You know, there was a time when I was not the strapping burly man that you see before you today.
Let me tell you. Back whenever I was a kid back in school, I was always the nerdy kid.
The one who is always like nose in the book, didn't really do a lot of sports or anything like that.
And there were reasons for that. But one of the things later down the line is I lived in California
and for some reason those Californians just love to be outdoors.
I don't know, it's like they have a pretty countryside or something, assuming nobody's burning it down.
But with it though is that when I was there, there was a girlfriend of mine that wanted to go walk around,
do an eight mile hike around Mount Diablo.
Now, Mount Diablo, the mountain of the devil, if you will. It actually was a very pleasant place.
It was right there in the east bay of San Francisco and I would see it from a distance every day.
With it though is I had never gone on an eight mile hike before.
I was in my late 20s and I had never done an eight mile hike and I'm just thinking to myself,
what crazy person thinks to do this? I have a TV, there's a coffee shop, why am I going to be going on an eight mile hike?
But as I'm thinking about it and I think to myself, you know, self, you should probably get a little bit more exercise in,
be a little bit ready for it, exactly.
And so what I started doing is most days of the week I would go for a walk around the neighborhood.
Nothing too crazy, maybe two or three miles, but just enough to start getting comfortable with it and used to it.
So it was a day to go up on the mountain and we're going to go on this hike.
And we invited a friend of ours to come along as well. And about halfway through, our friend just was done.
There was no more hiking at that point. It's like, okay, there's another four miles to go.
I'm here, just leave me to die. And it's like, dude, you can see a Starbucks over here. You're not going to die.
It's going to be okay. But he wanted to just go and stay there.
Okay, well we're going to keep going. And then three quarters of the way through, my girlfriend was just done.
She was just messing up her ankle. It was not good at all.
And so there I am, the city kid from Houston with absolutely no mountains whatsoever.
Finally get to the end and I'm like, okay, great, I need to get my car. I'm going to drive over. I'm going to pick them up.
And then realize that my friend had put my keys in his backpack.
Yeah, yeah. So as I'm standing there trying to figure out what I'm going to do.
So I had to hike another mile in and I think one of them was like hiking a mile back to meet me.
So I think altogether I ended up hiking 10 miles. And oh my word, it's the last time I think that friend of ours went hiking with us ever again.
But one of the things that was amazing about this is that in so doing, this ended up leading to a pathway that led to other work that I wasn't ready for when I was a kid.
I did Cub Scouts. And I made sure I got every one of those little pins.
I got all the check marks, made sure that I got signed off, that I accomplished things.
But at the end of the day, I also knew deep in my heart, I'd never make it in the wilderness at all.
And I realized I didn't want that to be the rest of my life.
So when I was teaching, I joined a backpacking group out of the school.
And so while the kids were learning how to backpack, I was learning how to backpack too.
And I ended up, because of that, I got to go to Glacier. I ended up going to Donner.
I went down to Guatemala and went up to Mount Akatenango.
Shortly thereafter, the volcano blew up. I swear it's not my fault.
But with it though, is realizing that each of these things, they only happened because I'd been putting in the work and embodying what it meant each step of the way.
You see, that struggle, that push towards something that matters.
This is the setting that we see from Paul in the letter today.
See, the thing about Paul is that he went to go preach the Gospel, but when he did so, this wasn't something where he just went and gave lip service to it.
Let me just tell you about the Gospel. Okay, great. You accepted Jesus as a Savior. Okay, great. I better go.
All right, good luck everybody. Take care.
Paul, when he would go to a place, not only would have to deal with the Jewish community that didn't like him,
but then he'd have to deal with the Greek community who thought that he was an idiot, because he would talk about the resurrection of the dead.
And then on top of it, he'd end up having issues with the government authorities and he'd be thrown in jail,
or other times whenever he was making sure that even though this was his full-time work, maybe nobody was giving him any food to eat,
he'd have to go do another job to try to make it work.
This was a guy who put his life on the line.
But we want to use a term that maybe you've heard before, incarnation.
You know, whenever we say the Creed and we say, you know, born of the Holy Spirit, incarnate, sorry, born of Virgin Mary, incarnate by the Holy Spirit,
what it's meaning is that God took on a human body.
Anybody think how strange that that is? Why it's so important that God himself has to be human.
But you see, the thing about whenever something matters is that truly finding success doesn't come by avoiding the struggle.
Truly finding success has to go through the struggle and the suffering.
Think of something right now. What is something in your life that is truly meaningful to you?
Something that truly matters to you.
I want you to ask yourself, could you possibly have achieved it without struggle?
Because the things that matter the most are only the things that not only we have to work toward because they matter,
but frankly, they mean more to us because we have to struggle through them.
And that's the thing about what Paul ends up showing is that to demonstrate love, the kind that ultimately comes from God,
it ends up requiring more than just words. It requires our very lives.
You see, the Thessalonian church, they had been changed, truly changed, but it wasn't just by hearing the words,
they had to see it in Paul's life.
He was showing them because of who he was and what he did.
The thing is that oftentimes we misunderstand what we think about the cross of Jesus.
How many times have we thought before, you know, it would have been so nice if those people back there had just been accepting Jesus
and they hadn't tried to crucify him?
Man, it would have been so great if he didn't have to go on a cross.
Life would have been so much easier. People would have had it made. Jesus could have lived to a nice old age.
He probably would have had a wonderful beard with gray hair in it, because, you know, that's whenever you know that you've truly matured
and you're intelligent right there. Nobody catching that joke. Okay, whatever.
But with it, though, is that it's only because of the cross that it ended up mattering.
Because the thing with us is that we are a people who create destruction.
So only by going through the very destruction that we cause can God actually provide the salvation that we need.
See, it says oftentimes in our society that you can't just throw money at a situation.
Usually when somebody is saying you can't just throw money at a situation, it's usually because they don't want to actually give any money to something.
They're trying to find an excuse.
The thing is, is that honestly, things do take money to run.
But the flip side of it is that when all we want to do is throw money at something, then it doesn't mean anything.
Whenever we have things going on here at the church and we try to find people to volunteer for things,
even just to trim bushes or maybe water things or whatever,
and there are times where someone might say, oh, well, we'll just go pay somebody to do it.
The trouble is that when we are not involved with the things that matter to us, ourselves, our body, our blood, sweat and tears,
our very time and energy, it doesn't mean the same.
The generations before me, they knew what it was that they were actually putting their hands to the work of the church.
And we've lost sight of that oftentimes.
My generation, the one after me, the one after them.
But that's what God has done by being incarnate, by being in this life.
Is that he's ended up showing us how much we matter.
You see, the people who actually know the most about a situation are the ones who are actually feet on the ground in the middle of it.
Whenever we went through all the initial stuff with COVID and stuff like that, how many people thought that they were an expert?
I mean, it's like, oh, I've got it all figured out.
Either elected officials who thought that they were super smart and everything, never had a doctor degree whatsoever,
or the person next door to you who was like, just spray some Windex on it and you'll probably be fine.
All of the Greek wedding fans, I got you, I got you.
And yet, who were the ones who actually knew what to do?
The people actually there in the emergency rooms, actually treating people, actually there with them.
And the truth even now, we hear everybody's got commentary about Israel and Palestine.
Everybody knows this is why it happened.
That's why it happened.
This is the only way to fix it.
That's the only way to stop it.
People who've never even been in the Middle East.
But the people who have been there for years, trying to find ways to create peace, hope, love, housing, food,
are the very people who are the most likely to actually create the peace we keep wanting to find.
And that's the thing about what we see when we see theology of the cross.
See, theology of the cross is not saying that we try to avoid what the struggle is, but rather we have to go through it.
And when it's hard, it's usually when we realize that it's worth fighting for.
It's said in our Gospel passage, what's the greatest commandment, and it says, you know, love the Lord your God.
Isn't it fascinating that we find that part the easy part to stop on?
But he goes to the second part of love your neighbor.
You see, in reality, he's not saying, oh, the Lord your God is the greatest one, and then the second one is second place.
They're together, because the only way to truly love God is because of loving the people that we're with.
I mean, believe me, I've taught middle school. I know what it is to suffer.
Yeah, that was for you, rather.
But also, is to realize that that's the truest revelation of who our Messiah is.
They have this part where it says, the Lord said to my Lord, and it sounds a little confusing.
But in your Bibles, probably what you're going to see is that the first one has all capital letters, L-O-R-D.
But the second one, capital L, lowercase O-R-D.
The reason for this is because the first one is actually Yahweh.
This is saying God, the God that you have known, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
The second one is the Adonai.
This means Lord in the sense of one who's in authority over me.
But if they understood that this person is someone that David is saying, you are above me, you're in authority over me,
but this is David's descendant.
How many of you ever plan on saying to your kids or grandkids, my Lord?
That would make Thanksgiving really awkward.
But imagine taking that for the Messiah.
And how is it that the descendant of David could be greater than David?
The thing is, is that we know who this God is as being incarnate.
But the truth is, is that we also look to David to understand why that's important.
Because David did not become important on an easy path.
David had to go up against a giant, a Goliath.
He was running from the king that he had to take his place.
He had to live among the Philistines, the very people whose champion he had killed.
He then is becoming king, but even ends up having warfare with his own son,
who has to die at his general's hands.
He can't even build the temple that he wanted to build.
You see, the thing is, is that as much as we know that King David for them was great,
the Messiah was meant to be greater, it actually means that as much as David had to struggle,
the Messiah had to suffer even more.
And that's the thing about giving yourself, is that God knew what it was going to take for us.
And he didn't even spare his own son.
And that's the thing that we end up learning about the incarnation, is that to be present within it,
to be in the midst of those who need us the most, is the only true way of bringing hope,
because it's the only way that you received hope in the first place.
Right now, God has plans for each of you.
You are in a life and a situation that only God, that God has called only you to be in.
But this isn't for you to somehow pass it off to somebody else, or hope that somebody else will fix things.
It's for you.
God has come and given us life for us to live.
So as we're going forward and trying to figure out what is it that God's doing, God wants to do it through us.
Because in reality, even as Christ was embodied to bring us life, our lives can then bring that life to others around us.
Thanks be to God.