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Blending the Old and New Testaments During Lent and Easter: “Responding to ‘I Am Who I Am.’”
Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Romans 10:8b-13
A member of a previous church came into my office to ask a question about the value and continued use of the Old Testament. He wondered if there was any value at all in continuing to use the Old Testament because, as he said, “we no longer depend on the law to save us and since we are Christian……that is to say, we are followers of Jesus Christ.” How would you have answered him?
What I would like to do during Lent and Easter 2010 is to try and answer that question as we get a glimpse of Lent and Easter through Old Testament eyes. If we take the Old Testament and lay the New Testament on top of it I hope that we will be able to see that one resembles the shape of the other, as if tracing paper had been used. When we do that you will be amazed.
If you had a chance to ask God, "who are you?” what do you think the answer would be? Moses had a chance to do that one day when as he was tending the sheep of his father in law Jethro he saw a bush which was burning but wasn’t being consumed. He stopped long enough to check it out. When he stood near the bush he heard a voice calling out to him, “Moses, Moses!” Moses said, “Here I am.” God then told him to take off his sandals for this was holy ground. God then asks Moses to go back to Egypt to lead his people out of slavery to the Promised Land. In the course of his conversation with God Moses asks God, “what happens if they do not believe that you sent me?” Who shall I say sent me Moses asks God. God says to Moses, tell them that, “I am who I am” has sent you.
Now what kind of answer is that to a perfectly good question? I guess you had to be Jewish to fully understand that answer. What God meant was that you will know who I am by what you see me doing in concrete acts in your lives and in your history. Before it was all over the Jewish people saw what God could do in the lives and history of his people. Plagues and waters separating and manna from heaven and the walls of Jericho falling down are just a few of the things that God caused to happen.
From that time on until today people have come to believe in God not because we see the beauty of creation and have decided to believe in God or Jesus. No, we do not believe in God because in our imaginations we have a picture in mind of who God is and so we worship and believe. We haven’t drawn up rules for living based on what we believe to be a good rule or two. No, far from it we believe in response to God’s words and deeds, a history that is now passed on to us in scripture.
God’s acts always come first. We did not build our faith out of our own thoughts and desires. Rather we believe because we recognize that God has acted among human beings.
Paul in his letter to the church at Rome says, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, will be saved.”
Faith and salvation rest on God’s prior act in Jesus Christ.
You can see it is the scripture from Deuteronomy 26. Our scripture talks about one of the oldest practices and statements of faith found in the Old testament, probably from the 12th century BC. It tells of bringing the first fruits of all crops to the temple as an offering to God in recognition of the fact that Go is the owner and giver of the Promised Land to Israel. When the worshiper brings these first fruits, he tells why he is doing so because God has acted concretely in his life:
A wandering Aramean was my father,
He went down to Egypt and sojourned there,
He and just a handful of his brothers at first, but soon
They became a great nation, mighty and many.
The Egyptians abused and battered us, in a cruel and savage slavery.
We cried out to God, the God of our Fathers:
He listened to our voice, he saw our destitution, our trouble, our cruel plight.
And God took us out of Egypt with his strong hand and long arm, terrible and great,
with signs and miracle-wonders.
And he brought us to this place, gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.
So, here I am. I’ve brought the first fruits of what I’ve grown on this ground you gave me O God.”
What this man is saying is basically how God is described as acting in the lives of his people in the first six book of the Bible. What the worshipper is doing as he brings his first fruits is a response to God acting in human life. He believes that story and he responds in faith and practice.
Did you notice the language this man uses? He doesn’t just say thanks God for what you have done in the past. He uses pronouns like us and we and our. The Egyptians treated us harshly,” “and afflicted us,” “we cried to the Lord,” “The Lord heard our voice,” “saw our affliction,” “brought us out of Egypt,” “ gave us this land.”
God’s acts of salvation were done not just in the past, but also for each new generation of Israelites in the present.
That happens for us too. We have a sacred story of God’s acts of salvation in the past too. That story is very much like Israel’s story. Here is the blending. We too were slaves once…not to the Egyptians but to sin and death. God sent us a Moses too, a deliverer to bring us out of slavery too. That deliverer brought us to a promised land too. Our deliverer is named Jesus Christ. That salvation for us happened once in the past but also will happen in the future as Christ will have to forgive us, save us, deliver us into the future.
The Cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ delivers us from sin and death. You and I are on a journey from slavery to a promised land known not as Canaan or Israel but as the Kingdom of God.
So you see that story in the Old Testament is our story, too. It mirrors the story in the New Testament. If we believe that story with all our hearts and confess it with our lips and lives and act accordingly, we too shall be saved.
Two other things need to be said here. The worshiper in Deuteronomy knows the story. He knows his people’s history and how God has intertwined his actions in the history of his people. Because he knows it he can recite it and because he can recite it he can teach his children and his grandchildren.
I have note from my grandson Joshua framed and hanging in the hall way of our home. It states in the kind of handwriting and spelling only a four year old can put on paper the following message:
“God is faithful and Jesus is to. They are good.”
Only a child who has been taught the story can write something like this. It was simply a comment Joshua provided us one day when he was four years old, unsolicited I suspect out of the kind of joy a four year old feels when a child has heard the story from someone, probably his parents.
Do we know the biblical story well enough so that we can share it with others and particularly our children and grandchildren? If we do not know the story it stops with us. Perhaps during this Lent we will begin reading the story, a bit every day.
Secondly, our scripture tells us that the worshiper when he brings his offering, can “rejoice. Celebrate all the good things that God, your God, has given you and your family; you and the Levite and the foreigner who lives with you.” His worship can be joyful, because he knows the wonderful deeds that God has done on his behalf. The same is true for us. If we know what God has done for us, if we know the benefits of his deeds and words there is simply no other response we can make in the worship of our church than to rejoice.
In the words of our scripture for this evening we can rejoice because God has heard our voice, has seen our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. We can rejoice because God has delivered----and delivers us daily---from our slavery to the sin of this world and from the terrible defeat and that death would mean. We can rejoice because our Lord is with us here, accompanying us on our journey. And we can rejoice because there lays before us his kingdom of good and forgiveness, love and eternal life.
Thanks be to God. Amen
This sermon was written and preached by Dr. Jerry D. Bron at the Southminster Presbyterian Church, Gastonia, NC on February 17, 2010, Ash Wednesday. This sermon manuscript does not give credit for sources used so please do not use this material for any other purpose.
Blending the Old and New Testaments During Lent and Easter #1 Flash Drive
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