How did we get here?
You ever drive home late at night, not drunk, maybe just a little tired, and yet you’ve left work or your friend’s house or wherever and then you’re home? You don’t remember what was on the radio. You don’t remember the red lights or the green lights. The time in between seems to not exist, and you just somehow made it home safe?
Those are strange moments. It seems we go on auto-pilot and the brain and body just do their thing without taking much notice. It happens all the time—even over long periods. Sometimes months pass on a project and the time between the stressful project proposal and the day when you’re breaking ground is just a blur. Or it’s your last first day of school and suddenly you’re graduating—you know you’re smarter, but when did that happen? Or maybe your nieces were one and now they’re in grade one. Things happened in between, you even have great memories of it, but there’s no way that 5 years has passed. How did we get here?
I get this sense when we take our reading from Isaiah in the big picture of Scripture. God had made some promises to Abraham, great promises about a nation of countless descendants living in a promised paradise. God confirmed those promises on Sinai in awesome power after saving these very people from slavery. And now God is accusing them of telling Him to bugger off. The people who once agreed to keep His commandments that they may have a long life in the promised land now say “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you, God. I don’t need you” How did we get there to here, from a people who were reliant on Him and were trusting in His promises to a people who despise Him and call themselves too good for this God in the sky?
This is a people who have not paid attention. A people who have forgotten. Those who were once called to be God’s people believe they are a people for themselves, who may do whatever makes them happy. This is a people who sinned and were enticed by sin and forgot that sin was so bad because it felt so good.
You see, God knew that His people were going to sin—they were bound to after Adam and Eve disobeyed and gave their children this tendency towards doing whatever they wanted. But God, despite their sin and the sin of all the children, made promises, promises to restore and forgive and to sustain and to love. He made a promise to destroy sin and its bringer—the devil—and He made a way for the sin to be dealt with until that glorious day. The sacrificial system, where animals were brought to the temple to die in the place of sinners, was to remind them of the seriousness of their wrongdoings and of their sinful state, and to deal with their sin as it pointed to the final sacrifice of Christ.
But the people who have told God to keep to Himself have forgotten the promises He made, the promises to deal with the seriousness of their sin. They took His mercy, His slowness to anger to mean approval—or at least ignorance—from God. They ignored the prophets because life was going just fine without God’s ways. They’ve forgotten the reality of their sin. And in their poor memory, that have forsaken any need for a God who would try to give them anything less than immediate gratification, whatever I want, whenever I want it.
It doesn’t take much to go from being faithful to God, attempting to live righteously and coming in repentance when that doesn’t work out, trusting that His forgiveness is sure and His promises endure, to forgetting all He has done and wants to do for them. From worshipping YHWH at the temple to worshipping the occult among the tombs and their carvings on mountains. They have wandered so far that they don’t even try to act like God’s people anymore.
They end up as outsiders, just as the guy in today’s Gospel is an outsider. He isn’t a Jew. The promises made to Abraham are not for directly for Him. And even among his own people, he is an outcast and a burden, possessed and dangerous. And then today happens. Today, God, in Christ, says Here am I to the outsiders, to those who did not seek Him.
Dead and dying is this man. He’s already living among the tombs, with demons possessing him, an outcast of society. Yet God reaches out His hand to this seemingly God-forsaken man to offer him salvation.
I’m sure, in many ways, as he sits at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in His right mind, he asks “How did I get here? I didn’t do anything to free myself, I don’t even really recall what happened because I was possessed. I’m not sure how I got here, but I don’t really want to leave.”
You and I are the same. We ask—or at least we ought to ask—how did we get here? Most of us were baptized as babies so literally we don’t remember how we made it to this place and this time in our faith. But we were in the same state as this man—dead and dying to our sin, naked in our shame and out of our right minds, unable to know God and His love. Though we may not have been possessed by a legion of demons, innumerable sins controlled us and directed us and we could just as easily free ourselves from them as this man could—we couldn’t. And yet Jesus said to us, through His Word, Here I am! Listen to me and receive salvation.
And just like that, you were alive. Yes, sin still taunts you and haunts you, but though it can accuse you its power is harmless. We have found ourselves among God’s people, heirs to God’s promises to Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and all of the Israelites. You are now in. You have received His name
And all this happened because God had mercy on His people. All the Israelites were sinful but not all had forgotten their faith in Him. Some still trusted in the coming saviour, the blessing in the cluster, as Isaiah calls it. God knew there was one good grape on the tree that could make up for the rest, even redeem the rest of the grapes.
And some of God’s people had faith in the blessing, in the fulfilment of God’s promises that would come—of Christ’s eventual appearance.
And then Christ came to prove God faithful. He endured where all His people had faltered. He endured to make true the hope that His people had been waiting on. He endured even the death and condemnation for those faithless idolaters of Isaiah’s day, who worshipped in the tomb and booted God to the curb. He died for even us, who say the exact same thing. But do we provoke God to His face? Do we neglect Him and reject Him?
It might seem far-fetched to imagine us saying “we don’t need you” to God because we know that we did not earn salvation but that Christ came and found us and gave us His name. We know that He is Lord and that He has all grace and mercy for us.
And yet still, if you close your eyes and let life pass by, if you let your mind slip for a year or two, not even for that long, it could just as easily be us.
Because we are sinners, through and through even as forgiven children of God, and each time we sin, when we make ourselves gods to protect or to provide or to satisfy ourselves, we are saying a little whisper of “I don’t need you. I’ve got my own back.” When we worship our jobs or our toys, or our status, it can be obvious that this is what we’re saying to the true God, yet even when we do “little sins” we say it too. In our gossip and little lies and lust and spurts of rage and jealousy, we are saying that God is not a good enough God and we could do better.
And left unchecked, left as though they aren’t that important and are really inconsequential, these little sins grow when they are not repented of and aren’t taken seriously. They grow and they divide us. What was once a sin that God yearned to forgive can grow into that which separates us from the God who has given us His name and has poured out His grace and promises upon us. Left unchecked, these little sins can lead us to believe that God doesn’t really care about our sin because life hasn’t gotten worse because of my sin. And it’s not too many steps between saying “God doesn’t care about my sin” and “God doesn’t exist.”
This is why we come, week after week. Here we confess our sins—the ones we know and the ones we don’t know, the ones we feel and the ones we don’t really care about. We do this not because of some ancient ritual but because without it, we will forget, we will wander. And weekly we hear His Word read and preached so He may work on our hearts and lives and show us that all is not yet okay with us—but remember Christ, who has paid the heavy price for our sin. And then we receive of such a gift and sacrifice. Not a gentle reminder as if that’s all we need, but we are given the true body and blood of Christ, the sacrifice which paid for and cleansed the world’s sin, including yours. Such a high price is not paid for trivial whoopsies but for deadly sins. But the price was paid, and this is gift you receive.
And so again, you are clothed in His righteousness and found in your right minds—in His mind. And we are all invited to sit at the feet of Jesus like the man who no longer was possessed, and we are sent to our homes and our friends to proclaim the works of God, the works of Jesus, to all around us, just as this nameless man was.
Brothers and sisters, receive and share, for in this way we do not forget the gravity of our sin and the awesome reality of His grace.
And then, one day, we’ll end up just after our reading in Isaiah, when God promises there will come a time when we’ll find ourselves in the New Jerusalem. In the end, we’ll look around and see heaven, where we can’t find death or sorrow, only life and feasting, and we’ll all ask “How did we get here?”
You won’t remember any great works that got you there, not even valiant attempts at pure greatness. Not even your commitment to the faith. You’ll only remember Christ.
Christ, the promise, who sustained a remnant of God’s people, Christ the blessing in the cluster of grapes for whom God did not destroy His sinful people. Christ, who cast out demons and sins alike of the outcasts and us outsiders—He brought us into this promised path. Christ who died on the cross to assure a place for all, even for those who ultimately won’t end up with Him eternally because they refused His grace. Christ, who comes to us, the blessing in the wine, His person incarnate for us, living, dying, and rising again for us, and today given and shed for you, His body and blood.
When you wonder today how you’ll last the trials of life, how you’ll endure where others have stumbled and failed, don’t look at your sin and your weaknesses—for even if you managed to conquer them, you still wouldn’t be strong enough to keep yourself in the faith and hold onto Christ.
Only look to Christ. He has brought you to this point of faith and life, and He has promised to carry you till the end, one day to get you there. He’s how we got here, today and always.
Amen.
You ever drive home late at night, not drunk, maybe just a little tired, and yet you’ve left work or your friend’s house or wherever and then you’re home? You don’t remember what was on the radio. You don’t remember the red lights or the green lights. The time in between seems to not exist, and you just somehow made it home safe?
Those are strange moments. It seems we go on auto-pilot and the brain and body just do their thing without taking much notice. It happens all the time—even over long periods. Sometimes months pass on a project and the time between the stressful project proposal and the day when you’re breaking ground is just a blur. Or it’s your last first day of school and suddenly you’re graduating—you know you’re smarter, but when did that happen? Or maybe your nieces were one and now they’re in grade one. Things happened in between, you even have great memories of it, but there’s no way that 5 years has passed. How did we get here?
I get this sense when we take our reading from Isaiah in the big picture of Scripture. God had made some promises to Abraham, great promises about a nation of countless descendants living in a promised paradise. God confirmed those promises on Sinai in awesome power after saving these very people from slavery. And now God is accusing them of telling Him to bugger off. The people who once agreed to keep His commandments that they may have a long life in the promised land now say “Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you, God. I don’t need you” How did we get there to here, from a people who were reliant on Him and were trusting in His promises to a people who despise Him and call themselves too good for this God in the sky?
This is a people who have not paid attention. A people who have forgotten. Those who were once called to be God’s people believe they are a people for themselves, who may do whatever makes them happy. This is a people who sinned and were enticed by sin and forgot that sin was so bad because it felt so good.
You see, God knew that His people were going to sin—they were bound to after Adam and Eve disobeyed and gave their children this tendency towards doing whatever they wanted. But God, despite their sin and the sin of all the children, made promises, promises to restore and forgive and to sustain and to love. He made a promise to destroy sin and its bringer—the devil—and He made a way for the sin to be dealt with until that glorious day. The sacrificial system, where animals were brought to the temple to die in the place of sinners, was to remind them of the seriousness of their wrongdoings and of their sinful state, and to deal with their sin as it pointed to the final sacrifice of Christ.
But the people who have told God to keep to Himself have forgotten the promises He made, the promises to deal with the seriousness of their sin. They took His mercy, His slowness to anger to mean approval—or at least ignorance—from God. They ignored the prophets because life was going just fine without God’s ways. They’ve forgotten the reality of their sin. And in their poor memory, that have forsaken any need for a God who would try to give them anything less than immediate gratification, whatever I want, whenever I want it.
It doesn’t take much to go from being faithful to God, attempting to live righteously and coming in repentance when that doesn’t work out, trusting that His forgiveness is sure and His promises endure, to forgetting all He has done and wants to do for them. From worshipping YHWH at the temple to worshipping the occult among the tombs and their carvings on mountains. They have wandered so far that they don’t even try to act like God’s people anymore.
They end up as outsiders, just as the guy in today’s Gospel is an outsider. He isn’t a Jew. The promises made to Abraham are not for directly for Him. And even among his own people, he is an outcast and a burden, possessed and dangerous. And then today happens. Today, God, in Christ, says Here am I to the outsiders, to those who did not seek Him.
Dead and dying is this man. He’s already living among the tombs, with demons possessing him, an outcast of society. Yet God reaches out His hand to this seemingly God-forsaken man to offer him salvation.
I’m sure, in many ways, as he sits at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in His right mind, he asks “How did I get here? I didn’t do anything to free myself, I don’t even really recall what happened because I was possessed. I’m not sure how I got here, but I don’t really want to leave.”
You and I are the same. We ask—or at least we ought to ask—how did we get here? Most of us were baptized as babies so literally we don’t remember how we made it to this place and this time in our faith. But we were in the same state as this man—dead and dying to our sin, naked in our shame and out of our right minds, unable to know God and His love. Though we may not have been possessed by a legion of demons, innumerable sins controlled us and directed us and we could just as easily free ourselves from them as this man could—we couldn’t. And yet Jesus said to us, through His Word, Here I am! Listen to me and receive salvation.
And just like that, you were alive. Yes, sin still taunts you and haunts you, but though it can accuse you its power is harmless. We have found ourselves among God’s people, heirs to God’s promises to Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and all of the Israelites. You are now in. You have received His name
And all this happened because God had mercy on His people. All the Israelites were sinful but not all had forgotten their faith in Him. Some still trusted in the coming saviour, the blessing in the cluster, as Isaiah calls it. God knew there was one good grape on the tree that could make up for the rest, even redeem the rest of the grapes.
And some of God’s people had faith in the blessing, in the fulfilment of God’s promises that would come—of Christ’s eventual appearance.
And then Christ came to prove God faithful. He endured where all His people had faltered. He endured to make true the hope that His people had been waiting on. He endured even the death and condemnation for those faithless idolaters of Isaiah’s day, who worshipped in the tomb and booted God to the curb. He died for even us, who say the exact same thing. But do we provoke God to His face? Do we neglect Him and reject Him?
It might seem far-fetched to imagine us saying “we don’t need you” to God because we know that we did not earn salvation but that Christ came and found us and gave us His name. We know that He is Lord and that He has all grace and mercy for us.
And yet still, if you close your eyes and let life pass by, if you let your mind slip for a year or two, not even for that long, it could just as easily be us.
Because we are sinners, through and through even as forgiven children of God, and each time we sin, when we make ourselves gods to protect or to provide or to satisfy ourselves, we are saying a little whisper of “I don’t need you. I’ve got my own back.” When we worship our jobs or our toys, or our status, it can be obvious that this is what we’re saying to the true God, yet even when we do “little sins” we say it too. In our gossip and little lies and lust and spurts of rage and jealousy, we are saying that God is not a good enough God and we could do better.
And left unchecked, left as though they aren’t that important and are really inconsequential, these little sins grow when they are not repented of and aren’t taken seriously. They grow and they divide us. What was once a sin that God yearned to forgive can grow into that which separates us from the God who has given us His name and has poured out His grace and promises upon us. Left unchecked, these little sins can lead us to believe that God doesn’t really care about our sin because life hasn’t gotten worse because of my sin. And it’s not too many steps between saying “God doesn’t care about my sin” and “God doesn’t exist.”
This is why we come, week after week. Here we confess our sins—the ones we know and the ones we don’t know, the ones we feel and the ones we don’t really care about. We do this not because of some ancient ritual but because without it, we will forget, we will wander. And weekly we hear His Word read and preached so He may work on our hearts and lives and show us that all is not yet okay with us—but remember Christ, who has paid the heavy price for our sin. And then we receive of such a gift and sacrifice. Not a gentle reminder as if that’s all we need, but we are given the true body and blood of Christ, the sacrifice which paid for and cleansed the world’s sin, including yours. Such a high price is not paid for trivial whoopsies but for deadly sins. But the price was paid, and this is gift you receive.
And so again, you are clothed in His righteousness and found in your right minds—in His mind. And we are all invited to sit at the feet of Jesus like the man who no longer was possessed, and we are sent to our homes and our friends to proclaim the works of God, the works of Jesus, to all around us, just as this nameless man was.
Brothers and sisters, receive and share, for in this way we do not forget the gravity of our sin and the awesome reality of His grace.
And then, one day, we’ll end up just after our reading in Isaiah, when God promises there will come a time when we’ll find ourselves in the New Jerusalem. In the end, we’ll look around and see heaven, where we can’t find death or sorrow, only life and feasting, and we’ll all ask “How did we get here?”
You won’t remember any great works that got you there, not even valiant attempts at pure greatness. Not even your commitment to the faith. You’ll only remember Christ.
Christ, the promise, who sustained a remnant of God’s people, Christ the blessing in the cluster of grapes for whom God did not destroy His sinful people. Christ, who cast out demons and sins alike of the outcasts and us outsiders—He brought us into this promised path. Christ who died on the cross to assure a place for all, even for those who ultimately won’t end up with Him eternally because they refused His grace. Christ, who comes to us, the blessing in the wine, His person incarnate for us, living, dying, and rising again for us, and today given and shed for you, His body and blood.
When you wonder today how you’ll last the trials of life, how you’ll endure where others have stumbled and failed, don’t look at your sin and your weaknesses—for even if you managed to conquer them, you still wouldn’t be strong enough to keep yourself in the faith and hold onto Christ.
Only look to Christ. He has brought you to this point of faith and life, and He has promised to carry you till the end, one day to get you there. He’s how we got here, today and always.
Amen.