2625AFC061226 – See and Do ← :smile: PODCAST LINK
Exodus 19:5-6 A – 5 “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, 6 but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”
Psalm 100:3 –
3 Know that the Lord is God.
It is he that made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Romans 5:8 – 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Matthew 9:36 – 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Matthew 10:8 B (GNT) – You have received without paying, so give without being paid.
Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! Grace and Peace to each of you from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus the Christ, in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Things are changing, and I hope to have good news for you about those changes soon. Thanks for hanging in with us! We are now approaching the 11th Week in Ordinary Time. Back to the wearin’ of the Green, another change!
Change is inevitable. It is inevitable because it is essential. In order to stay alive on this old Earth, we have to change every day. And still, change is upsetting, even always upsetting! We resist change – usually because we feel uncertain about the purpose and outcome of changes. Often we resent change because it seems contrary to what we had planned. We get up in the morning, get ready to go to work, and discover traffic is backed up for miles because of roadwork. We choose to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast so we can polish off the milk in the fridge, and it slides out of the milk bottle like a cupful of yogurt. We get the kids ready to catch the bus and one pipes up, “Did I tell you I had to take a dozen cupcakes for our class party … today?”
Perhaps the worst kind of change comes when we know we are supposed to do something but we don’t know what it is yet – so how do we know we’re supposed to do something we don’t know? A lot of the changes that we have to make come because we have to follow rules. What if we don’t know the rules? What if the rules are changing? If there aren’t really any rules at all? Then what do we do?
Today’s title, “See and do,” arose because of some subtle little changes that were going on inside my little brain. It started with, “See what I can do and do what I can see.” That was directly related to the changes that I'm going through as the website gets moved. I have to rely on the expertise of some people that I trust implicitly, but it also means that I have to give up control of what it is I think I'm doing. Now that some convoluted logic, But that’s how we – I – think sometimes when we’re asked to go through change. Right now I'm trying to give my arthritic hands a break using text to speech to type these words. That’s frustrating because there are some rules, and even though I know what some of the rules are, the rules I know don’t cover the problems that I'm having with making this thing work.
Earlier this week, as I began to pray about the content of this message, that phrase up there morphed into, “Please help me see what I must do and please help me do what I must see.” That is not the message that I conveyed to the people who are helping me make the changes to the website, but it did turn out to be a pretty decent prayer. Please help me to see what I must do. We have B.I.B.L.E. for that, The Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, but the volume of the content of the Bible can make looking for specific rules a little difficult. After I had looked for The Key Verses for today, the Holy Spirit again sent a pattern, and this post began to take shape.
In the Key Verse from Exodus, El Shaddai says, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant …” These were the instructions given to Israel shortly after they left Egypt, repeated frequently throughout their entire history. Our God was basically saying to them, and of course to us as well, “Do what I tell you, the way I have told you, and everything will be just fine.” Really now, doesn’t that sound simple enough? It’s that phrase that appears so often here: Do the right thing. The sinful nature inside us protests, “No! I want to do it my way.” At that we should recall that sin consists in telling God, “I know what you want, but I want what I want, so that’s what I'm going to do.” We are able to see what we should see – the way to be blessed by God – but we actively resist doing what we should do. The payoff for obedience is HUGE: you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. And we turn that down so we can try to outsmart God. As my kids used to say, “How dumb is that!?!?”
Here it comes again. As we often say, we forgot. What did we forget? How about, “Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his.”? Forgetting something that is so clear and so important is perhaps forgivable, but knowing the Truth and intentionally contradicting it is a pretty serious matter. We might be tempted to reply, “Well, we are sinners after all. What do you expect?” And that’s were CHANGE happens big-time!
In today’s Key Verse from The Apostle Paul, he reminds us, “that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” Despite thousands of years of reminders from Prophets and judges and poets and wonderful stories, nobody saw that coming, at least not the way God had planned it. Salvation came to us as a little baby, born in a cave somewhere in Bethlehem surrounded by a couple of astonished parents, some livestock and shortly thereafter a bunch of shepherds talking about Angels. Not the kind of entry anyone expected. It ultimately led to the kind of Exodus no one expected – a sham trial, torture, crucifixion, death, and burial.
The accuser was too busy rejoicing after that to notice that Jesus didn’t stay down for the full count. Jesus died around 3:00 PM on Friday and rose before dawn on Sunday. This translates to roughly 1.5 days or about 36 hours. A lot of “waiting periods” in the Bible have the number “40” in their title. Just for the sake of narrative, let’s say that from the descent from the Cross to the breakfast on the shoreline of Lake Tiberius (Sea of Galilee) was 40 hours – just a convenient number, not a fact per se – and then for 40 days after that, Jesus appeared to groups of Disciples ranging from about 2 to about 500. By the time Jesus' Exodus was completed and he took his seat at the Right Hand of the Father, Ol’ Scratch would have been fiddlin’ a different tune!
OK, now we’re seeing what must be done and seeing it better than before because we are seeing our part in the History of Salvation through the lens of John 3:16-20 and Micah 6:8. We’ve used those so many times, they should be memory verses by now. For all of this to make sense we are also required to remember that Jesus voluntarily accepted and complied with the will of his Father. The Gift of his flesh for the Life of the World was a Gift! What are we supposed to do about that? Right you are, Camper! We are supposed to GIVE that Gift to others! Jesus' own words in the Key Verse from the Gospel: You have received without paying, so give without being paid. It’s time for another Original Language Tip here so we can look at the word received.
The Greek word is Strong’s # 2983 /lambánō. lam-BAN-o. this is broken down as 1. (actively) to take; or 2. (passively) to receive; or 3. (objectively) to get hold of (with the hand); properly, to lay hold by aggressively (actively) accepting what is available (offered). 2983 /lambánō ("accept with initiative") emphasizes the volition (assertiveness) of the receiver. This old man would summarize it like this: IF I am a Disciple and Jesus is teaching me, I see him teaching and remember to “See what I can do and do what I can see.” He’s giving us his Life! We should be, and can be, quite certain to reach out and bear-hug that Gift!
I can see that he wants me to teach because I see him doing that and – since I am his Follower – I'm going to try to do what I see him doing. That is to say, “Please help me see what I must do and please help me do what I must see.” The Gift of Teaching is available, and the Gift of doing the Teaching is something I can reach out and hold on to as his Gift to me. It would be crazy to turn that down, wouldn’t it?
“Jesus I know what you want, but …” That’s not craziness. That’s sin! “Go therefore into all nations …” I can barely make a trip around the east-to-south coast of Kauaʻi – barely 30 miles; however, I can go “to all nations” with the Bibles I buy and send to mission Churches, prisons, hospitals, or homeless shelters. I can go in the expensing for missionaries in the field. I can go down to skid row, or to the Lepers’ Street, or the Crack House with the Word. Or I can say, “Yes, Jesus, I know, but …” When I prayed for this content, something unusually unexpected happened. I was immediately connected to a passage that had nothing to do with this weekend’s readings. It’s a familiar passage though. The first part of it gets published here fairly often. Here’s what I saw that I must do. It’s from the Prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah 5:20-24 (GNT)
20 Ah, you who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
21 Ah, you who are wise in your own eyes,
and shrewd in your own sight!
22 Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of their rights!
4 Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble,
and as dry grass sinks down in the flame,
so their root will become rotten,
and their blossom go up like dust;
for they have rejected the instruction of the Lord of hosts,
and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
My motto for the last 40 years (there’s that number again!) has been AGE QUOD AGES (ah-jay kvohd ah-jess in “Church Latin dialect”) which translates pretty much as DO WHAT YOU’RE DOING. Keep your eye on the nail, not the hammer. Do what must be done and do it rightly. Do what is right and you will see all right. Why? Ah, Belovéd, it’s all in the Absolutely Perfect Plan so that YOLO-F brings us together in Heaven. So stay on course and follow your M.A.P. (↔ Click Link) SEE the LORD and DO as he does.
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
Please pray with us here at Share-a-Prayer.
Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Biblical languages inserts from Bible Hub (Bible Hub: Search, Read, Study the Bible in Many Languages) Visit at http://biblehub.com
Aloha Friday Messages by Charles O. Todd, III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
