Sermon for Sunday July 12, 2009

Title: Living in the Promise of God: Celebration and Sacrifice

Texts: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6:14-29

Grace, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

“I’m justified by grace, I can do anything I want.”

I would love to attribute those words to anyone else but myself, yet I can’t. They were spoken by me as a joke, a proclamation to a friend of mine who’d asked if I could drink the way that I did and still be a Christian.

Now granted, that was almost ten years ago, though the memory is as fresh in my mind – if not more clear – than the recollection of what I had for breakfast yesterday morning. Like a lot of young people of my generation, alcohol played a huge role in my life. Every weekend, and often on more nights of the week than not, I stood at a party with a drink in my hand. I worked in a bar, as a nightclub bouncer, largely because I needed the job but also because I reasoned, if I’m here anyways I may as well get paid for it.

But after a few years of that lifestyle I had to face some realities: I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t growing in any way that was actually meaningful to me. And I will, also, point out at this point that I was already a pastoral candidate – though maybe not the best one.

A summer spent managing the bar at my hometown golf course nailed that point home to me in some fairly definite ways: the same groups of friends a decade older than me from the same high school, coming to the bar to drink, to fool themselves into thinking they were having a good time, then to fight it out as alcohol wore down their inhibitions and what was left of their good sense.

Yet they insisted they were having fun. In the midst of their DUI tickets, fights, divorces, and family problems they still insisted they were having fun.

Then one Sunday someone I love very much surprised me with her own baptism. As I watched as she made those promises to God and was welcomed to new life, I knew that there was hope for that same new creation in me, too.

I could go from sacrifice to celebration, and then from celebration to sacrifice.

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There are so many different ways that we can name and claim our faith as Christians, but there’s a dichotomy of living that stands out for me: that as Christians, living in the covenant of God – the promise that God is always with us, will never forsake us -- we are called to live lives that are marked by both celebration, and sacrifice.

Or, as a theologian once said: salvation is free. Discipleship costs.

In many places in the Bible the Lord speaks through the prophets to condemn the behavior of the people of Israel. They’re partiers, let’s face it. If there’s a celebration to be had, a fatted calf to kill, they’ll be there. Throw in some dancing girls and abundant wine, and they’re there like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. They’re so anxious to party that they’d desecrate the altar of the temple if it meant they could get a rousing cheer.

But what are they celebrating? What do we celebrate all the time? The Calgary Stampede runs concurrently to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. What do the events have in common? Well, they both celebrate the heritage of their cities. They both allow normally sane people to act like hooligans. One difference, though: in Spain, people get tossed around by the animals; here at the Stampede the animals get tossed around by the people. My two-year-old tried to bulldog a toy Tyrannosaurus the other day; I think moving may, in fact, be for the best.

I think that the truth may be that, if people are celebrating for the sake of being stupid, then they are not celebrating at all. In fact, they’re sacrificing their souls for the sake of a good time. But the gift of salvation, though – that’s worth celebrating.

King David danced before the Ark of the Lord, in a celebration of life. Having the Ark meant that God was bringing the blessings of His presence to David and his kingdom, and that was worth celebrating. The presence of God’s redeeming and enlivening grace in our midst is a treasure worth dancing for.

But Saul’s daughter – and, I might add, David’s wife – Michal isn’t so pleased. In fact, as Samuel records, “…she despised [David] in her heart,” for his unseeming display of joy. In Michal’s book – and her father’s example – kings just don’t dance.

It reminds me of some people Diana and I visited back when we were just dating. They were Lutheran, and their congregation had just recently built a beautiful new building. This was a rural church, mind you – and as we toured through it our friends made a point of telling us just how much they needed a ‘bright, young’ pastor to ‘bring the young people in.’ And I’ve got to admit, that kind of emphasis was flattering to me.

But as we followed them to another part of the building with basketball hoops and big-screen TVs my lovely wife blurted out, “You could even hold dances in here!” At that, our Norwegian pietist lady host turned on her heel and up came (what has become known as) the Finger of Lutheran Reproach: No! You don’t dance in church!

Like Michal, she was more concerned with staid, orderly worship – and the pietist theology of renunciation – than with actually celebrating the grace of God in her midst. Her, and probably about a hundred thousand other Lutherans in Canada.

Church becomes synonymous with sacrifice; lists of ‘don’ts,’ both real and imaginary, loom larger in our minds than the celebration of our salvation. But maybe – I think – that’s part of the problem. We want our lives outside of church to be as free and easy as ever, but want to hear the message in church that if we DO something right, then we can slip those other behaviors right past God.

It’s time to change that; to go from sacrifice to celebration. To reclaim the proper order: that first we are called to celebrate the salvation of sinners; then turn our lives to the task of discipleship, of following Christ.

But even as our lives can turn from those of sacrifice to those of celebration, as Christians we are reminded again: salvation is free, but discipleship (following Jesus) costs. Our lives will again lead to sacrifice, just as Christ’s celebration in our midst led to the cross at Calvary. But then we know that our lives are then a different kind of sacrifice, one that in many ways celebrates the presence of God in our lives.

The account of the death of John the Baptizer in Mark’s gospel casts an ominous shadow on Jesus’ future, even as it does on our own. John spoke out against Herod Antipas for marrying his brother Philip’s wife (when Philip wasn’t dead). John called for Herod to repent, for which Herod had John put in prison.

But like many who hear but don’t understand the deep-rooted relationship believers have with God, Herod didn’t know what to do with John. He was “greatly perplexed…yet heard him gladly.” Herod didn’t agree with what John was saying, but he could not deny the truth – or at least the point – that John spoke. He knew that John was a righteous and holy man, and protected him. But those people who want to stifle the word of God will often find their way. Herod’s wife did, through the actions of her daughter Salome, and John paid the price for his witness and honesty.

But certainly, and especially in our North American context, the sacrifices of our Christian witness very rarely ends in death. But maybe for us and our opulent society, death seems an easier price to pay than living differently – more compassionately, with greater concern for the people among whom Jesus walked: the poor, the suffering, and the destitute. If we are John to another’s Herod – then we too, will be imprisoned, scorned, and ridiculed.

To accept the shame and scorn of our peers as we live our lives as Christians in the promise of God, daring to risk all that we have to preach the good news. And itit will cost us, because the message of Christ is foolishness to those who would rather die than have eternal life. And it’s easy, I would argue, to risk our lives; it’s far, far harder to stand up to our friends, our families, and explain why our justification has led us to a life of self-giving love.

I was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee with a friend when his wife came home. She came into the kitchen, barely glanced at me, and addressed her husband: I told our friends that we’d meet them for drinks tonight. My friend replied, “honey, you know that I have church council tonight, and I can’t miss that.”

And you spend too much time at that stupid church. Why don’t you just live a little, sometimes?

My friend left the church eventually, like many choosing to make his own hodgepodge of beliefs that caused as little friction in his relationships and friendships as possible.

Discipleship costs – sometimes dearly, sometimes more than we are willing to pay.

But we are called to be people of celebration and sacrifice; to dance before the presence of God and to accept the consequences of our commitment to God in ways that may cost us dearly.

Just like at my wife’s baptism I realized that at even I had been born anew, a celebration and sacrifice in the name of Jesus Christ, so have you. We dance with David before the presence of God almighty, and we die with Christ, so that we may have eternal life.

Living in the promise of God is living as justified sinners – lives of celebration and sacrifice, witnesses to the world of Christ’s own redeeming sacrifice and the celebration of the resurrection that makes all things – even those we thought dead – alive again in Christ.

May this be so among us, amen.