Living Faith: Heights Sermons

What does it mean that God has put eternity into the human mind? What this means is that God has placed the desire for wholeness in the human heart. A theological reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11.

All you have to do is hear and believe, and all the treasures of heaven will be open to you! A message about the good news of God’s grace.

The image of the potter's wheel is a classic of biblical storytelling. It appears again and again in the history of salvation. In one such story, the prophet Jeremiah went down to a potter’s house. There, he witnessed a master craftsman working at his wheel. But the vessel he was making was spoiled in his hands. But the potter, like any master craftsman, promises to remake what was spoiled. This is God's promise to us: even when we are broken or tainted, God promises to work with us and refashion us until we are remade in God's perfect image.

Where is home? The Apostle Paul would argue that our homeland is in heaven. In a manner of speaking, we live here, on earth, as resident aliens. When we were baptized, we were made citizens of the kingdom of heaven. A kingdom that is everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere because its people are dispersed throughout all the kingdoms of this world. It is nowhere because its values are not consistent with the values of the culture that surrounds it.

What does it mean that we can call God our Father? What it means is that we have access to God. This is a big deal because, by nature, we have no access to God. What Paul is saying in this passage is that the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ, and Christ carries us to God our Father. Since Christ is the Son of God by nature—the one who has direct access to his God and Father—we are made siblings of Christ by adoption.

A lot of people confuse morality with religion. The two are not synonymous. You can follow all the rules; you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and acquire status among your peers, but that doesn’t get you any closer to God. If you want to get closer to God, you have to let go. You have to relinquish your grip. And that takes a leap of faith.

It is easy to forget just how great Jesus’ anguish was in the last days of his life. The tendency for the church has always been to step too quickly from the cross to the resurrection, from Jesus’ humanity to his divinity. But if we make this leap too quickly, we fall victim to neglecting his humanity. And if we neglect Jesus’ humanity, we neglect our own salvation. On this Resurrection Sunday, I invite you to sit and dwell with the fullness of Jesus’ humanity.

What is God like? Religious people have been asking this question for millennia. As Presbyterians, we believe that unless God first speaks to us, we cannot know who God is. Our experiences of life, of humanity, of the world, are so out of sync with God that unless God reveals Godself to us, we are utterly blind to who God is. The Good News is that God has spoken. The first and last word out of God’s mouth is Jesus. Jesus is the very image of God. So if you want to know God, all you have to do is look at Jesus. He is God’s Word in picture form. And the picture he draws is one of compassion. God is compassion. Mercy is at the very root of who God is.

What is meant by the Eternity of God? Eternity, though it be not easy to understand, is highly practical. It is what the Emmaus Road Story is all about. Jesus meets his disciples on the way and fills their present with his presence. Eternity is the maximal presence of all time in the moment of Now. God makes all of Jesus' earthly life present on the road to Emmaus. Through a simple act of breaking bread, Jesus makes himself present to his disciples as a living reality.