Last Sunday Mike and I provided the snack supper for the children and youth. I went to pick up the 10 pizzas I had ordered which Little Ceasars had given me a great deal on of $5 a pizza because I was buying them for a church function with $53 dollars in cash in my hand. The bill was $53.69. I, of course, wrote a check instead.
Coming up short.
*****
A Post Office worker, at the main sorting office, finds an unstamped, poorly hand-written envelope, addressed to God. He opens it and discovers it is from an elderly lady, distressed because all her savings -- $200 -- have been stolen. She will be cold and hungry this Christmas.
He organizes the postal workers, who dig deep and come up with $180 to donate. They get it to her by special courier the same morning. A week later, the same postal worker recognizes the same handwriting on another envelope. He opens it.
"Dear God, Thank you for the $180 for Christmas, which would have been so bleak otherwise.
P.S. It was $20 short but that was probably those thieving workers at the Post Office."
Coming up short.
*****
AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership". He received a $26 million severance package.
Somebody came up short in that one.
*****
A man in Orange County Municipal Court had been ticketed for driving alone in the carpool lane. He claimed that the four frozen cadavers in the mortuary van he was driving should be counted. The judged ruled that passengers must be alive to qualify.
He came up short in his passenger list.
*****
According to the Knight-Ridder News Service, the inscription on the metal bands used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated, "Wash. Biol. Surv." until the agency received the following letter from an Arkansas camper:
"Dear Sirs: While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible."
Somebody came up short, but I’m not sure who it was - the Dept. of the Interior or the camper.
*****
Its amazing some of the things we can do to ourselves and to one another. It is unbelievable the number of these funny but sad stories that exist out there. Yet the stories become even more sad.
*****
A story is told about Fiorello LaGuardia, who, when he was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression and all of WWII.
One bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city. LaGuardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself.
Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving. But the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges. "It’s a real bad neighborhood, your Honor." the man told the mayor. "She’s got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson." LaGuardia sighed. He turned to the woman and said "I’ve got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions--ten dollars or ten days in jail."
But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket. He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous sombrero saying: "Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Baliff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant."
So the following day the New York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren, fifty cents of that amount being contributed by the red-faced grocery store owner, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the mayor a standing ovation.
Coming up short.
*****
Over the summer our Monday night worship service is taking a trip to Rome. We are traveling the Roman Road to Salvation with Paul.
These stories and the countless others out there ilustrate Paul’s words:
“All have sinned and fallen short of the gory of God.”
Paul doesn’t hint around at it, he makes it clear:
"There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one." "Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive."
"The venom of vipers is under their lips."
"Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness."
"Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known."
"There is no fear of God before their eyes."
You know, at times we try, make a concious and concentrated effort to do the right thing, but even so, we all come up short. No matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, there is nothing and no way for us to earn God’s grace, glory, and mercy.
That’s what the Jewish law was all about. It was a way for people to do the right things in order to stay in God’s good graces. It was believed that if they followed the laws - religious laws, rules about how to engage God and one another in faith, then you could stay in God’s good graces. It was all about what you did, how you behaved - how you washed your hands, how you cooked your food, how you carried out your work responsibilities. Doing these things in just the right way kept you in a relationship with God.
We might say thats just silly, but there are people, and I don’t mean Jewish people but Christians, who still follow this same line of thinking. They don’t realize that are doing the very things Paul speaks of that won’t make a difference at all.
Someone told me the other day of a group of people who believe that wearing make up, jewelry of any kind other than a wedding ring, or women wearing pants are sinful behaviors, and as sin, such behaviors will separate us from God’s grace.
But such externals isn’t what its about at all.
Even so, what concerns me most, is not people such as these who believe there are such things they can do that will separate them from God’s love or keep them in God’s graces,
but those who’ve given up on God’s mercy, who believe nothing can ever be done to make up for human short comings.
To such people, I really want to point out its not about what we do or don’t do, its about God’s righteousness revealed to us.
But what does righteousness mean?
*****
Paul uses 3 metaphors to describe God’s righteousness revealed to us. The first was a legal metaphor.
It’s like being in a court of law. In fact, its being accused of a crime and being found guilty. And the truth is, we are guilty. As We gather for communion, we acknowledge our guilt in prayer when we pray:
Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy.
Like the woman who stole the loaf of bread because her family was hungry, we fail to meet the needs of others. We have not loved our neighbors. We sew seeds of discontent rather than peace. We Are Guilty.
But we are aquitted. We are found not guilty. God’s mercy and grace is given to us, an aquital we do not merit and have not earned. We, who came up short.
Interestingly enough, Paul tells us it is revealed apart from the law - different from all those things we try to do to be good Christians, to be good followers of God. However, it is testified to by the law and by the prophets.
Yet the testimony of the law and of the prophets - those that share with us God’s intentions - the testimony they give is of the love of God who knows our sin, who knows our failings, who knows our mistakes,
and redeems us anyway.
Another metaphor Paul uses to describe the righteousness revealed to us is one relating to slavery and the release of captives, or prisoners.
Right now in the Phillipines there is a couple that is being held hostage by some Muslim extremist. Perhaps you saw on the news, that one of the things being debated in negotiating their freedom is whether or not to offer a cash ransom for their release, even though the American government doesn’t believe in paying ransom for hostages.
Paul speaks of redemption received, like a ransom for hostages, a ransom paid for us by Jesus. We are captives, slaves to sin. It has us in its grip. On our own power, its better than any maximum security prison. We are incapable of breaking free, of escaping.
Do you remember that movie - The Shawshank Redemption?
The main character is a Christ-like figure who embodies this idea of being imprisoned by sin.
A young banker named Andy is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and sentenced to life in prison. He strikes up a friendship with fellow inmate "Red", the man that can get anything. After bringing hope and resourcefulness to the entire prison he escapes under daring and almost impossible circumstances, recapturing the freedom he was denied for twenty-years.
Andy paid a price for a crime he didn’t commit. He made sacrifices in prison to provide comfort and ease the suffering of his fellow prisoners. He provided hope and a new way for them to live. And in his escape, Andy provides something for prisoners to believe in beyond prison life.
There is no freedom for us, no redemption we can achieve, but Christ paid that redemption price for us. Jesus bought our freedom.
And if the purchase price Jesus paid wasn’t great enough, laying down his life for us, it is made all that more powerful because we could not do it for ourselves, we don’t deserve it.
Paul uses a third metaphor to describe the righteousness of God revealed in Jesus. Its one he knew good practicing religious people would understand. Paul talks about a sacrifice of atonement.
This was a part of Jewish worship. Animal sacrifices were made for any little thing that tarnished a person before God. There were sacrifices made when you handled dirty animals, objects, and following involvement in certain occupations. There were animals sacrificed following the impurities cleansed from the body that come from illness. There are sacrifices made following knowing and unkowing involvement in sinful behavior and activity.
The amount of animal life taken for the sake of human sin was astronomical but there is not enough animal blood in the world that would reconcile us with God. There just isn’t enough animals to sacrifice that can make up for that.
But that’s what the blood of Christ does for us.
Paul tells us the blood Jesus shed on the cross demonstrates the justness of God, because God left unpunished we who deserved to be punished and instead Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took our place, making that sacrifice for us, so that we can be brought back into a relationship with God.
Now we who are church going folks know this. We hear this often. Jesus died on the Cross for us. Jesus shed his blood and died for us. He hung agonizing hours, sufficating, in humiliation for us.
William Barclay calls it the paradox of the gospel. God accepts us as just, even though we don’t deserve it, because Jesus accepted the condemnation that we all deserve.
I think we hear it so much we tend to let that pass over us almost nonchalantly, letting the signifance of it slip by without it really grasping ahold of us. When we really pause to think about it, it causes us to catch our breath and shake our head to believe anyone, anyone could go to that measure for us - something we can’t do for ourselves,
something we don’t deserve,
because we always, always come up short.
Perhaps we fail to recognize the magnitude of such a gift, because we try to do what people have always tried to do - to do things on our own. When the Jews tried so hard to follow the law, when we focus on our behaviors, when we try so hard to be good people, when we appeal to legalism rather than grace, when we try to come up with that list of things we must do to be Christians...well William Barclay said something else that I thought was interesting.
He said the difference between grace and the law, is that we try to follow religious obligations because they are things we think can do for ourselves. We tend to try to rely on ourselves to bring about our salvation.
I know we strive to be better Christians, but even the ability to work towards such a noble endeavor is a gift from God.
But the grace of God is concerned with what God can do, has done, and is doing for us for no other reason, than because God wants to. For no other reason, than because God is righteous and just. Because of no other reason, than the love God has for us.
I believe Paul would have us hear two things this evening:
Its not about what we do, because even at our most perfect moments we still come up short.
Its about what God has done, is doing, and will do in and through the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
In the name of Jesus Christ, thanks be to God. Amen.
