UCC Church of Charlotte

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Tell Him I’m Busy!
Psalm 27
Luke 13:31-35

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
Who is in charge?
    
Pharaoh thought he was in charge when he directed the midwives to get
rid of the Hebrew babies.  But he wasn’t.
    
The people thought they were in charge when they got tired of waiting
for Moses to come off the mountain, and got scared of the wilderness
around them, and they poured all their jewelry into the cast and made
a calf out of the gold to worship.  But they weren’t.
    
Goliath thought he was in charge when he took the field, proudest of
the mighty warriors, squaring off against a pipsqueak little shepherd
boy.  But he wasn’t.
    
Nebuchadnezzar thought he was in charge when he put Daniel in the
Lion’s den, and when he put Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the
furnace, but he wasn’t.
    
Herod the Great, father of the Herod in today’s story, thought he was
in charge when he sent for all the babies of Bethlehem to be killed to
get rid of any threat to his power.  But he wasn’t.
    
Last week, we read about the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness.
Let me be in charge, the devil says, and I will give you what you
want.  Put yourself in charge, the devil says, and you will not go
hungry.  Let God know you are in charge, the devil says, and God will
come and do your bidding.
    
And in each temptation, Jesus says, “No, God is in charge.”
    
Last week, Satan.  This week, Herod.  Not much difference in the Gospels.
    
So Pharisees, who are privy to the rumors of those in power, but
sympathetic to Jesus, come running up.
“Hurry, get out of town.  Herod is coming for you!”
“Tell him I’m busy!”
Who else but Jesus tells the king to take a number?

“That old devil coming to get me?  Tell him he’ll have to wait his
turn, because I’m busy casting devils out of these folks, and healing
them up, and preaching good news to them.”

We can tell who is in charge by who can put whom on hold.

The psalm says:
    The LORD is my light and my salvation;
          whom shall I fear?
    The LORD is the stronghold of my life;
          of whom shall I be afraid?
    
For Jesus, these are not merely old lyrics.  This is the substance of
his courage, the foundation of faith, the means by which he says,
“Tell the one that the Roman Empire put in power over us, and all
those who wield power and authority over him, and all those he has
given positions of authority and power to, that no matter how much
power they wield, no matter how much authority they have, no matter
how much political or economic or military might they command, they
are not in charge.”
    
We who attend the word of God, we who hear the Gospel and seek to be
doers of the word and not simply hearers, find that this message is
often whispered, when all the other voices of power and authority
shout.  These words can be hard to hear when the television ads are
trying to sell us the latest in home security and the radio is
reminding us we are on orange alert and our calendars are getting more
full and our bank accounts are going the other way.
    
These words can easily be lost in our belief that we are not worthy of
such grace as forgiveness, much less such fearlessness as what Jesus
showed.
    
They can so easily be forgotten.  We may hide from them in our
humiliation or ignore them in our arrogance.  But that doesn’t change
the truth, merely which side of it we are on.

As Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, he does so not because Jerusalem was
the enemy.  He weeps because the people of God had forgotten that God
was in charge.  And maybe we can be a little forgiving, for Rome was
in charge over them now.  But they had forgotten when the Greeks were
in charge before them, and when the Persians were before them, and
when the Babylonians were before them, and the Assyrians before them.

And what led to these Empires ruling over Jerusalem?  The prophets
tell us that when Israel ruled itself, it forgot who was in charge.
The leaders and the people looked to their own good, their own
comfort, not the call to tend to the neighbor and the neighborhood
that the Torah commanded.  They followed too much the ways of the
kingdoms around them, not looking to the justice for the poor, the
widow and the orphan that God commanded.

They came under the power of other nations because they made of
themselves a nation like all the rest, trusting in the powers of men
and of arms rather than the covenant of God.

The prophets did not simply speak judgment; they spoke reminders.

    The LORD is my light and my salvation;
          whom shall I fear?
    The LORD is the stronghold of my life;
          of whom shall I be afraid?
    
If we are going to grow our faith, we need to start where we are.
Maybe we don’t have any mountain movers here this morning.  Maybe it
took a lot of prayer to get us out of bed this morning.
    
Maybe we aren’t ready, like the gentleman in the famous picture, to
stand before a column of Chinese tanks coming to Tiananmen Square and
just stand there.  Maybe we are at the level of sitting with someone
who lost a loved one.  Or calling up someone we haven’t seen in a
while.
    
Maybe we aren’t ready to take on Herod and his minions who proclaim
that compassion makes for a bad business model.  Maybe we are just at
the point of reaching out to our neighbor in quiet and simple ways.
    
We start where we are.  And we remember who is in charge.
    
And when the devil comes knocking at the door, tempting us back to
selfishness or forgetfulness or business as usual, we know how to
answer.
    
“Hey Jesus, you mind getting that?”
    
Because we will be a little too busy remembering the words of the psalm:

    I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD
          in the land of the living!
    Wait for the LORD;
          be strong, and let your heart take courage;
              yea, wait for the LORD!

Remembering who is in charge, we can do all that we are called to do,
and leave behind all we are called to leave behind.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.