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Two promises… major promises in my life changed me forever.

The first was the promise of marriage… she said yes… and it changed everything…

And then she said, twice, we are going to have a baby… the promise of new life… and it changed everything…

All of these started out as promises for some future event, getting married, having kids, but the promise was not just about the future… the promise changed my present.

That is the real power of promise.  The real power of the promise is the hope and focus that it brings to our present.

You and I live in a world where promises matter.

Promise gives us hope…

I am seeing a lot of promises out there…

Promises like… I hear you… I stand with you…

Sounds a lot like the promise found in Isaiah 41…

“… do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”

What a promise! It is the kind of promise that changes me because I believe it to be true …

So maybe these promises will lead me to fear a bit less…

Maybe these promises will help me shed my tiredness and lean into the strength of God I see in others…

That is the power of promise.

A broom is a highly effective tool… until it’s not. And it doesn’t take long to figure out if a broom is up to the task.

When the bristles no longer do the job, debris slips through, making the task of sweeping almost futile. You simply can’t clean.

In scripture this idea of cleaning, or making things right again, is central to the story of God’s relationship with humanity.

This is what God’s law was all about. A set of instructions to provide ways of making things right and in that way we can understand the law as a broom. A broom that is fully capable of keeping things clean with God and clean with one another.

But what happens when the broom of the law doesn’t work anymore? Or maybe more specific… what happens when the people who are supposed to care enough to use the broom leave it in the corner and the mess just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

And the mess… caused suffering. The law… has been subverted and the people do not get justice.

So what do you do when the broom fails?

When all that should be, isn’t?

Well… faith…

⁴ Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith. (Hab 2:4 NRS)

Faith… Far too often we think of faith as having the answers all line up.

But faith is not about answers… faith is a way of life… a way of living even in a world of failed brooms.

¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” (Rom 1:17 NRS)

Faith as a way… when all else fails…

What happens when you can’t see the promise?

There are no blossoms, the produce of the olive fails – there is no promise of food,

What do you do when there is nothing in your experience that tells us that a new day is coming?

Faith…

Faith is a militant response – faith is an act of defiance.

Faith….Calls people forward even when circumstances don’t seem promising.

None the less there is a God who created you, redeems you, and it is God who makes your feet not only move quickly like a deer… God will help you find footing over rugged terrain.

May you…  in the waiting… when the broom fails… live by faith… continue to see beauty among the broken… reach out when others hold back… seek joy when life seems the darkest… open up to the possibility that you are part of a new day.

I grew up with lots of rules…
A highly disciplined environment.
Mr. Adams – the principle of my elementary school – would walk around with a large paddle at recess and wack kids who were out of line. Sounds criminal today, but was normalized back in the day.
And while we didn’t have a guy walking around church with a paddle… sometimes it felt that way…
The church always seemed like just a bunch of rules…
A bunch of rules that others imposed upon the rest of us…
The same was true about the idea of self-control… just another rule…
But as I got older I began to realize that most of the disciplines of our faith are not about what you can’t do…

They are really giving us the freedom to do what we can…

The Eighth Commandment – You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor…
Sure seems like we are being told what not to do…
But the real power of the commandment comes when we live it…
The call is not to just refrain from lying about our neighbors…
But we are supposed to stick up for them when others lie about them, speak well of them, come to their defense and to think well of them…
Think about this in context of bullying… it’s not just that we should refrain from bullying…
But we are to stick up for those who are bullied…
Through the lens of today’s culture… in the context of today’s world,
A culture that is over hyped…
Over politicized…
Over conspiracy theorized…

When we talk about the kingdom of God… when we live into that… when we live the disciplines of our faith… the kingdom of God comes near.

Jesus uses a very normal event in the life of community, a wedding, to talk about being prepared for the kingdom of God.
Customary for the friends of the bride or bridegroom to escort the bridegroom to the wedding feast,
It just so happens that this wedding feast happens at midnight, at the last hour…
It’s a deliberate time to illustrate that the kingdom of God shows up when it shows up
It’s not about staying awake… all the girls fell asleep.
It’s about exercising the type of self-control that keeps us prepared to greet the kingdom of God when it comes…
Self-control is not just about saying no to things… it’s about having the capacity, the ability to say yes to things.
And to say yes to the things that really matter.

What is it that you do not have time to do that would change the world?
What is it that you want to financially support but haven’t sat down and planned to do it and when it comes time to give you can’t?

Typically when we think we don’t have time or the resources to help it’s because we haven’t grown the spiritual fruit of self-control that would inevitably give us the time and the resources to live more fully into the kingdom of God, to be prepared to respond when the kingdom of God presents itself.

Michelle was on the phone. She had lost her mom to cancer, 9 months previous.
And now Michelle was calling me to tell me that now her father had passed in his sleep of a diabetic coma.
She was in her early twenties and now she and her older sister were left alone… far too young to have to deal with what life had dealt them.

But she was not alone… for she was now a part of a large, very large group of people that through life circumstance had or were in a new season of questioning.

Why me?
Why now?
Why this?
Where is God in all of this?

During several of our conversations she would declare that she was losing her faith.

She was losing her faith… her faith in the kind of God she used to believe in.
She was losing her faith in that “vending machine God”… you know the transactional faith where we try desperately to play our role… we put in our bit, and then God will do God’s bit.

But I was heartened by a future I believed was waiting for her. A future of more, not less, faithfulness…

So let’s talk about faithfulness.
Faithfulness is not all about unicorns and rainbows.
Faithfulness is not always easy or simple.
Faithfulness is not about burying you head in the sand and ignoring the reality of life.
Faithfulness is not just making lemonade out of the lemons we experience.

Faithfulness is a living, breathing, journey filled with twists and turns, ups and downs, joy and pain. Even excruciating pain…

For all of our efforts we are still left with the confession that we don’t know all there is to know about our reality.
There is a lot of ambiguity that we have to deal with…
Faithfulness is the ability to stay in relationship with the creator of the universe in the midst of ambiguity.

Why do bad things happen to good people?
Why do we come pre-wrapped in bodies that are so frail and prone to disease and simple accidents that can be so devastating?

Faithfulness is being able to seek hope and beauty in the midst of all this ambiguity.
This also helps us know what is not unfaithful…
Being upset at God is not unfaithful…
Being frustrated with God or questioning God’s motives or plans or intentions is not unfaithful.

But that is not an unfaithful stance before God.
It’s real and it’s honest.
And God encourages real honest relationships and real relationships have all of that stuff in them.

Years ago, while on a youth group retreat, we had all finished breakfast at a McDonald’s and were walking back to the bus when I heard some loud shouting in the drive thru. It was clearly a man’s voice loudly berating the McDonald’s drive thru employee and as his car pulled away I could see a young woman hunched at the window, sobbing. The pastor on the trip with me also heard it and after a quick nod of the head we both jogged over to the drive through window.

As we attempted to comfort her, the pastor asked her what was wrong.
She told us that the man had paid with cash and some change… the change totaled 11 cents and she mistakenly thought the dime and the penny he gave her were two penny’s. The dime was darkened and looked like a penny– with a quivering outstretched hand she showed us – and she told us she simply asked him for the other 9 cents. Instead of extending kindness he exploded with vile anger, and reduced this young woman to rumble.

Have you ever wondered God is so concerned about how we treat each other?
You and I… we are created in God’s image…
How we treat one another is how we treat the image of God.
What are your 9 cent moments? We all have them.
It might not be destroying the spirit of a fast food worker in a drive thru…
But being unkind is not new…

Over this next week take some time to reflect on your past 9 cent moments.
What was it that led you to that 9 cent moment?
What continues to wind you up, producing those 9 cent moments?

And in all of that may you remember that you are made in God’s image… so are others…
You were made for more… more kindness.