True Love

True Love

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 14, 2016

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy Valentine’s Day. You know of course that in in our culture today we associate Saint Valentine’s Day with romantic love. We give our loved one’s Valentine’s Day cards. Maybe we men give our wives or sweethearts flowers and chocolates or, like I’ve seen on one TV ad, ginormous teddy bears. We buy little candies that say “I love you” or “Be my Valentine.” I don’t know if they still do it, but when I was in grade school all the kids gave Valentine’s cards to every other kid. On TV we get inundated with ads that want us men to think that if we don’t buy our wives or girlfriends diamonds we can’t possibly love them, never mind that I can’t afford diamonds and my doesn’t even like them. It gets to be a bit much, for me at least.

It gets to be a bit much, but I think the way we treat Valentine’s Day raises an important question: Just what does the word love mean? Or to put it another way, what is true love? In the movie High Society with Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly the True Love is a sailboat, but of course I don’t want to answer my question about true love by saying it’s a sailboat. It’s a whole lot more important than that, as much as I do love boats. No, love isn’t a boat; it’s one of the central concepts of the Christian faith. The New Testament even says “God is love.” 1 John 4:8 We say not only that God is love, we say that God loves us. We say that God loves all of creation and every creature in it. We say that Jesus loved humanity so much that he went to the cross as a sign of God’s love. Now pretty obviously, if we are going to understand all of those claims about God, Jesus, and love we have to know what the word love means. Since the love of God, even the love that God is, must be the truest, most authentic kind of love. To know what true love is we need to know what God’s love is, with the understanding of course that since it’s God’s love we certainly can never understand it fully.

In our ordinary usage love means many things. Often it means nothing more than “like a lot.” “I love your new hairdo,” we say; or as I have said on occasion “I love my new car.” Sometimes love gets reduced to physical relationships. I hope it’s clear to you without my having to explain it that God’s love isn’t any of those things. No, God’s love is much deeper, more powerful, and more authentic than any of those superficial or distorted meanings of love.

Which is all very well and good, but it doesn’t tell us what God’s love really is. Fortunately the Bible tells us what true love is, what the love that is God is. St. Paul does it in the passage we just heard from 1 Corinthians. In the book we’re reading in the 9 am group Thomas Merton says that when he was in school in England a chaplain tried to convince the students that 1 Corinthians 13 means everything that the English elite mean when they call a chap a gentleman. That’s utter nonsense of course. 1 Corinthians 13 means nothing of the sort. I means a whole lot more than that, thanks be to God.

Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, which we just heard all of, is Paul’s great ode to love. This meditation on love of Paul’s has a couple of different parts to it, and I think they’re worth looking at rather closely. He starts by saying that anything that might otherwise be a great virtue is worthless is it does not include love. Even if I have faith that can move mountains, he says, but don’t have love, I am nothing. If I give everything I have to the poor but don’t do it out of love, Paul says, it means nothing. Even if I sacrifice my life but don’t do it from love, it’s worthless. For Paul, love is what makes anything moral. It is what makes any act virtuous. Any act done without it is neither moral nor virtuous.

OK, but while that may tell us something of the value of love, it doesn’t tell us what that love is. So Paul has some really powerful things to say about that next. Love is patient and kind. It envies nothing. It doesn’t boast, it is not proud. It is not self-seeking. Love is not easily angered and doesn’t hold a grudge. It is glad of truth not falsehood. It protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres, and never fails. Quite a list isn’t it? Pretty clearly it is, but what does it all mean? How are we to understand this love for our own lives? Is there something about it that holds all those things Paul says about it together? I think that there is, so let me take a shot at explaining what I think that thing is.

I think that the most central characteristic of true love, the kind of love Paul is talking about and the kind of love God is, is that it is about the other not the self. It bears with the other, being patient and kind, not demanding and rude. True love always seeks the good of the loved one above the good of the lover. Love sticks it out when it would be easier to quit. Love speaks the truth, always in love of course, as scripture also calls us to do. Love doesn’t insist on its own way, but always considers the other in every calculation.

Now notice one thing that Paul doesn’t say about love. He never says it’s about following rules. He never says that there are fixed boundaries around what is love and what isn’t, around what is acceptable love and what isn’t. Paul’s criteria for proper love are instead flexible and fluid. The question is love is one of intention and care, not one of conformity. The questions around the relationship between any people are not who are they, the questions are rather about patience, kindness, caring for the other more than the self, and whether the people in question are being truthful about their feelings and attitudes in the relationship. That is the kind of love that God is. God cares about creation not Godself. God cares about us not about Godself. God is patient in God’s relationship with us. God is not proud of being so infinitely superior to us but trusts us and perseveres in endless love for us. 

1 Corinthians 13 isn’t in the lectionary readings for today, the first Sunday of Lent. Luke’s version of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is. Because I wanted you to get all of 1 Corinthians 13 I didn’t have any of that read in our service, but I see a close connection between Jesus’ relationship to miracles and his personal power on the one hand and what Paul says about love on the other. In his temptations in the wilderness Jesus could have used his divine powers for his own good. In that story Jesus is really hungry because he’s been out in the desert alone for forty days. The devil tempts him to turn stones into bread so that he would have something to eat. Jesus declines. He won’t use his divine nature to benefit himself. But later in his ministry he does all sorts of miracles. He gives sight to the blind. He makes the disabled walk. He calms a storm that is threatening his friends. He feeds thousands of hungry people with a tiny bit of food. Jesus loves other people more than he loves himself. He is God Incarnate, but he isn’t proud. He doesn’t boast. He doesn’t dictate to people. Rather, he heals, cares, lifts up, and helps the people he meets. He uses his divine powers for them, not for himself.

That’s how it is with true love. True love looks always to the welfare of the other; and it is in the welfare of the other that a true lover finds her or his own welfare. It is in the wholeness of the other that the true lover finds his or her own wholeness. That, I think, is what Paul is telling us. That, I believe, is what Jesus showed us. That, I trust, is how God loves. Not to meet any needs of God’s, for surely God has no real needs other perhaps than to love. Other perhaps than to give expression to God’s nature as love. No, God loves to meet our needs not God’s own, and that’s the love to which God call us. To care more for others than for ourselves. And it’s not that we lose anything when we do that, for Paul and Jesus both tell us that it is in furthering the wholeness of the other that we find our own wholeness. It is in truly loving that we find true love, and I don’t mean a sailboat.

So let’s celebrate love today; but as we do, let’s try to understand what true love is. It isn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling, although warm fuzzy feelings can be a wonderful part of it. It doesn’t come from any selfish desire to have our own needs met, although in true love our own needs are met. It isn’t there to build us up, although true love does lift us up. It isn’t there primarily to make us feel good about ourselves, although when we achieve true love (or as close to it as we can ever get) we do feel good about ourselves. None of us will ever love perfectly. Only God and Jesus do that. Still, Paul isn’t talking to God and Jesus in 1 Corinthians 13. He’s talking to us. He’s giving us an ideal, an ideal for our personal relationships and for our life together in community. He’s giving us a challenge. He’s calling us to our better selves. Today may we hear him and listen well. True love is what makes life worth living. Thanks be to God. Amen.

An Ash Wednesday Meditation

It’s Not Supposed to be Fun

An Ash Wednesday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

Feb. 10, 2016

Scripture: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I was powerfully struck by something I once heard one of my UCC clergy colleagues say. This isn’t to pick on him. He’s a great guy and a good pastor, but this one thing he said kind of struck me wrong. Along with another colleague he and I were discussing the season of Lent that would soon be upon us. My colleague asked: How can we make Lent more fun? I didn’t call him on it, but the thought that flashed through my mind was: Fun? Lent’s not supposed to be fun! But I get where he’s coming from. People, including church people, like fun. It’s easy for us clergy types to think that we’ll be more successful if we make church nothing but fun and games, to make it entertainment, so that more people will want to come. But here’s the thing. Religion isn’t entertainment. It’s a whole lot more serious than that. That’s not to say we can never have fun at church. I believe, and I hope, that we do. But God’s not an entertainer, and life has a whole lot more in it than just fun. Since religion is about God, and since religion is about human life—all of human life—lived in relationship with God, it too has to be about more than entertainment and fun.

Ash Wednesday is a particularly appropriate day on which to be reminded of that truth. The lectionary readings for the day that we heard drive the point home. The prophet Joel cries out: The day of the Lord is coming, and it is a day of darkness and gloom. He shouts to the people to return to God “with fasting and weeping and mourning.” He calls on the priests and ministers to weep and offer prayers of lamentation to God. Fun stuff, eh? Not so much. The Psalmist of Psalm 51, ancient Israel’s great prayer of confession, admits that he has sinned before God and done what is evil in God’s sight. He calls on God for mercy and forgiveness. He says that the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. More fun, what? Not so much.

These texts are pointing to a powerful but uncomfortable truth about God. God is gracious and merciful, yes; but God is also the judge and punisher of sin. If God is ultimate reality, if God is All and the Ground of All, then God is Judge as well as Creator. We believe in grace, yes; but grace does not preclude judgment. Grace is necessary precisely because we humans do that which God judges. Judgment precedes grace and is its necessary precondition. If we did not sin, there would be no need for God’s grace. If God did not judge sin, there would be no need for God’s grace. We often forget that truth. We don’t like to think about sin, especially our own sin. We want only positive self-esteem and ego reinforcement. We want to feel good about ourselves, so we kind of forget about all that sin stuff at times. We forget that human sin hurts and angers God and that that’s why God’s grace is necessary for us.

Well, Ash Wednesday is a day in particular when we don’t get to forget all that sin stuff. It is a day for admitting our sin, that is, it is a day for admitting our need for God’s grace. Indeed, all of Lent is a season for admitting our need for God’s grace. It is the season of preparation not so much for Easter as for Holy Week, and especially for Good Friday, the day that Jesus was crucified in order to show us God’s grace. Jesus Christ, and in particular Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, is a great gift that God gives to us; and God gives it to us because God knows we need it. We need it because of sin. However we understand it, we all confess that Jesus died on the cross as part of God’s plan for dealing with human sin. Or perhaps better, that God uses Jesus’ death on the cross, which is an undeniable fact, as part of God’s plan for dealing with human sin. God indeed does precisely that, and here on Ash Wednesday it is appropriate and necessary for us, necessary to our spiritual lives within the Christian tradition, to acknowledge that uncomfortable truth.

And no, it’s not fun. It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s serious. It’s supposed to be serious. But it a crucial part of the Christian spiritual life. Ash Wednesday, when we powerfully acknowledge our need for God’s grace because of our sin and our mortality, deepens and strengthens our faith, deepens and strengthens our spirituality, deepens and strengthens our walk with God. It does that because it brings us face to face with an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: We need God. We need God’s grace. Ash Wednesday forces us to admit that truth. Our need comes before God’s grace and is the condition of it. It’s not fun. It’s not supposed to be fun. But it is part of God’s plan of salvation. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Back Down

Back Down

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 7, 2016

Scripture: Luke 9:28-36

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It must have been quite an experience. For Jesus’ three disciples who went with him, I mean. Jesus took his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, up a mountain with him to pray. Jesus frequently went off by himself to pray, or tried to. A good example for us actually, but this time he took the inner circle of his inner circle with him. I wonder if they wondered why, but none of the three Gospels in which this story occurs tells us that they did. So they were up on what our text calls a mountain, although there really is nothing in Galilee that is all that much of a mountain by our standards. They’re up there, and the most incredible thing happened. As Luke tells it the appearance of Jesus’ face changed, although Luke doesn’t tells us how it changed. It just changed. He does tell us that his clothes changed too. They became “as bright as a flash of lightning.” This story is called the Transfiguration, which means the transformation of Jesus’ appearance, and transform his appearance certainly seems to have done.

But wait! There’s more! Two long gone giants of the Jewish faith, Moses and Elijah, appeared on that mountain along with Jesus and his friends. These men are immensely important. Moses represents the Law. Elijah represents the prophets. Together they represent all of the Hebrew Bible that had become the Bible in the first century CE. They come to Jesus. I think we are to understand this part of the story as a symbolic confession that Jesus is the culmination of the Hebrew scriptures, something the Evangelists certainly believed him to be and that the Christian tradition has believed him to be ever since.

A cloud comes over our three witnesses, which scares them a bit. A voice comes from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” It’s always struck me as really important that the voice of God in this story, for that clearly is who is speaking here, says of Jesus “Listen to him” not “Believe in him.” It’s not that we aren’t supposed to believe in him of course, but God here says listen to him instead. I think maybe we Christians should spend more time listening to what God says here, but that’s a sermon for another day.

Now, I don’t think I can even imagine what having such an experience would be like, but I do know that people of faith often have experiences that they name after the setting of this story. We call them mountaintop experiences. Mountaintop experiences are powerful, extraordinary experiences, experiences outside of our ordinary experience. People describe them as transcendent experiences, as experiences of the presence of God in a remarkable way far beyond our ordinary experiences of the presence of God. People often describe these experiences as being peaceful in a way those of us who haven’t had them can’t even imagine. They can be experiences of great joy as well as of great peace.

The Gospels don’t say that Jesus’ three disciples felt those things, but it hints that they did. The story says that when Peter saw Jesus transfigured and saw Moses and Elijah with him he said “Master, it is good for us to be here.” He doesn’t elaborate, but I don’t think it’s reading too much into the story to think that Peter said that being there was good because he was having a real mountaintop experience full of peace and joy, and a little fear too. In any event he says it’s good for them to be there, and he makes a suggestion. A rather startling suggestion perhaps, but a very telling one. He says to Jesus “Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

Now, the story has told us nothing to suggest that those three giants of the faith needed shelters up there on that supposed mountain, but Peter suggests building shelters for them anyway. I’ve always understood that part of the story to indicate that Peter wanted to stay up on that mountain. He wanted to stay in his mountaintop experience. Why else build shelters? They wouldn’t need them if they were only going to be there for a brief time, but they might well need them if they were going to stay there for a while. Peter is saying, I think, I want to stay here. I don’t want to go back down the mountain. It’s too good up here with my Lord and his two great predecessors in the faith. I want life always to be like this, on the mountaintop, having a mountaintop experience.

I think I get why he would want to stay up there. Mountaintop experiences really are wonderful. A powerful sense of the immediate presence and love of God is better than anything else any of us ever experiences. It is the experience toward which the mystics of all faith traditions aspire. Such an experience transcends all of the trials and tribulations of the world, and in those experiences we transcend them too. After such an experience ordinary life seems so, well, ordinary. So Peter, I get it. You didn’t want to come back down.

How did Jesus react to Peter’s suggestion of building shelters and staying on the mountaintop? Well, he didn’t. Jesus didn’t respond to Peter’s suggestion at all. None of the Evangelists who tell this story, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, say anything about Jesus answering Peter’s suggestion. In all three Gospels, Jesus just leads them back down the mountain. He leads them back into the world. He leads them back into the work of his ministry with the lost, the sick, and the suffering. He doesn’t say no to Peter. He doesn’t explain why they can’t stay on the mountaintop. He just leads them off the mountaintop without a word. It seems he didn’t even think Peter’s suggestion was worth replying to. He ignored it, and he took them down off the mountain.

There’s a great lesson for us in the way Jesus didn’t even respond to Peter but just took his closest disciples down off the mountain and back into the world, back into the work they had to do. Sometimes we’d rather stay on the mountaintop. We’d rather bask in the radiance of Christ’s presence in places set apart, in sacred places, in places of worship and prayer. Or maybe places of great beauty, like the mountains and waters in this beautiful part of God’s world. We’ll take marveling at a spectacular sunset over working with the homeless any day, but here’s the thing. Jesus took the disciples back down the mountain. He took them back into the world, not even answering Peter’s suggestion that they stay on the mountain with words, just with actions.

Out in the world is where Jesus wants us. Out doing God’s work. Out serving the poor and the suffering. Out working for peace and justice. Sure. We’d rather stay on the mountaintop. It’s a lot more pleasant there. Life’s a lot easier there. Jesus knew that, but he also knew that Peter’s suggestion that they all stay there wasn’t even worth responding to. He lead them back down. He leads us back down. That’s where God wants us most of the time. Back down off the mountain. Out in the world, doing God’s work. Of course Jesus comes back down the mountain with us just like he came back down with Peter, James, and John, but back down is where we belong. So be it. Amen.

Who, Me?

Who, Me?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 31, 2016

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:22-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There’s an odd thing about the great prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It seems that none of them really wanted to be a prophet. When they heard God calling them to be prophets they all tried to get out of it, or at least many of them did. The greatest of them did. We heard one of them doing it just now in our reading from Jeremiah. Jeremiah is one of the greatest Hebrew prophets, even if he is called the gloomy prophet, which indeed he is. He lived and prophesized in Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege of the city in 586 BCE. He has the longest book in the Bible that is named after a prophet, and indeed in the whole Bible only Psalms is longer. We just heard Jeremiah’s account of God’s call to him to be a prophet, that is, to be one to speak words from God to the people and especially to the rulers. Jeremiah tells us that God told him that even before he was born God had “appointed [him] as a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah’s account of his reaction to that startling news is pretty understated, but I get the sense that he wasn’t exactly thrilled by it. He says “Ah, Sovereign Lord, I do not know how to speak. I am only a child.” He doesn’t tell us how old he was, but he pleads his youth in an attempt to get out of this appointment as a prophet of God. God, of course, will have none of Jeremiah’s excuses. God says “Do not say I am only a child.” God says in effect I made you a prophet, so whether you like it or not, deal with it. You’re a prophet, and a prophet Jeremiah indeed became.

In trying to get out of being a prophet Jeremiah is in good company, A couple of centuries earlier Isaiah had tried to get out of it too. In chapter 6 of Isaiah we read that Isaiah had a visionary experience of being in the throne room of God. He wants none of it. He pleads unworthiness. He says “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips….” So a seraph, a sort of winged beast that attends God, burns those unclean lips with a live coal to make them clean. Frankly, I’d rather use soap, but the seraph used a live coal on Jeremiah, which I suppose is more dramatic. After that when God asks “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Isaiah gives in and says, in effect, oh all right. I’ll go. Send me.

The greatest of the Hebrew prophets is Moses. He tried to get out of it too. In Exodus chapters 3 and 4, when God appears to him out of a burning bush and tells him to go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses, like Jeremiah and Isaiah, wants nothing to do with it. Exodus doesn’t quite put it this way, but I imagine his reaction was something like “Yeah. Right. Sure. Me go to Pharaoh? I don’t think so.” He pleads that he isn’t eloquent. God doesn’t care and sends him anyway, with Moses’ brother Aaron along to do the talking. God called Moses to be a prophet, and a prophet Moses became.

The greatest prophet of all is of course Jesus. We don’t have a story of him arguing with God about being a prophet, or much more than a prophet, but Luke does tell us that Jesus was thirty years old when he began his public ministry. I don’t know about you, but I wonder what he was waiting for. Was he hoping he could get out of doing what he knew God had sent him to do? We don’t know, but maybe. If so, he certainly was in tune with his great forerunners Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

Why do you think that is? Wouldn’t you think that being called directly by God to be God’s voice in the world would be a great honor? Wouldn’t you think that people would be lining up for the job like people line up for Powerball tickets? Why did these great prophets try so hard to get out of the gig of being a prophet? Well, I think it’s because they knew what being a prophet really meant. Moses certainly didn’t have an easy time of it. Pharaoh’s army, probably the strongest military force in the world at the time, chased him and his people through the Red Sea. The people turned against him and against God out in the desert, worshipping the golden calf and all. Moses died without ever entering the Promised Land of Canaan. I don’t know about Isaiah, but Jeremiah had no easy time of it. He was accused of treason. He was arrested. He was thrown into a dry cistern to rot. He got out, but that couldn’t have been much fun. He lived through hell as the Babylonians first besieged, then took Jerusalem. And of course we all know what happened to Jesus. Yes, he rose from the grave; but before that he was arrested, tortured, and hung on a cross to die a horrible, painful death. No, being prophet of God isn’t quite the thing that perhaps we’d like it to be or even think it would be. Prophets suffer. Prophets die. That, I think, is why Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and maybe Jesus all tried to get out of it. They all tried to get out of it, but here’s the thing. God really was calling them to be prophets. God was calling them to speak for God in the world and to do the work of God in the world. Eventually they all realized that they really had been called, and they really had to accept the call. We’d never have heard of them if they had not.

I know perfectly well that most church people don’t much like the idea that God calls God’s people to do difficult and unpopular things. I suppose God may also call people to do some easy and popular things, but I’ve long thought that if you think God is calling you to do something you already want to do and that you find really easy to do you may well be wrong about God calling you to do that thing. We’d all rather focus on God’s love more than on God’s challenge. We’d all like to say with Saint Paul that neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord and leave it at that. I know some of you want to do that. To be honest, I’d like to do it too, but here’s the thing: God’s love comes to us in many ways. It comes as forgiveness, encouragement, comfort, and support. It really does come as all of those wonderful things.

But that’s not all it comes as. It also comes as challenge. It also comes as a call to do things we don’t want to do. To do things other people don’t want us to do. To do things that will make us unpopular. Even to do things that can get us killed. God’s call to Jesus got him killed, after all. God’s call to Martin Luther King got him killed too, and there have been so many others. God calls us to speak for the voiceless. God calls us to love the unlovable. God calls us to welcome the outcast and make friends with the stranger. God calls us to welcome sinners and to rethink what we call sin. God calls us to oppose oppression and resist all forms of violence. None of that is easy. None of that is going to win us any popularity contests, or maybe it will but it’s a contest with only one spectator, namely, God. The world won’t like it one little bit. But if we don’t hear God’s call and respond, we believe only in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, grace that doesn’t cost either God or us anything at all; and that’s not really grace. After all, God’s grace cost Jesus his life.

Being a prophet isn’t easy. Being a prophet isn’t safe. And maybe you think God isn’t calling you, or calling us, to be prophets. The Bible disagrees. At Numbers 11:29, for example, Moses says “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” I hear Moses saying that God does indeed call all God’s people to be prophets but that most of us turn a deaf ear to that call. God doesn’t call us all to do the same things. After all, the Bible also speaks of many gifts from the one Spirit. Still, God calls us all, and God knows that answering that call often isn’t easy and isn’t safe.

So God does more than call us. We hear God doing that more in our reading from Jeremiah. When Jeremiah protests that he is only a child God tells him not to be afraid of the people to whom God will send him, saying “I am with you and will rescue you.” Few words to be sure, but divinely powerful ones. “I am with you.” That is God’s promise to us always. That is God’s promise to us when we respond to God’s call. It is the most important promise there ever was or ever could be. God is with us. With that promise we can do anything. We can do anything God calls us to do, just like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, and Jesus did.

God’s calling. Do we hear? If we do, will we respond? See, God really has no choice other than to call ordinary people like us. Who else can God call? All people are ordinary people. Yet some become extraordinary because they have ears to listen for God’s call and the courage to respond to it. So if you’re thinking about all this call stuff Who, Me? Believe me, we’ve all thought that. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Moses all thought it. I thought it when I heard God’s call to get out of the law and go to seminary. I was sure God had the wrong guy. Maybe you think God’s got the wrong guy or gal in you. Well, God doesn’t. God has you. God has us. Will we listen? Will we respond? Will we say yes? May it be so. Amen.