Don't Waste This--April 22, 2021

 Don't Waste This--April 22, 2021

"Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. For if the message declared through angels was valid, and every transgressions or disobedience received a just penalty, how can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? It was declared at first through the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, while God added his testimony by signs and wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, distributed according to his will." [Hebrews 2:1-4]

Let me put it this way:  if you get excited for the trailer, then don't talk through the movie when it finally comes out.

I was catching up on news the other day, and saw that there's a whole segment of the internet fawning over a new Marvel comic book movie coming out in the fall.  And generating the latest buzz over it was a new trailer for the movie--rave reviews from some, articles exploring and explaining every detail, and lots of people just sharing links with others for how to watch it.  These are folks who take their superheroes--and superhero movies--very seriously, and you can tell because they will savor those two minutes of clips from the movie, poring and obsessing over every shot, every camera angle, and every bit of dialogue.

And I get it: I've been excited about movies, too, and I've been known to geek out before a new entry in a favorite franchise comes out (Batman, Star Wars, and, sure, even all those Marvel movies get me excited).  So I know, then, that the trailer, which absolutely gives you a taste of what's ahead, is meant to get you ready to fully immerse yourself in the movie when it eventually comes out.  It would be grossly missing the point to get excited about the trailer and then ignore the movie, or talk through it, or stare at your phone during the screening, when it finally comes out.  By the time you're in the movie theatre (and here's me rooting for the day when we are all back in movie theatres for our movie watching experience!), you've now paid money to be there, you've committed to spend the next several hours in the darkened theatre, and you've arranged the sitter for the kids.  Don't waste all that by talking through the movie or being distracted, especially not if you were the one engrossed in the trailer when it first came out.

If that logic makes sense, then this passage from Hebrews hopefully will, too.  The idea is simply this: now that Jesus has come, it's like we've got the actual movie that the trailer was pointing ahead to all along.  So it would be a terrible shame to ignore what the trailer was intended to get you ready for.  And as God has spoken throughout history--as the writer of Hebrews put it before, "in many and various ways, through the prophets"--the expectation was that we were supposed to listen.  So, if we knew to pay attention when God was speaking through, say, the poetry of David or the visions of Isaiah, or the commandment to love neighbor in the Torah, well, then, how much more should we be paying attention now that God has spoken to us through the feature-film we have come to experience in Jesus?  And if everybody knows not to talk through the movie trailer when it first shows up online and your movie-fan friend is streaming it on his phone, well, then, we had better not talk through the movie itself.  If everybody knows you're in for a shushing if you talk when someone's watching a two-minute trailer for free, then you should know to expect an even firmer shushing if you start blabbing loudly during the movie everybody has paid to see.

So what does all of this mean, practically for us, on a day like today?  Well, in a sense, it's as simple as this:  pay attention to Jesus.  In Jesus we get the feature-length vision of God's love story with us.  In Jesus we get the fullest depiction of who and whose we are, and of how God's Reign looks in real lived experience.  In Jesus we get the shape of what God's kind of justice, God's kind of mercy, and God's kind of goodness really look like--in ways that everything else before pointed to.  And maybe that analogy of a movie trailer and the movie itself is helpful to tease out a bit--because it reminds us that ultimately, the content of a trailer and the content of the movie are the same.  They are both telling the same story, but of course, there is a fuller clarity about what each shot or scene means in the full story.  That reminds us that Jesus didn't come to invent a new religion (much less to re-brand an old religion!), but rather that the same Reign of God was envisioned from the ancient commandment to love neighbor and cancel debts in the jubilee and the visions of lambs and wolves lying down together in the prophets, all the way through the Sermon on the Mount in Jesus, announcing blessing on the poor and calling us to love our enemies.  There's a through-line all along, centered on God's redeeming love that brings us into a beloved community.

Today, now that we have been given the fullness of the story in Jesus, our verse for today says, "Don't waste this!"  We don't get to say, "I don't really like this thing that Jesus says that challenges me, so I'll ignore this thing about forgiving my debtors." And we don't get to talk over his command to put others' interests before our own because we'd rather shout, "Me and My Group First!" to the person next to us.  We don't get to say that Jesus' love for outsiders, his welcome of the outcast, and his lifting up of those on the margins aren't relevant to us--no, he's the one we've been waiting to see.  He's the one who brings the story in its fullness.  He's the feature presentation.  We can't ignore the one we've been waiting for, even if sometimes Jesus challenges, stretches, or pokes at us.

You and I have been given an immersion in God's own presence through Jesus and his news of God's Reign--let's not talk over it, or miss out on the gift we've been given.

Lord Jesus, help us to listen to you in all your fullness, and to let our lives be shaped by the story you bring us into.