Every Valley – Ethics, Morals, and God

Genesis 3; Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

When Saundra and I were first married, we moved into an apartment in Johnson City, TN, and then six weeks later, I found a job in Medina, NY, halfway between Buffalo and Rochester. I had to find a place to rent in a couple of days, and there were only a couple of homes available in the small town, and so I found a small farmhouse a couple miles outside of town on County House Road beside a 40-acre cabbage patch. It was the better of the two places, but it had its issues. I’m sure many of you have lived in homes or apartments that had issues.

First of all, we soon discovered that the previous renters had kept a tomcat in the house. At least for a few months, the weather was pleasant and we could keep the windows wide open – and did! The kitchen stove did not work – at all, and when Saundra turned on the electric skillet and microwave at the same time, the fuses blew. Not the breakers – the fuses!

But the most interesting part about the house was the plumbing system.

It seems that the house had three separate water supplies. There was the original 30 foot deep hand-dug well, lined with stone. There was a large basement cistern which received water from the roof. And there was a drilled well, such as many people have today - perhaps you have one.

But there was a problem with the drilled well – the well had so many minerals that the pipes and pump were clogged up with the minerals and so the water did not flow from the drilled well.

This left us with the hand-dug well, which ran dry from July to November so we had to have water delivered to it, and the rain-fed cistern.

Now to make things really interesting, the hand dug well was connected to one pump which supplied the cold water, and the cistern was connected to a different pump which supplied the hot water. And when you’d take a shower, the different pressures between the water systems meant that the temperature was constantly changing as first one pump and then the other kicked on and off. It was always easy to tell when someone was in the shower – particularly washing their hair - from the shouts every time a pump would kick on or off and the water temperature would change from 100 degrees to 130 degrees to 55 degrees and then back again.

It would have been so much better if the different systems had communicated with each other, but they had been piped poorly, and it would have also worked well if the drilled well had not been clogged up, since that pump fed both hot and cold water systems. But it wasn’t hooked up that way, and after about 8 months of tolerating this mess, we moved from the wilderness of County House Road to a modern apartment 15 miles from Medina.

The wilderness. Our readings today speak of a great savior who would come to Israel. They speak of a man who would come before that savior, a man who would declare the coming of the Messiah, a man would prepare the way. That man appeared one day in the wilderness and people began to listen to him. Would you have the guts to go into the wilderness, live in a tent, and begin preaching on a riverbank?

That man became known as John the Baptist – or more properly, John the Baptizer, a cousin of Jesus of Nazareth, a strange man, a man who rejected worldly goods and left the cities and towns to preach in the wilderness by the Jordan river. As Luke tells us:“3 He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” John’s ministry had three components.

First, John called people to look at their sins and to repent of those sins. Second, John offered forgiveness for those sins through the physical act of baptism – a way to wash away the sins. And third, John announced the coming of the Messiah and pointed to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

Sins. It reminds us of the apple from the Garden of Eden. It is interesting that sin – which Jesus Christ died to remove from the world – is the single thing that most people associated with Christianity. If you ask the average person what Christianity is all about, and whether or not they agree with Christianity, you will find that your discussion will center around what people think of the moral and ethical positions that various Christian preachers have taken. To the world at large – the most important aspect of Christianity today is the ethical and moral system of Christianity.

The world is filled with moral and ethical systems. There are people who believe that you should do that which gives you the greatest pleasure. There are people who believe that you should do that which provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There are people who believe that you should always be fair. There are people who believe that you should always help the weakest people, various minorities, women and children first, and there are those who believe that the world would be a better place if everyone would simply try to do what is best for themselves without forcing anyone to do anything.

And so, many people look at Christianity and say, “Christianity is just another moral and ethical system. What makes it so special? I disagree with several of its commands and so I reject Christianity!”

And what is the common Christian response? “The ethics and morals of Christianity were given by God, so we should follow them.” And our unbelieving friends say, “If God has that system of ethics, I don’t want to follow that God.”

And so where do we go?

Perhaps we need to understand the place that sin and ethics and morals has in Christianity before we begin to argue sin and ethics and morals with our friends.

Christianity is actually a very simple story. It is about God, who created a Universe and a race of humans and asked them to take care of that Universe. They were given all things, but were asked not to do one particular thing. You see, they were given a wonderful home, abundant food, a pleasant eternal life if they would simply obey the One who created them.

Gen 3:6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Adam and Eve chose to disobey by eating the wrong apple, and then they were kicked out of their pleasant home to survive as best they could in the world, operating by their own rules.

In essence, Adam and Eve were given a choice – live by God’s rules or make up your own rules.

The world we see around us is the world that we get by making up and then not following our own rules. For nobody ever follows their own ethical or moral system completely. How many of you have ever cheated on a diet, have ever stolen even a pencil, have ever done something that you once said you’d never do?

Do you have any ex-friends? I think we all have people who were once in our lives and now we no longer talk much because one or the other of us hurt the other – usually we both were somewhat at fault if we are honest.

You see, breaking God’s rules – what we call sin – harms relationships. Sins are like the mineral deposits that clogged up the well and the pump and the pipes and the valves in our home in Medina. Every time we do something sinful, it is like putting another spoonful of minerals in the pipe system that communicates between us and our friends, our families, and our God.

Have you ever tried to make things right with someone? All the old things that were said and done get in the way. It is like the minerals in the pipes are clogging the flow of love from one person to the other. And if there are enough minerals, there is no way that the relationship can ever be mended, short of God’s intervention.

And that is what happens when both people ask God for help mending a relationship. That choice of both parties to ask God for help gives God permission to cut out the old relationship pipe and to insert a clean, new relationship pipe between the two of you, which allows the love to flow again. Don’t you have someone where you’d like God to put a clean new relationship pipe into place?

But what place does the Christian ethical system have in the scheme of things?

What most people miss is this: Christian ethics and morals is almost the last thing about Christianity. It isn’t the core of Christianity – it isn’t even an important part of Christianity. It is what we get when we have already made a full and complete commitment to following Jesus Christ and practiced it for several years.

Imagine, if you will, an apple? An apple has an outer protective skin, a wonderful sweet and sour fruity part, and a tough core with seeds in the middle.

To an apple tree, the important parts are the seeds. If the seeds end up in good soil, a new tree will grow. The tough core protects the seeds, while the fruity part is what is important to and attracts the deer, the horses, the people who will spread the seeds. And the outer skin is what protects the good fruity part from damage by insects and rot. Without that outer skin, the fruit would quickly rot.

And so it is about Christianity. The outer skin of the ethical and moral system protects from rot the wonderful fruity part of Christianity, the joy, the relationships with God, Christ, and Holy Spirit, and with other people who have those relationships, other Christians. But inside that joy and those relationships is a tough core, a series of understandings and beliefs about who God is, what God desires of people, and what the purpose of life is all about, what we call theology. It doesn’t taste very good and can be tough to swallow, but it is important to allow us to enjoy the fruity part of Christianity.

And in the middle of Christianity is that seed, the Gospel, the seed of the new life which comes when we accept that God does not hate us, but actually loves us intensely, when we accept that Christ did not come to earth to condemn us, but to save us, when we accept that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believe in Him will not perish, but have eternal life."

Remember that Eve saw that the apple was good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom? The skin is not what we desire in the apple, but many people are taken in by the pleasing skin of the Red Delicious, the common apple found in the supermarkets, which has a tough but shiny skin, and disguises a horrible tasting inside which will feed you.

Instead, look at the skin of a Romney Golden Delicious found at a roadside stand or on your own apple tree, which isn’t that attractive, may have blotches which turn us off, but which contains a most wonderful tasting fruit. Do not fall for systems which have what appear to be beautiful moral systems but do not fill you with good spiritual nutrients and a good tasting method of reaching God who is the source of wisdom.

You see, a good skin must be both attractive and be a tough protective coating, yet not be too tough or you can’t get past it, nor too weak, or it does not protect the fruit. Like the Golden Delicious, Christianity’s moral and ethical system is balanced – tough, yet at first glance it does not appear as beautiful as some systems. But as we look at those blotches and dots, we see that there is a deeper beauty there, places where the skin has protected and healed itself without damaging the fruit.

But above all, remember that the moral and ethical system of Christianity is nearly the last part we truly learn about Christ. What is far more important is that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Christ is the Wisdom of God. It is through an understanding of Jesus Christ the living water, a deep understanding, that we come to have a healed life in this world and an eternal life in the next. It is through understanding God, Christ, and the fire of the Holy Spirit that we come to understand how the Universe operates, the Universe we live in, the Universe that we die in.

And while you – and I – may at times disagree with some of the ethics and morals of Christianity, I have come to understand over the years and decades that there are wise reasons behind those ethics and morals that appear to be blotches and stains on the face of Christianity. And what is more, I’ve also come to realize that some of the very things that once bothered me the most about so-called Christian ethics and morals – were based upon ideas that are not Christian at all, but were later additions, later ideas that men and women added largely to help keep their children under control, and over the years the guiding principle was lost.

I’ll give you an example. Years ago, some preachers saw the evil and destruction of gambling addiction. And at that time, gambling was mainly done by card games such as poker. And so the preachers preached against gambling and card playing.

Fifty years later, the skill-based game of bridge became popular. But by that time, in the memory of the people who had heard the earlier preachers, but not really read the Bible, they only remembered: Don’t play cards. And so they frowned upon playing the game of bridge, a skill-based card game which is every bit as dependent upon skill as chess is. The real principle – don’t gamble – had been lost.

And in some cases, they were the teachings of a very few men and women, and had become noticeable because some Hollywood movie brought the teaching in front of their audience. Some of you may remember the movie “Footloose” in which a pastor preaches against dancing – any dancing. Yet we know that David danced before the Lord when the Ark of the Covenant was brought to town.

And so, it is important to look at what you think Christianity teaches very carefully, reading the Bible and asking questions, before concluding that a particular rule or declaration of good or bad is a “Christian” rule. You may find that that Christian rule is not so hard and fast – and is, in fact, only the rule of a particular denomination.

Let me give you another example. When I was a teenager, there was a great debate in the church. The issue was very simple – one group of people maintained that Christianity taught that women must not wear slacks or blue jeans, but only dresses and long skirts. Another group disagreed. And in some churches, the argument still goes on. But look around you today. Some women here today are wearing skirts, some dresses, some slacks, and some blue jeans, and all of them are accepted in this church.

I have seen this carried to the extreme. In some independent churches, the elders have decided that a proper church must never have a kitchen because no church in the New Testament is mentioned as having a kitchen, and people must never eat anything other than the communion bread in church.

For you see, those who see Christianity as a bunch of rules and instructions have missed the point. They are focused upon the skin of the apple instead of the fruit of the apple. And so here we try to be a bit different.

Our focus here is to help each person connect with God through Jesus Christ – they are given the seed, and then when that connection is made, to help each person learn to understand what God wants for them personally through the written Word of God – which means to read the Bible as people learn the core, and then we help them move forward through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the gentle whisper of the breath of God who speaks to us when we truly try to listen for God’s will, which is the fruit. And as they understand the seed, the core, and the fruit, they will develop their own beautiful, wonderful ethical and moral skins.

For truly, as a pastor in many ways I am like a water bucket bringing the living water of Christ to people. How much better if you were plumbed in with a clean pipe directly to the source of the water? I carry matches to bring the fire of the Holy Spirit to you. How much better if you were connected with a clean pipe to the source of the fire, like having a 2 inch gas line connecting you with the fire of the Holy Spirit?

For Christ - who IS the living, breathing Word of God – and the Holy Spirit have indeed come to us – and will one day come to all people. The clean pipe is laid and ready to be connected on your end. And when the living water of Christ and the fire of the Spirit arrive, they clean us up, purifying us as we trust and listen. As Malachi said:

2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.

To be righteous, read the Word of God, follow Christ – the living Word of God, and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This will lead you to become “acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.”

And most importantly, we understand that we cannot set rules for another who is not our child, that we cannot tell another what the right ethical and moral decisions should be, and above all that we cannot be another person’s Holy Spirit – the Spirit must speak to each person individually, for that is what Jesus taught – He would send us a counselor, the Holy Spirit, to guide us into all truth. We must grow our own protective ethical and moral skin from the Word of God and the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

And that, my friends, is our ethical and moral system: To do what the Word of God and the Holy Spirit of God guide us to do rather than attempt to lay out a specific set of do's and don'ts. Let the seed of the Gospel and the core of theology develop through the fruit of Christian joy and relationships a wonderful skin of morals and ethics. And if we do that, we will be the most respected people in the world – and will be told one day by God: “Well done, good and faithful servant."

If you are struggling with an ethical or moral dilemma, a problem which you cannot easily solve, begin to find a solution today by praying, asking God for guidance, and then listening for an answer over the next few hours in Sunday school, in the reading of Scripture, and in simply sitting in silence listening... listening... listening, and asking God to speak to you.