The Glad News (sermon for the second Sunday in Epiphany)

Adults, we know, don't like doing things at which they feel no competence. That's why every church has a well staffed fellowship and property ministry and has to pull teeth to get people for evangelism, education, membership, worship, stewardship and outreach. Sometimes if you change the name of stewardship to finance, you can get a big committee, but money and business management is actually a very small part of Christian stewardship.

But the skill we're talking about here, the skill of inviting, welcoming and assimilating new people to Christian faith, this skill, like all the others, can be learned, and it can be learned from a person who is present and ready to teach us, right here in our midst. His name is Jesus Christ, and he is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, and if we are humble and willing and go to him ready to be true and diligent disciples, he will train us.

The psalm this mornings is a good teaching example of this skill. The psalmist is declaring the glad news of his experience with God to what he calls the great congregation, a great gathering of people. He is, in other words, shouting from the rooftops, not about theology, not about miracles, not about moral codes, but about what God has done for him.

He talks about being mired in some kind of bog, and about how God lifted him out of that bog and set him on solid ground. He talks about God hearing when he, an ordinary person, cried out to God. What God has delivered is safety and security.

The rest of the psalm is proclamation and indeed about proclamation. The psalmist is saying that testimony is the chief thing we do in serving God. We might do all kinds of other good things in obedience to God, make all the requisite offerings of time and talent and money, but the main thing God wants of us is our testimony.

The psalmist is confident that because of his testimony others will come to believe in God. Indeed, the psalmist understands that this is the chief reason God is active in his life, to be glorified through the psalmist.

The psalmist makes an observation about testimony; he seems to suggest that some people hide what God has done for them, that they conceal it from others. He assures God he will not be like them. He will make God's love for him known. And he then asks God to continue to be a saving presence in his life.

Apparently this problem with giving testimony is not new. Even in ancient times, people were reticent about talking about what God had done for them.

I know for my part of it is that God has rescued me from my own sinfulness. In order to testify about what God has done, I have to reveal my sinfulness. The psalmist had to admit that he ended up in a miry bog somehow. Maybe we don't like people to know about the miry bogs in our lives. We don't like people to know that we really don't know how to live in the world, that we fall into traps and can't find our way out of them. I think I know why. I know why because I've been one of those people who very publicly and disastrously screwed up. Other people love to have a screw-up around. It gives them something to focus on outside of their own problems. For many people it becomes the way they avoid facing their own less obvious struggles.

But most of us find, when we finally stop caring about showing our warts, that we feel much better. We are oddly much happier if we open up about our blindness, our shortcomings, our defects. I think Mark Twain said that the truth is easier to remember.

But it's not only easier to remember, it also makes it easier to enter into relationship with God.

Jesus asks "What do you seek?" If we have nothing we need, no trouble to be saved from, no sin to be taken away, then our answer is "Nothing, thank you." But most of us have any number of answers to such a question. And the answer to those questions, the salvation we seek, the freedom we long for, is in going to see Jesus.

And in going to see Jesus, in encountering him in a direct way, so that we can each say "I have seen for myself," may be something that we have never done before. But what is life for if it isn't to take a new journey now and again?

It will require of us the courage to do something that doesn't come naturally, that we haven't already had a lifetime of practice to do. But that's the very essence of discipleship, working hard at doing something we haven't ever done before, practicing a way we don't already know, going down a path we've never trod before.

What we are seeking is our own glad news. At the end of the day, when you talk about our business, the business of ministering to the broken world, the business of bringing people back into relationship with God and one another, we are talking about telling people our own glad news. It can't be some canned theological statement, some set of evangelical buzz words. It has to be our glad news. It has to be about our particular miry bog, and about how our God plucked us from it. It has to be our own solid ground, the ground that God found for us. It has to be our particular glad news.

Don't be afraid to go where you haven't yet been.

Come and see.

Amen.