The thing about our God is that He talks. He has a story to tell. Words for us to hear. And therein is the great weakness and the great strenght of the Christian faith. The Church has only the story of God to tell - and that's how God chooses to save and to sanctify our lives. If we hear it, if we listen and take it to heart, if we enter into the story and see ourselves in it, and realize that God is talking to us about what He has done for us and wants to give us, and about the blessed life that waits for us - a life which He planned for us to enjoy before the world began and for which He created us and for which He redeemed us, then the Word will show its strengh. It will bring forth faith and with faith, all the fruits of faith - the fruits of the Spirit.
But there's a weakness to the Word too. And that is that instead of letting God's story inhabit us and possess us, we can tune it out, and we can do so in a number of ways. First, it can be the old in one ear and out the other deal. You know, sitting and hearing without actually listening. Never really engaging with what God is saying. Husbands are experts at this - just ask my wife - "Uh, huh." Not good for a marriage, but deadly when it happens with what God is telling us.
Or it can be that we rejoice in the story of God when we're gathered here in this room on a bright and sunny kind of day, but in our lives when the storm clouds rise, and the thunder sounds, things begin to turn sour, then we let go the story and think it must not be true, or at least not true for us.
Or it can be that we rejoice in the story for a while, but we come foolishly to think that there's more to life than just listening to our God tell us stories and give us His promises, and so we begin to attend to other things - riches and pleasures - until the voice of God is just plumb drowned out of our lives. Instead of waiting patiently for the joys that never end, we like old Esau trade off our heavenly birth-right for a bowl of mere earthly pottage, passing pleasure.
Another thing about our God, though, is that not only is He a story-teller, a talker, a Word-master, but like us - if we have the courage to admit it - he likes to tell the same story over and over again. Oh, He always adds a new twist here or there to the story as it comes to us, but it is the same story that He tells from start to finish. It runs like this: There once was a God who loved. And being love, He couldn't keep His love contained - it overflowed, and so He made a world to share His love with. And in this world, He made one special kind of creature - a creature who could reflect and mirror His love and return that love to Him freely and joyfully. Only that special kind of creature, called humanity, chose in the freedom God had given, not to return the love. Instead of freely living in the life that pours ceaselessly from the loving heart of God, mankind chose in Adam and Eve a life of autonomy, a life of separation from God; they chose a life of death.
But this loving God was no quitter. He didn't believe in giving up so easily those that He created to share His love and to taste His life and rejoice in His presence forever. And so He sent prophets with words of warning and words of hope. Sometimes they were heeded, but most often people still chose to go their own way and do their own thing - and that choice continually brought heart-ache, grief and pain to the growing human family. Lies were spoken. Secrets betrayed. Goods stolen. Marriages broken. Disease spread, and death ruled over the whole race with an iron fist.
The prophets hinted at what would happen, but none in their wildest dreams grasped the full meaning of what the story-telling God was up to. He wasn't just writing the greatest story ever told. He entered into that story in a way that left the angels of heaven speechless and awe-struck. He became one of those creatures that He made. He took up His dewlling in the womb of a Virgin, and He Himself was born into this world where people continually bring hurt and sorrow on themselves and others by insisting on doing their own thing. He came to do His Father's own thing. He came to show, to be, to open up the way for human beings to see what Life really was meant for.
And it all came to a head when the One who had taken our flesh decided that it was time for Him to borrow our death. So in obedience to His Father, He goes to a cross. Trusting His Father's promise that this is how He would bring an end to the alienation of human beings from God, bring in a flood of forgiviness, and open up the way home, Jesus Christ carries His cross to Golgotha and on its hard wood, gives the gift of humanity back to the Father.
He enters into death and death freaks. Death cannot hold Him. The great church father Ephrem the Syrian says that when death swallowed down our Lord it swallowed a poison pill. Soon death itself was wretching, and it hurled not just Him out, but with Him all that death had swallowed.
The One who died, lives again! The One who came to share our humanity, born in our flesh and blood, lives and lives with a life that is forever in a body that death can never, ever touch again. And that life that is now in Him, is what He came to give to you. By the power of His Spirit, He pours that life into you with the water of Baptism. By the transforming power of His Spirit, He plants that life into you with His body and blood in the Eucharist. By the mighty working of that same Spirit, He seals His life in your ears with His words of absolution. Thus in every way, He reaches to you the life that was with the Father before the world began, which our parents lost in Eden, and which He came to restore to us.
Folks, telling that message, speaking that story, inviting others to hear it, listening to it ourselves again and again - it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. It's God's plan A, and He doesn't have a plan B. And that's why it is so important to let His words, the story of His overflowing love in His Son, find a home in us - it is the only way God has of saving us from the fearful fate of choosing to go it alone without Him in this world and so ending up without Him for eternity. God never tires of telling His story! The angels never tire of looking into it! Let us never tire of hearing it, speaking it, singing it, and celebrating it, until that joyful day when our Lord sees fit to bring us from this life into the Kingdom of His Father. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"
Amen.
