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[crickets chirping] [music] [Music] From the sand to the summit, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman.

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[Music] We turn now to God's word, not sung but written. The gospel according to Luke, the fourth chapter. The reading begins at the verse numbered 14.

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Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth where he had been brought up,

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and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good

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news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendants,

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and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he said to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." And may the same God who inspired these words

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incline our hearts to understand them. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The event in Jewish history most cited on the pages of the Old Testament,

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the encounter between God and the Israelites, which the children of Israel remembered always with the greatest zeal. The central event of Old Testament history is the exodus, that occasion when God brought his suffering and oppressed

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people out of Egypt to freedom. God said to Moses, "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their suffering, and I have come down to deliver them

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out of the hands of the Egyptians." And what God said he would do, God did. He brought the children of Israel out of the oppression, the economic, the political, and social subjugation which they knew in Egypt. Now it is important

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to remember that this event is documented history. There are those who tend to spiritualize this circumstance, to suggest that it is a story told in order to lead us to believe that God is always ready to deliver us from any of the burdens or oppressions which we

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suffer in life. This may or may not be true. What is true for our consideration this morning is this. Historically we know that Almighty God moved in history dramatically and deliberately in order to save those who were oppressed

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economically, politically, and socially. He brought them to freedom. He led them from the enslaving fans of Egypt to the top of Mount Sinai, to the summit of his revelation. And there God said to these people whom he had freed,

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"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you up on eagles' wings and brought you out myself. Now obey my voice, keep my covenant, and you shall be my possession, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me

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a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." God says to these people whom he's brought into freedom, "Remember what I have done for you, be obedient to me, keep my covenant, and understand yourselves to be a new people,

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a nation of priests, who will be my witnesses to all the world." In other words, God gave to those whom he had freed a new vision of life, what the life of the people of God is to be, and then sent them into the world to bear witness to that. Now in the next chapters of the

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Old Testament, definition with regard to this new lifestyle of the community of God is clearly given, and out of all of those definitions I just select a few for our consideration. God says that those who have been released from

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oppression should always be specially concerned about those who are still in oppression. He points out that to him real worship is not ritual, but rather the loving service of any who suffer in this world because of economical

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or politic or social degradation. He says that instructions are to be followed by his people in how they are to deal with the poor. Loans are to be given to them without interest. Their debts are to be remitted. Again and again

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God instructs his people, his holy nation, his kingdom of priests, to remember you are free. Therefore, you must free others. You must be a kingdom of priests. Now come with me more than a thousand years ahead in history.

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Come with me not from Egypt and Sinai, but to Galilee and Jerusalem. Jesus is in his hometown and he's called upon to preach the sermon. They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he opens that scroll which contains many, many words,

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and out of all of those words he picks but a few. He reads, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captive and the recovery of sight to the blind,

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and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." He then returns the scroll to the attendant, sits down, and announces, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your

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hearing." Jesus is saying, "Like father, like son. Just as my father came and brought the oppressed to freedom, so I have come to bring the oppressed to freedom. Just as my God is a God of liberation, so I, God's son,

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am given to liberation. I am a summit person. I am one of those who is part, indeed king, of this kingdom of priests and this holy nation. And I say to you what my father said to you, that you shall take all those who are oppressed in the world

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and bring them to freedom." And then Jesus, having said this, demonstrated it in all of his life. He spent his ministry with prostitutes and lepers and lunatics and tax collectors and the poor. He called people to a covenantal relationship with God.

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He summed the whole love of God by saying, "You can't love God if you don't love your neighbor." He taught parables in which he said, "Your neighbor is not only the person you like, but the person you don't like." A Samaritan. He says that those who do not give to the poor

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will be like the character in another parable, the parable of Dives and Lazarus. Dives separated from God forever. He lived a very simple lifestyle. He required his disciples to live in that same lifestyle. He said to those who had a great deal of this world's goods, "Beware, because no one

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can serve two masters. It's a mistake," he suggested, "to lay up treasures on earth. Put your treasures in heaven." And in the Magna Carta of his teachings, in the compendium, the sum of his message to us, in the Sermon on the Mount, this is what

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he says, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you hungry, for you will be satisfied. Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.

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Woe to you who are well fed, for you will go hungry." And then Jesus climaxed his ministry to the oppressed by dying on a cross. He permitted himself to know the utter alienation, the final separation from all worldly

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goods, crucified naked, owning nothing, identifying with those in the deepest poverty, and dying in the midst of two who are separated like himself, thieves, there. Jesus suffocates

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beneath the stands of all evil dehumanization. But the story doesn't end there. The story ends a few chapters later in Scripture, where we discover that on Mount Zion there is Easter and Pentecost. And Easter and Pentecost in the New Testament

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are the parallel of the Sinai experience in the Old Testament. Just as God brought his people out of the Sands of Egypt to summit Sinai and gave to them new freedom and ministry to the world, so God in the New Testament brings his people

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out of the ultimate Sands, out of the final brokenness symbolized by the death on the cross, to a new life. And that new life is given its banner at Easter and Pentecost. Just as God spoke on Sinai out of flame and thunder, so now he speaks

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by the Holy Spirit and he says, "You are my people. You are in relationship with me. You are to keep my covenant. You are to be the community of the redeemed, and there shall be no racial or linguistic barriers within you." Remember at Pentecost they could speak

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all different tongues. "And you shall share," and it says in the book of Acts that they shared in teaching and preaching and they had all things in common. There was no one with need within this group, within the fellowship. And they were so generous with all that

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they possessed that the book of Acts says that they did what they did with gladness and with generosity, and the people who saw it were thrilled and believed. And Paul, the greatest writer to come out of the New Testament church, a man who gave up position in order to

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take the way of serving Christ in poverty, writes that Christ, though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor and calls us to the same thing. And in the summation of his teaching on this Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 8, "Your surplus is to meet the need of

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others, and other surplus is to meet your need, and the great goal," the great goal he says, "is equality." And in the next verse he repeats it, "The great goal is equality." It is no accident that the New Testament church called

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itself the New Israel, for it saw itself as called from the sands to the summit, just as the Old Testament church saw itself. And Peter then sits down and writes a description of the New Testament church

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which parallels almost exactly what God said of his redeemed people Israel in the Old Testament. Peter writes, "You are a chosen race, you are a holy nation, you are God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who brought you out of darkness,

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out of the sands, into his marvelous light, the scintillating clearness of the summit." Central to the Old Testament and the New Testament is this message. God brings people out of oppression to

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freedom, makes them his people, and then sends them out into the world to carry that same message of freedom to all those who are oppressed. It is no accident that Paul repeatedly describes the children of God in the New

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Testament as the redeemed of God. That word "redeemed" comes from the vocabulary of slavery. Paul, having both Jew and Greek backgrounds, understood slavery in both Jewish and Greek terms. When a Jew thought of slavery, he thought of it in terms of the Exodus,

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that freedom which God gave his people, bringing them out of slavery to the Egyptians, which we have already thought of this morning. But Paul no doubt also thought of slavery in terms in which a Greek understood it. You see, in Greek society a slave could buy his own freedom.

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On his own time he could take odd jobs. Now a portion of what he would learn from those odd jobs he would have to return to his master, but a portion of it he could keep for himself. And if he wanted to buy his own freedom, he would take that money to a nearby temple

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and he would deposit it there with the priest of that temple. And he would do this across years and years and years until enough money had been deposited with that priest in that temple to buy the slave's freedom. He would then take his master to the

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temple and the priest would take the accumulated money and pay it to the master. And then he would say to the master, "This man is your slave no longer. He is now the slave of the God of this temple

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who has bought him." It's just this that Paul has in mind when he says about the children of God, "You are bought with a price." He says of us, he says it to the Romans and the Corinthians and the Ephesians and the Colossians, he says of all of us that we are the

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redeemed, the purchased slaves of God. In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, it's the 14th verse, Paul uses an interesting phrase. He says, "Christ's love compels us." Other translations of that passage read, "Christ's love

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overmasters us. Christ's love controls us. Christ's love leaves us no choice." Slaves don't vote. We are called, you see, from the sands of a slavery to evil, from the choking

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sands of human degradation, from all the oppressions of poverty and disease and social failure and collapse. We are called out of this to the slavery of love, to the summit where we meet God in the high

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and holy place and become in that moment his kingdom and his nation of priests. But notice, it is a kingdom. It is not a democracy. Please turn your cassettes to the other side.

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Out of this truth then, I would draw just two applications and then I'm done. The first application is this. It seems obvious to me from this understanding of what our role as God's people is to be. It seems obvious to me that we must

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understand that setting people free is not just a spiritual ministry, it is also a physical ministry. A priority of God in the Old Testament was to bring those who were suffering economic and social and political subjugations to freedom.

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That same priority is evidenced when our Lord Jesus picks as his very first sermon theme and then demonstrates throughout all of his life in his teaching that he has come to bring blessing to the poor and the oppressed. And the ministry which belongs to God

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and to his son belongs also to us. One night a number of years ago I was speaking with a Hindu gentleman and I was trying as gently and as persuasively as I could to bring him to an understanding of Christ and suddenly

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in the middle of the conversation he said something to me which stopped me cold. It was not a hostile word or an argumentative word or a belligerent word. As a matter of fact he said it very humbly with downcast eyes. The sentence which stopped me was this.

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You know of course that all of us Indians will finally starve to death. I've been sitting there talking to him about the state of his soul and the state of the souls of his people and all the time what he was thinking about was the fact, true then and just as true

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today, that under the present state of affairs in the end all Indians will starve to death. In the light of that it suddenly seemed that what I was doing in my witnessing was almost a blasphemy. For I was speaking to him of spiritual

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things when the God who is the author of those things moved in history first to meet man's physical needs. We need to get away from the idea of believing that God is only concerned with spiritual things. Everything in the world has God's name

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on it except evil. Every day is his day, every book is his book, every dime is his dime. When we get to the place where we see God so exclusively in our churches that we do not see him in our factories and we do not see him where migrant

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workers labor, then we need to tear down our churches. When we get to the place where we see God so singularly in our chapels that we do not encounter God in the despise and the suffering and the hurting people that we meet on the street, then we need to destroy our chapels and

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rip down our altars. For our God says to us on the pages of scripture, "Take away from me the noise of your worship services. They're an offense before me, but let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

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I understand that knowing Jesus Christ is the most important thing in the world, that you can have all the material goods of the world ten times over and all of them together will not feed a truly hungry soul. I fully understand that you can feast on every blessing which life itself can

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give and if you are without Christ then you are the poorest of all. I suggest to you this morning that this medicine show gospel which we so casually dandy about, just take one swallow of it folks and your heart and your head and your soul and your

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belly will all be full. That gospel is a perversion of what God's Word teaches to us. We have to decide whether our ministry as a kingdom of priests is to bring a few people to such a pitch of spiritual devotion

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that they can be assured of eternity forever, or whether our ministry as the people of God is to bring the whole world to Jesus Christ, entering into politics and economics and literature

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and the arts and education and every dimension of the human experience and saying, "Here to Jesus Christ is Lord." It seems to me rent disobedience to talk about the hungry and not feed them, to talk about the imprisoned and not relieve them,

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to discuss the moral implications of the naked, to talk about health when so many are sick, to talk to the lonely about their loneliness and then leave them alone while we go off to pray about it, to say to someone that has no home,

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"Well, enjoy the spiritual shelter of Jesus." To understand holy separate, to me separated from all the needy of the world, the first implication of our being a holy people of God is to understand that our ministry is not only a

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spiritual but a physical one, and the second implication is to understand that the goal of the people of God is not charity but unity. We need to remember that only to feed someone

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is to starve them. You know, charity has a bad name in our time, and I think that's a good thing, because charity has come to mean those who have giving what they really don't need to those who have not.

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And so not only allowing those people to remain in their poverty because the health is never enough to get them out of it, but also adding to their burden the shame of being in a position of receiving charity

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but never being able to give any. That kind of charity has become a kind of excuse for Christianity in our time. The slaves of God in Jesus Christ are not given to that kind of charity. They are called to unity.

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True greatness in this world is the greatness of service. We've understood that ever since the Egyptians and Sinai and Galilee and Golgotha and Pentecost. We are called to be one people. Have you ever pondered the fact that every significant thing that separates

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man from the beast, everything we've come up with, our ability to talk, our ability to write, printing, radio, television, modes of transportation that move us rapidly about the earth, every one of these things contribute to our coming closer together.

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To our being in more intimate communion with one another. I believe that that's the reason that God has given to us these lessons, that we might become more one people. That's what summit people are. They are people who go out into all the world,

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not to drop a bit of charity here and there, but rather to offer themselves and all they possess in a living unity with the suffering people of the world. The New Testament says we know that we have passed from death to life

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when? When we love the brethren. You see, in God's holy nation there are no lone rangers. We have a kind of a myth of the individual in our society. We honor the person who doesn't need to depend on anybody.

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They kind of rise above society and are separate. They're strong enough and generous enough to sometimes come in and help society when it needs assistance, but they don't need anyone. They can get along on their own. The powerful two-fisted individuals. We see it mostly in our

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our westerns on television and the movies. You know the story. The town's in serious trouble because the Indians are coming or some group of convicts has just gotten out of jail and they're coming back to get revenge or some land baron is trying to capture

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all the water rights in the area and the cavalry has been tricked into following false smoke signals off into the hills. And the sheriff, of course, he's an alcoholic and a coward. He's no good anymore. And the preacher just hides in the basement of the church and preaches

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irrelevant sermons. And the music in the movie tells us the danger is very near. And then suddenly there appears at the end of the street a man who rides tall in the saddle, brings his horse to a stop before the saloon,

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ties it up at the rail, shakes off the dust, walks in and leans on the bar and asks for a drink. He doesn't care about the town. He's just passing through. But something happens that captures his attention.

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One of the bad guys picks a dog. Or a kid looks at him with a tear in his eye. Or there's an older woman in the town who reminds him of his mother. And so he decides to clean the place up. He does nothing to help the town clean

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itself up. He warns everybody to stay indoors. And then at high noon in the street he faces the problem and guns it down. Then he jumps on his horse, calls out "Hi-Yo Silver" and he's gone.

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That's the Lone Ranger. That's a cult symbol in our society. That's the independent person. That's the George Patton with his pearl-handled revolvers that just goes ahead and does what's right. That's the politician who says "I don't have to be a part of any party.

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I reject the whole political system. I'm going to just go out there and win it all by myself." That's John Wayne. And all of us in this society are given to the adoration of that. But there are no Lone Rangers in God's kingdom.

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And in moments of quietness there's still enough of evening in us to remember that that myth of the individual is really wrong. For the fact is, we're the slaves of God. We've been called out

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of the oppressing things of life to freedom. But then we are sent back into the world to be agents of physical and spiritual redemption. And being sent back into the world does not mean coming by with a moment's charity.

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It means limiting yourself, turning aside from your luxury, disciplining yourself in the use of the world's resources. It means adopting a lifestyle which makes you one with people around the world who do not live as you live because they're unable to live that way.

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It means being a brother and a sister to all the world's people. Not charity, but unity. And it is to this that we are called. Somebody asked me the first of the week what I was going to talk about this

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morning. I told them. And they said, "Well, saying that will get you into hot water with a lot of people." And I've been thinking and praying about that all week. And the Lord has given me three things. First,

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he reminded me that more and more the center of the church is moving out of rich western nations to the poor of the world. The majority of the world's Christians are now colored and poor. And so if I'm in hot water, I'm in hot water with the majority of

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the world's Christians and a growing majority every day. The second thing happened to me in my devotion. I'm rereading for I don't know how many times the greatest myth that Christianity has ever produced, Dante's The Divine Comedy.

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And in that he says that the lowest and deepest hell is reserved for those who betray the family of names. The unity that is to be amongst all people. And he says that those who are in that deepest hell

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are frozen in icy silent separation from each other in a frigid lake. I'd rather be in hot water than in a frigid lake. And the third thing that God said to me, he said in the shower this morning.

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He said, "Bruce, never forget, it's hot water that makes you clean." Let us pray.

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Our Father, thy word is sharper than a two-edged sword. Give us courage enough to confront it. And give us obedience enough to yield to it.

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For Jesus' sake, and for our own sake, and for the whole world's sake. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his

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countenance upon you, and give to you, and to all those whom you love, and to all those whom nobody loves, his peace.

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