Sermon Archive

We are taught to believe what we see and question everything else. Is that really the right way to view things though? When Elisha’s young apprentice fears for the impending attack from the surrounding forces, Elisha reminds him that the truest thing about their lives isn’t what they can see, but the things they can’t.

Wealth, fame, power, success, honor- you name it, Namaan had it. Unfortunately, he had one other thing too- leprosy. When a young slave girls suggests he go to his enemies God for relief, Namaan is desperate enough to try it. After learning some hard lessons about humility and how God works, Namaan finds healing- and the reality of the one, true God. Namaan’s desperation, healing, and eventual return to his home teach us much about God, our own story, and our suffering.

Sometimes stories in the Bible can leave us scratching our heads and asking, “What just happened?” The end of Elijah’s ministry and the beginning of Elisha’s ministry is full of stories that can seem flat-out strange. Some of those stories give us no explanation or means of understanding what is going one, but some give us an insight to how God works and what he intends to do through Elisha. From both Elijah and Elisha’s ministries, we must see that God is not limited by what makes sense to us or even how we might have done it. Instead, we must learn from a God that does things on his own terms for his own purposes in his own way.

There are two different, often conflicting views of life. One believes that we can write our own story and decide what our “verse” will be that we contribute to the world (see Walt Whitman). The other says we have no control of “who lives, who dies, who tells our story.” (See Lin Manuel Miranda). Who is right? What would you want your contribution to be? What story do you want your life to tell? What happens if your story is forgotten or told differently than you’d want? All these questions are at the heart of a bible story about truth, injustice, oppression, and the sovereignty of God- and some of the stories might just surprise you.

Oftentimes in life we don’t recognize the things that we need the most. We go through our lives thinking about the temporary, the urgent, and the things we “feel” like we need. The things that are truly most important are left in the background or completely unnoticed. Fortunately, God did not wait on us to realize our need before he sought to meet it. We may not even know what a priest did in the Kingdom of God, but it’s exactly what we needed and God provided it at exactly the right time- when we weren’t even asking for one.

Jesus almost never lives up to our expectations. That tells us more about our shortcomings than it does about his mission. Time and time again in the gospels, Jesus does things the disciples simply never saw coming. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story that makes a Samaritan the hero when just a few verses before, the disciples wanted to destroy a Samaritan village with fire from Heaven. Like the disciples, and like Elijah before them, we simply don’t/can’t understand all that God is doing. That’s true in our own lives, but it was revealed most clearly as Jesus made his way to the cross. It’s there that we learn to live our lives according to the way of the cross, a path we’d never choose for ourselves.