I've decided in the final four sermons I will preach at these three churches, that I'll do my best to narrow these sermons to the four favorite verses I have in scriptures, or at the least the four pieces of scriptures.
Last week I preached on John 17, talking to the congregations about what it means to have Jesus pray for us as he does in that chapter. He prayed we would be sanctified, among other things.
This week I'll preach on Romans 5: 1-11, which talks about the progression of faith that gives us justification, then sanctification, at just the right time.
The following week, I'll preach on Romans 8:28 which says he turns all things to the good of those who love him.
Finally, I walk out the door after preaching on my favorite verse and its implications, Philippians 4:13 (10-13) which says I (we) can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us.
Romans 5:1 is so wonderful. It states, demands we listen to, this: THEREFORE (since, because, so, you name it) we gave been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."
We have been converted through faith. We have been justified. We have peace.
I assume that there is a more meaningful verse in scripture, but I can't think of it right now. Maybe John 3:16. Maybe something from Psalm 23 or even the power of Psalm 22's beginning, or even John's prelude.
But really, we have been converted (justified) because we have faith in our Lord. We have been justified because of that faith. We then have peace in a battle that has been going on all our lives and even the thousand, million, years before it -- sin versus forgiveness, life versus death.
Simply put, the war is over ... come on home.
Years ago a tornado ripped into the little (very little) town that I still call home -- Lizelia, Miss. In this burg, there are or were about 11 houses. In those 10 or 11 houses, there are the Vaughns, the Turners, and the Johnson's. In those homes are, however, countless lives stretched thin across generations.
When I got the call about the tornado, which my father watched tear across pastureland and make a bit of a right turn when it crossed Ponta Creek in order to head toward the Turner house, my then fiancé, Mary, and I grabbed a few things and hastily headed up Interstate 20 toward Meridian from Jackson, Miss.
When we got to Meridian, we took Highway 39 north as always. About the time we roared through Ponta, a farming community four miles from my parents' house, we knew something was extraordinarily different.
Instead of the incredibly seductive and impossibly fragrant honeysuckle odor that normally greets visitors as imagination and beauty at the top of the hill pours forth down the ridge into the community of Lizelia, what I smelled, what I saw was something from disaster movies. The huge oak trees that wave hello, instead lay on the group ripped from the earth like Transformer robots. Instead of wet, thick beautiful fragrance, the smell of freshly turned earth, a sliver of broken wood, and even a wafting of smoke was thick on the air.
Old Highway 39, instead of that new fangled thing that was paved in the early 1960s, was a high-hurdle exercise as we weaved our way right, then left, left farther still, then right ... missing trees and limbs and kids toys and bikes and such. Some had told us we couldn't get to Lizelia, home of a Naval Air Station since the early 1960s, but we were then as now hard-headed as my Mama always said.
We made it to my parents' house, where a conglomeration of Turners and Nulls and Parkers and such had begun to gather and, well, gather, and it was just like the rest of community. Like an abuser of enormous proportions, the tornado had visited, smacked the house and even its at the time lone inhabitant around, and left before the cops could come.
My parents were home, safe. The house? Not so much. My mother had driven frantically from town, crying (as she was want to do), and absolutely certain of the worst. We found some of the tin that Dad had put on the roof of his "shed" miles away, bent, beaten and generally discouraged from ever being used again productively. It was bent across trees. We found stuff from his shed "around and about," and bits of the house all over the front pasture.
The house was, in search of one word that would describe it, depressed. It would be rebuilt, made new again, but it would never be the house that at that point would have been in its 30s. The house I grew up in, therefore, was gone. The new house, which I never truly lived in, would come later.
The point?
I never felt I truly had a place I could call home after that day in spring 1995. Not on this planet.
Later that year, I discovered I never really did in the first place. I found that Jesus had been calling me, not so softly by the way, all those years. And I discovered that I had a home, but it was not here. Now, 19 years later this August, I've noticed that we (all of us) do not have a home, but we have a place to return to.
I have the same rockers that my dad had sat in, watching the tornado coming toward the house. I have the kitchen table that got some water but little else that day. We have a few other things that made it through that tornado, through the remnants of Katrina in 2005, and through Rita in 2006. When my mother passed in 2007, those hearty things passed to us.
Hopefully in a few years, when I wake up in the land of glory, with the saints I will tell my story, there will be one name that I proclaim. That name, folks, is Jesus. That's home. That's tie-a-yellow-ribbon stuff. Someone will receive, I imagine, two medal outdoor rockers, two wooden white wood outdoor rockers, a china cabinet and a kitchen table with some wear on them. They will be things handed down.
But they won't be home. They won't make wherever they are home. When that time comes ... we won't be in Kansas, Toto. We, justified humans, will be there smelling like over-turned earth and peace with God.
No comments:
Post a Comment