August 13, 1995	A List of Things to Do	Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Luke 12:32-40

The other day my wife and I decided that we were going to try to organize our lives a little better. So, we went out and bought Franklin Planners for each one of us. With such a thing we can keep better track of appointments, jot down ideas we might get, keep notes of meetings that we attend, and so on. The Franklin Planner has two pages reserved for each day of the year. And on one of those daily pages there is a space reserved for something that is called "Prioritized Daily Task List." In that space you are supposed to write down the things you have to do that day and prioritize them according to their importance. It's a pretty good idea, really. All of us should do something like this with the things we think we need to do in a day. For, more often than not, if we don't do this we can easily end our days realizing that we were controlled by the things we had to do, rather than having the things we had to do under control.

Christians always seem to talk about doing things. Have you noticed that? And I suppose it all really started with God's discussion with Cain where God says: "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." Doing right things and not doing wrong things, are very important to our lives as we work at being God's people. We have the Ten Commandments, a list of "thou shalt 'nots'," for the most part – things not to do, as well as a few things to do. And even Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." In fact, the word "do" is so important in the Bible that it appears there 2715 times, or about twice for each page in the average Bible.

Through the centuries Christians have taken this pretty seriously. Perhaps that is one reason Christians have sometimes been criticized by non-Christians as being "do-gooders." Certainly, it is sometimes disturbing to those who like things the way they are to have Christians come along and stir things up. Christians have been stirring things up since the very beginning of the faith. Christians have always been involved in the act of doing. For, first of all, Christianity is not just a head religion – it is a body religion, as well. But, secondly, our activity is a response to God's love and acceptance of us, rather than simply a means of attaining salvation. And, finally, we Christians need to remember that there should be a sense of urgency in what God has called us to do.

Let's take a closer look at the first point I just mentioned. I said that Christianity is not just a head religion. It is a body religion, as well. Someone wrote a book a while ago with the title, "God is a Verb." The author was trying to get the point across that God is active. In fact, it is interesting to note that in the Judao-Christian faith you very rarely will find a picture of God. After all, how do you paint a picture of One who is everywhere? No painting could be big enough to contain even a small part of a God like this. And that is one of the things that separated the ancient people of Israel from the rest of the people living around them. Everyone else worshiped gods made out of stone. But, God told Israel not even to try to make any graven images of God or any other god, for that matter.

So, trying to visualize God's appearance is very difficult. God is beyond our capability to describe. For God doesn't stand still. God is active. Or, as he told Moses, "I Am." In other words, God simply is.

What a concept! But, believing in such a God demands our participation in what God is doing. If we believe in God, as we say we do, then we are called every day to get involved in God's life, just as God is involved in ours.

It was this concept that grabbed the prophet Isaiah. And we see it in our Old Testament lesson for this morning. Isaiah was distressed to know that many of the people of his day only had a head religion. Certainly, they had a religions life. They went through all the motions. But they didn't act out God's calling upon them in their daily living. They loved to burn incense at the altar, but would not seek justice, nor encourage the oppressed. The loved to celebrate the holy days, but would not defend the children who didn't have fathers, nor take care of the widows. They loved to quote scriptures and tell impressive stories, but in fact they had blood on their hands and bigotry in their hearts. And Isaiah told them to repent. Because if they repented, if the people of Israel would put their faith into action, they would truly be God's people, once again.

Truly, that is what God wants in our lives, as well. A couple of weeks ago, as you may remember, Linda and I went out to Washington, D.C. And while we were there we took a day to visit the parish we served while we were students at Wesley Theological Seminary more than twenty years ago. And so we drove across the Bay Bridge that spans the Chesapeake Bay, and went down to Cambridge and then further south to the islands. First we went visited the church at Fishing Creek across from where we had lived and then we went on down to Hoopersville where the second and smaller of the two churches is.

Now, it is amazing that even today the people in those communities still don't lock anything. We were able to walk right into those churches. And when we went into the Hoopersville church we stood there remembering how things had been there over twenty years ago. Memories of Chan Rippons, and Bubba Aaron, and Leon Lewis, and Teena Ruark, and everyone else there started to come back to us as we stood there looking at the empty pews. And the both of us laughed as we remembered one family, especially, who would come to church on Sunday morning to attend Sunday School and stay just long enough for attendance to be taken and then leave so that they could get to the race tracks in Baltimore in time for the first horse race. They wanted to make sure they got that perfect attendance pin on promotion Sunday, but they couldn't see how attending Sunday School and professing a faith in God had anything to do with how they lived their lives the rest of the time. But the rest of the church realized what they were doing and the lesson, as negative as it was, was not lost on them.

The problem, however, with a faith that emphasizes "doing" is that it can be taken to an extreme. The danger is that people sometimes put more emphasis on the "doing" than upon the relationship God wants to have with us. There are those who make up their list of things to do and things not to do, as if their very salvation depended upon it. The danger is in forgetting that it is by our faith in Christ that salvation is given to us. And that's the second point I want to make, this morning: Our doing comes out of our response to God's love, God's gift of eternal life, and God's acceptance. It is God's acceptance of us that inspires us to join God in God's work of creation and redemption and healing and loving the world. Certainly, faith without works is dead. But, works without faith is just as dead!

I have run into Christians that have gotten so involved with "doing" that they have gotten burned out. And, what's even worse, there are those Christians who put such an emphasis on keeping their list of "do's and don'ts" that they become critical and even judgmental of Christians who may not share that list, in spite of Jesus' warning about how we must not judge.

Nevertheless, and this is my final point, it is important that we take seriously what our response is going to be to God's love and acceptance of us. God calls us out from the rest of the world. And if we follow that call we're going to be different. We're going to be doing things that are different. The status quo will be rearranged some when Christians take seriously their call from God.

Our Gospel Lesson for today explains how serious we should take our response to God's call. Jesus told his disciples that believers should "be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning." He said, "It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes." Jesus said, "You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."

If you have watched Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, as well as other TV evangelists, you will know that there are quite a few of them who are enthusiastically predicting the end of the world within the next five years. And so their suggestion is that we send all our cards and letters in to them as generously as we can. After all, we won't need the money, right?

In a very real way this flies in the face of the scripture I just sighted from our Gospel Lesson for today where Jesus says, ". . . the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him." What we Christians really need to remember is this: If we truly take seriously what our response to God's call upon our lives, we'll always be ready. If we care about the needy, like Isaiah demanded his people to do, if we stand up for what is right, if we feed the hungry and clothe the naked and care for the sick, we'll always be ready. If, as a response to God's acceptance of us, we accept and love one another, we'll always be ready for the Master when he comes.

There is the story of a little six-year old, golden haired girl, with a simple, trusting faith. One morning, while a guest was staying in her home, the guest passed by her bedroom and noticed that the little girl was busily working in her room, carefully putting things in order for the day. The guest remarked, "Oh, how nice and neat your room looks, with everything put in order." The little girl's reply came sweetly and simply: "Yes, I am putting it in order, for Jesus might come today."	Amen.