the lives of God’s people, and in the Church. God provided salvation to individuals, reconciliation between people, and the unity of those who believe by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul wrote that because of all the great things God has done, he bows his knees to the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” God is the Father of all fathers. This is not just about the male head of a household; it is about all those who have power and authority over others. A king or a president is like the father of a nation. A CEO is like the father of a company. A priest is like the father of a congregation. The person who is in charge is not the ultimate authority, however. He (or she as might be the case) receives power and authority from the Father of all fathers.

The passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a prayer for God’s people, that those who bear His name will experience the love of God fully and completely as He transforms our lives and makes us whole. Paul is praying for Christ to continue the work begun in and through the church in Ephesus. In this passage, the word for love is the Greek word “agape,” which is the love of God found in and through Jesus Christ. It is a deep, permanent love. Though agape is not exactly the same as chesed, it is a word that calls us to more than trust in God. It calls us to a self-sacrificing love of God and neighbor. It calls us to an active life of trusting our Father Yahweh, the God of gods, Lord of lords, Father of all fathers. Paul is reminding every Christian that God’s grace is bigger than anything we can even imagine, a love so permanent that we should praise God forever.

We are comforted by the story of the disciples because we see that God’s loyal love is forever even when we our hearts are hardened by our inability to believe. We see the crowds flocking to Jesus, seeking His grace, but we are reminded that they did not all continue to walk with Him to the cross. The disciples on that boat saw Jesus do the impossible, and they struggled with knowing Jesus as He is. In the end, though, those disciples trusted Him all the way to and beyond the cross. The disciples, that rag-tag bunch of misunderstanding misfits, may have had hard hearts in this story, but they stayed the course and followed Jesus anyway. They trusted Him long enough to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit so that they might know Jesus and experience His chesed in a very real way.

Let us pray that we will stay on that same course, experiencing His grace daily and trusting that He will always be lovingly loyal, providing us with all we need to walk with Him daily. He is able to do more than we can ever imagine, and despite our hard hearts He embraces us with His chesed so that we will always sing His praise with thanksgiving and share his story over and over again for every generation from now until the end of time. Then we will all join together with the hosts of heaven to glorify Him forever and ever. Amen.