SPECIAL DAY: Fourth Sunday in Lent

March 22, 1998 - LESSON: Matthew 9:9-13

SERMON TITLE: Whose Will, will be done?

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Whose will will be done

My will, your will, someone else's will, God's will.

Whose will will be done?

How will this will be done?

I was evaluating sermons for a sermon contest and read one by the Rev. Mark Hatfield, So. Paris Maine

Rev. Hatfield tells this story.

Two Aardvarks, Art and Albert met at a very small anthill.

Art takes a look at the anthill and says,

"If we are both going to this hill neither of us is going to have a decent meal because there is only enough for one of us.

So why don't we fight it out and the winner gets them all."

Albert agrees and in one tenth of a second Art grabs Albert by the snout and slams him into the ground, swings him around and flips him fifty feet into the air.

On the sidelines other Aardvarks are watching and one says to the other.

"What kind of an Aardvark is Art?

The other one says,

"Well before he got that nose job, he was an alligator.

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Will may be determined by battling it out.

Someone is going to get beat-up.

More often than not we are the ones on the losing end.

There is another way.

In a March, 1992 interview on CBS News, James Buchanan was asked to respond to the comment of President Bush that he ought to get out of the primary race and throw his support to the President.

Mr. Buchanan said that he was in the race to stay.

In Mr. Buchanan's opinion, President Bush had abandoned his commitment to the conservatives in the Republican party.

Mr. Buchanan does not expect to win the Republican nomination.

What he does expect to do is to create opportunity for dialogue so that the conservative agenda will continued to be heard and hopefully carried out through the defeat of the President.

Buchanan's criticism of the President is mainly over how the social issues ought to be resolved.

This battle of wills may be settled politically.

But again one system will prevail.

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What may not be so obvious is that the above disagreements are based on ideological differences.

Ideology = orientation toward life and the world that serves to advance the interests of a particular class or group in society.

The picture of the world is presented that gives legitimacy to the cultural values and goals that are held most dear.

It is belief in a system that provides hope and guidance within the current circumstances of life.

In some way, many Americans equate American culture and ideals with the kingdom of God.

If we are doing God's will the nation will be blessed.

If we are not doing God's will the nation will be cursed.

What we are attempting are solutions based on:

the survival of the fittest.

political solutions based on party symbolism.

These are old controversies and ones that will not be easily resolved.

In some ways, they are based, on an understanding of the will and purposes of God.

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The dialogue between Mr. Buchanan and then President George Bush is not much different than that between two famous Congregationalists, Jonathan Edwards and Washington Gladden as they sought to understand and teach an understanding of God and God's will.

It was near the end of a long controversy in Congregationalism over an understanding of the will and purposes of God.

It was a clash between Calvinism and Arminianism.

A clash between pre-determinism and freedom of will.

The concept of omnipotent God who exercises total control and a God who exercises a self-limited amount of control.

Jonathan Edwards was the champion of Calvinism; teachings of God's sovereignty, original sin and predestination.

He wrote a book, "Freedom of Will" in 1754, and another, "Original Sin Defended," in 1758.

At the time he wrote:

"All people partake of Adam's sin because all are one with Adam. All are one, because creation has no existence whatsoever apart from God.

"God not only created the universe, he sustains it every moment.

"The existence of created substance, in each successive moment,...[is] wholly the effect of God's immediate power, in that moment, without any dependence on prior existence, as such as the first creation out of nothing."

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To help people understand Edwards offered this analogy.

"The color or brightness of the moon, as we look at it, seems to be a permanent thing as though it were the same brightness continued.

"But it is an effect produced new every moment.

"It stops and is renewed in each successive point of time; and so becomes altogether a new effect at each instant; and no one thing that belongs to it is numerically the same that existed in the previous moment.

"Even substance itself must be recreated every moment.

"It is this way with the color or brightness of the moon, so it must be with its solidity, and everything else belonging to its substance."

So he wrote:

"In this sense the continuance of the very being of the world and all its parts, as well as the manner of continued beings, depends on an arbitrary constitution. For it does not at all necessarily follow, that because there was sound, or light, or color, or resistance, or gravity, or thought, or consciousness, or any other dependent thing the last moment, that therefore there shall be the like at the next. All dependent existence whosoever is in a constant flux, ever passing and returning; renewed every moment, as the colors of bodies are every moment renewed by the light that shines upon them; and all is constantly proceeding from God, as light from the sun. In him we live, and move, and have our being."

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God is in control of all life and no life remained independent of God.

Washington Gladden in a 1873 newspaper editorial wrote:

"To teach that God is a being who has a perfect right to bring into the world a creature with faculties impaired, with no power to resist temptation, utterly unable to do right, powerless even to repent of the wrong which he is fated to do, and then send to everlasting misery this helpless creature for the sin which he could not help committing,--to teach such a doctrine as this about God is to inflict upon religion a terrible injury and to subvert the very foundations of morality. To say that God may justly punish a man for the sins of his ancestors, that God does blame us for what happened long before we were born is to blaspheme God if there be any such thing as blasphemy. To say that any such thing is clearly taught in the Bible is to say that the Bible clearly teaches a monstrous lie. Yet such theology is taught in several of our theological seminaries and preached from many of our pulpits. It is idle to say that it is nothing but a philosophical refinement; that the men who come out of our theological seminaries with these notions in their heads never make use of them in their pulpits. They do make use of them. They are scattering this atrocious stuff all over the land. They are making infidels faster than they are converting sinners. Men say, "If this is your God, worship him, if you want to, but do not ask us to bow down to your Moloch!" Who can blame them? For our own part we say, with all emphasis, that between such a theology as this and atheism we should promptly choose the latter."

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Religion is not free from ideologies.

We are still involved in this discussion.

Faith is the only bulwark against ideology.

Faith is living within God's will

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We cannot know directly what God's will consists of in heaven or how it is carried out.

We can know only indirectly, through Jesus.

God's will is revealed in Jesus.

Jesus conforms to and demonstrates God's will not because he is forced to, but because he in willing love unites himself to the Divine and seeks to will the will of the Father.

God's will may be known in the attitudes and actions of Jesus.

God's will may be known in the desires of Jesus for the people.

God's will may be known in the design of life for people that Jesus sets forth.

What we observe is that Jesus is not in total control of all of life, only his own.

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What occurs in his experience is the result of the choices that he has made.

These choices create a response on the part of others who either choose to act or to react to Jesus in a number of different ways.

God is not in control of all of life;

Divine grace is offered to those who choose to accept it and use it wisely.

When we pray, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," it is up to us to come to an understanding of that will.

When we pray, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," it is up to us to conform or not to that revelation of will.

We do realize that God seeks conformity not through force, but through persuasion.

William Agee in Letters to Father Flye written in 1962 observed:

"God is not a sentimental anarchist who decides to play poker when a bad hand at gin rummy has been dealt. He knows, sees, and cares what is happening; and the tests, the relationship of all of it to God, remain vivid and unfathomable; but he does not interfere with the laws of nature (which as their Creator he gave autonomy), or with the human laws of creation and self-destruction (ditto).

When you pray you are praying for understanding and power to, as best one is able, fulfill the will of God so that in all things his will may be done.

His will which through love and understanding is becoming our will.

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