An Unlikely Savior: The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” This is how JRR Tolkien begins his book The Hobbit. If you’re familiar with the Lord of the Rings series, you know that hobbits were a kind of creature who enjoyed comfort, who desired to enjoy a quiet, peaceful life away from any disruption or adventure. But it’s precisely out of this hobbit hole described at the beginning of The Hobbit that Gandalf the wizard calls Bilbo Baggins, a small, timid creature to an adventure. And then later, Gandalf returns to call Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo on an adventure to save Middle Earth by destroying the ring of power. One of the reasons the Lord of the Rings series is so lovable is precisely because the heroes are so unexpected.

Last week, we talked about the conclusion of the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. And our big take away was that God saved Joseph from his brothers and from his imprisonment in order to save the people of Egypt, to save his brothers, and to preserve the line of Abraham from which God brought us the Messiah. And so we talked about how Joseph anticipates the story of Jesus but we also talked about how it’s our story: how God saved us through from ourselves and from the devil so that we might be instruments that bring his salvation out into the world. I want to drill down a little on this principle that we are saved to save this week by looking the kind of saviors he uses and the kind of savior he is. What I think we find when we contemplate this is that the kind of saviors God chooses tend to be those we least expect.

Today, we see the story of an unlikely savior in the story of Moses. Born to an enslaved and oppressed people, he was born under a sentence of death due to Pharaoh’s tyrannical and monstrous policy of murdering Hebrew boys. But, as we saw, his mother saved him by constructing a basket and placing him afloat in it on the Nile. Now I’ll give you a guess, the Hebrew word used for “basket” in this story, you know what it is? It’s the same word that’s used for the “ark.” From there, the story of Moses is filled with irony. He becomes a member of the royal house of Egypt when Pharaoh’s daughter finds him in the basket (I like to read this action as a protest against her father’s inhumane practice). Even after Moses stands up for one of his fellow Hebrews who was being savagely beaten by an Egyptian, note that he lacks the self-confidence and leadership ability to garner any support—even his own people who he just defended reject him. And so Moses flees into the wilderness, knowing that Pharaoh was seeking to kill him. There are some other reasons the biblical narrative gives us to be suspicious of Moses’ ability to lead. For example, when he gets to the Burning Bush in Exodus chapter 3, his resistance to obeying God seems to be grounded in his lack of confidence in his speech. An old Jewish interpretation tells us the reason for this is that Moses had a speech impediment. We can’t be sure. But the point remains: if you were drafting a team of leaders, Moses was probably someone you’d leave off. But, at the end of the reading, we see that Moses begins to be used by God in the way he acts on behalf of the daughters of Reuel in saving them from the abusive shepherds.

In Galatians 4:4-5, St. Pauls states, “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” God’s plan culminates in the sending of himself. But Jesus was not the military deliverer many of the Jews who lived at the time expected him to be. They wanted to be free from Roman occupation and here is a carpenter from the backwater town of Nazareth who gets himself executed by the Romans. There have been many great figures in history and what we tend to be drawn towards are those who accumulated great power: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and various Roman emperors, Hannibal Barca, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and so many others. Napoleon’s own words admitted that, as amazing as these human accomplishments were, Jesus is greater, saying, “Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him.” Jesus didn’t come in power with fanfare. God was born in a manger in an occupied land to a working class family. And even as he grew, he was, from the outside, seemingly unremarkable. Look at who his disciples were: a bunch of blue collar workers who wouldn’t have been able to pass the canonical exams to make it in the rabbinical schools of their day. These are the men who became the first bishops, used by God to grow the Church. And of course, the story of Christ culminates in what looks like a total defeat wit the crucifixion, but in God’s economy, that defeat is actually a victory in which death is trampled by death. Jesus may not have been the savior we would have created in our minds (and for many people, the message of Jesus is a stumbling block), but he is God and he is our Savior, even if we wouldn’t have expected it.

Their story is Christ’s story which is our story. If it’s true that God uses unlikely saviors, then that applies to us too. I heard a great saying this week while I was in class up at St. Mary’s. A fellow student said “Israel wasn’t chosen by God in the Old Testament because they were special; they were special because God chose them.” Not only is that true of the Old Testament, it’s true of us because the Church is Israel. We weren’t chosen because of some great merit on our part; what makes us special is the identity God gave us at the moment of Baptism. If you grab a Book of Common Prayer in front of you, turn to page 577. What’s the first question in the Catechism? “What is your name?” The reason the Catechism begins this way is because the child’s name is given at Baptism. “Name this child,” we asked Stephanie and Colby earlier. Francis’ name is intricately tied to this moment in which God placed an indelible mark on his soul that made him a Christian. We’re not baptized when we have it have it all together. Quite the opposite! We’re baptized when we realize that “there is no health in us,” as the Prayer Book says. Baptism is a radical statement that we are insufficient of ourselves to save ourselves. And so we see that the Church is made up of redeemed sinners. We can think of the great saints of the Church: many of them were the last ones you would expect to do the great things God called them to do. Our own patron, St. Paul, was a persecutor of Christians and he became responsible for writing more of the New Testament than any other author. You can think about St. Augustine, a hedonist who resisted Christianity until his conversion. God uses people we wouldn’t expect…and we are some of those people he uses because we have been united to Christ.

What this all means is that God often works in the places we don’t expect him to. Our tendency is to look at respectable people, people who are successful, and we think “Oh God has blessed that!” But when we do that, we might overlook a Joseph languishing in prison or a Moses, fleeing out into the desert, or a Savior born in a humble manger. The challenge for us, especially in a world that so highly values the appearance of having it all together, is to look for God in those places where we might not expect him and in people we may not expect to be used by God. Even in people who aren’t there yet, we can see the potential of what they can be. Just like God loved us while we were yet sinners, we can, with God’s grace, love others into being lovable. And we do that when we pray for them. I mean really pray for them. Some people rub us the wrong way—I’ve mentioned before my mom calls these sandpaper people who God places in our lives to sand off our rough edges. If we pray for them though, those flaws, perceived or actual, begin to melt away in the purging fire of God’s presence. And as they become more lovable to us, we begin to really and actually will their good, wanting what’s best for them, desiring to see them flourish by God’s grace to the fullest extent of their potential. And, parallel to these practices, we can see them through the cross: Our Lord and Savior died for them so how could we write them off?

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.