Fullness of Joy: Never Give a Second Thought about being Second Class

 April 28 2024

Matthew 21:18-22

         One of the things that you figure out pretty quick is that all of us make a lot of assumptions in life, and can we all admit it, a lot of the time we just get it wrong. Well, one of the assumptions that we often make in a church setting is that everybody who shows up on any given Sunday morning is going to automatically know how to pray. Prayer is just one of those things we do without a whole lot of thought and we never really stop to consider, does everybody here understand what is going on when we come to our time of prayer? What makes this such a big deal is that prayer is nothing less than our lifeline to God, this connection between the heart of God and our hearts, this is what prayer is supposed to be all about. So this very essential part of our relationship with God is kind of left up to each of us to figure out which is strange if you think about it. 

So as we try and figure out what prayer is all about, we quite naturally begin to make assumptions about prayer which we hope are true. One of these assumptions is that prayer is a lot about asking for healing for those who are sick. I mean, honestly isn’t this what we hear the most about when we come to our time of prayer? And while it is true that prayer is about crying out to the Great Physician for healing and wholeness when we, or those we love, are sick, what we cannot forget is that prayer is more than this. Prayer can be shouts of praise, cry’s of thanksgiving, wails of sorrow and  the pleading for wisdom and even so much more than any of these. The thought behind the original Greek phrase for prayer is quite simply an exchange of wishes. So we could say that prayer is sharing our wishes, longings, and desires with God and in return, allowing God to share his wishes, longings and desires with us. This means that as we share our longing for healing for ourselves or someone we love that we, in turn, allow God to share with us his longing for all of his creation to be healed and made whole again.

         While we do make many assumptions as we try and make sense of our prayer life, one aspect of prayer is never based on an assumption and that is the character of our God. You see, what we must be absolutely certain of when we come to God in prayer is that God has a plan to deal with all of the evil in our world and, second, we must know that our God is able to bring this plan to fulfillment. This is why we say that we believe that the best is yet to come. This is our hope of the resurrection becoming for us the reality we can live in, right now. When we come to our time of prayer what we need, more than anything else, is for God to keep our hope alive. This is why we pray for miracles, a work which proves that God’s good power still reigns over the evil of this age. It is in prayer that we abide in the Saviors love so that we can rise and go out to bear fruit for the kingdom. To bear fruit means that we are to have lives which our focused on the very best that is yet to come, so that we no longer desire the second best of this world. And when our lives are tuned toward God’s good future, this is when the Holy Spirit works in and through us so that others will be inspired to put their hopes in the very best that is yet to come. What joy fills our hearts when we come into the assembly of believers and get a taste of the indescribable goodness that God has in store for us. This is the joy that Jesus, in the fifteenth chapter of John, promised would be ours, a joy that fills us to overflowing. In this series of messages call, “The Fullness of Joy” , we are discovering how this promise of Jesus can become a reality for us to live in. 

Well, when we take a look at the last words of Jesus, we find that just before Jesus promises to make us people overflowing with joy he also makes another strange promise in the seventh verse of this same fifteenth chapter of John. There Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and I abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” When you hear these words of Jesus, I hope it is becoming clearer as to why I thought I should address the assumptions we might have about prayer. Isn’t it tempting to pluck this verse out of its context and treat God like our own personal Amazon. I mean, doesn’t what Jesus says here sound like we have just hit the lottery?It is pretty easy for us to hone in on that phrase, “ask whatever you wish”, and we become quite deaf to the necessity that such a prayer can only be fulfilled if one is abiding in Jesus and if Jesus is abiding in them. This is a pretty important, “if”, don’t you think? You see, to abide in Jesus means that we are resting in the certainty of the God revealed to us by Jesus. What we are certain about our God is that he is a God of justice. What we mean when we say this is that God is going to deal with all of the evil that runs rampant in our world. Our God does not turn a blind eye to all of the brokenness in this evil age. No, our God entered into this evil age and took upon himself all of our brokenness, allowing the brokenness to break him, his body broken, his blood poured out. Yet this was not the end because three days later, our God whose name is Jesus, arose, his body made whole and alive through the Holy Spirit so that united with him, we might be made whole and alive in the Holy Spirit as well. This is what it means for us to go from the second best of this world to live in the very best of the next one. If this is what we are absolutely certain of then this will, no doubt, affect the way that we live, as people who now live to tell the world of the goodness of our God, a God of justice who will one day set everything right. Does this certainty affect how we pray? Absolutely! When we pray from this certainty we have in the goodness of God, what we desire is for God to keep our hope alive, for God to guard our faith in the very best as we live in a world which has accepted second best as the best that its ever going to be.

         There is also something else that must be brought up in time of prayer which is vital to us being people whose lives are to tell the good news that our God is a God of justice who most assuredly is going to deal with evil and death, once for all. The importance of this item that must be on our prayer list is what Jesus teaches us in our scripture for today. It is difficult, I have to admit, to figure out just what this item is from this story which seems to be nothing more than a story of Jesus and his all consuming anger which was taken out on a poor, unsuspecting, fig tree. Yet as so often is the case, things are never quite what they seem because in this story, which seems to be about a fruit bearing tree, we also find that this curious incident is concluded by Jesus telling his disciples that whatever they ask in prayer, they would receive, if they merely had faith. Once again, it sure sounds like a formula for turning us all into spoiled brats who demand to get all that they desire. But, just as when Jesus speaks about prayer when he spoke about he being the vine and we being the branches, we cannot forget that what tempers this teaching on prayer is that Jesus says that to do so requires faith.This means that our prayer depends on the certainty we have that God is going to bring forth the very best for us to one day live in. 

What this means for us is that we cannot take these words of Jesus telling us that if only we had faith, that we can just ask for whatever we wish, and just like Amazon, there comes what we asked for, ready for us to take hold of it. No, when we keep this teaching of Jesus about prayer connected to this story of the cursed fig tree, we must understand that whatever has caused the anger of Jesus, this has a bearing on how we interpret what Jesus meant when he says to pray and ask for whatever we wish. It just makes sense that we should only ask for that which pleases God.

         Fortunately for us, the context of this story of the cursed fig tree helps us in knowing just what it is that upsets Jesus so that we can figure out what it is that pleases him. If we look at what is happening earlier in this chapter of Matthew, we find that the day before Jesus saw the fig tree, he drove the sellers and the money changers out of the Temple. Jesus was angry because the people of Israel had made the house of God into a den for thieves. What a terrible tragedy this was because God’s original intent was that his Temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. This was the vision which had been foretold by Isaiah. In the fifty-sixth chapter, he says, “…the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant, these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer which… is for all people.” You see, what we are to come away from this is that with God no one has to give a second thought about being second class. God is saying that his house is a house for all people, so come on in. Yet, when Jesus entered into the Temple, the court that God had designed to be where foreigners could worship was being used instead as a bank and a livestock yard.  Sounds like an ideal worship space, doesn’t it? Can you imagine how very second class it must have felt like to be anyone who was not one of God’s people?The authorities who allowed such a mess to be in a part of the Temple which pointed to God’s promised fulfillment were refusing to accept this idea that with God no one has to give a second thought about being second class. 

         The story that the people of Israel told themselves was that they were God’s special people to the exclusion of others, and of course, this story affected every aspect of their lives. They did not have to tell their story because the way that they lived their lives, the way they interacted with those around them, the manner in which they worshipped, even, spoke volumes about what they hoped the future was going to look like. When we know that the future will be the very best the world has ever known, it is easy to figure out that for the people of God, the very best was a world was a world without all those they held to be second class. What could possibly be wrong with treating others like second class people just so you can write them off in the end? I mean why does such thinking matter so much to God? It matters because if those called the people of God hold that some people are second class and can be written off in the end, then God can no longer be considered to be a God of justice. You see, the very same blood flows through all people, as Paul puts it in the seventeenth chapter of Acts. This means that what God does for one person he must do for every person, otherwise he no longer can be considered to be a just God. Think about it: Why bother to pray to God if he is a God who picks and chooses just who it is that he will claim as his own? Can you get how profoundly important it is that everyone knows that with our God no one has to give a second thought about being a second class person. Otherwise, if it is alright for us to consider some to be second class citizens then what we are telling the world is that God is alright with a world with second class people in it. But this is not who are God is, no, our God is the one that no one ever has to give a second thought about being second class. If this is not who our God is then he would not be a God who we can believe in let alone pray to.

         When we realize how the people of Israel had told the people of the nations that they were second class by their disrespect of their worship area then the anger of Jesus becomes understandable. You see, what God had expected from his people is found in the tenth verse of the ninth chapter of Hosea. There we hear God say, “Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel. Like the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season, I saw the fathers of Israel.”  When God had first begun his relationship with Israel, he enjoyed his life with the people he called his own, just as much as we enjoy that first taste of strawberry shortcake. They had been second class slaves who had been rescued by the God who holds that no one is second class in his sight. God hoped that his people would be those who treated others like he had treated them yet how quickly they forgot where they had come from.They ended up having no trouble putting the people of the nations right where they had come from, in second class. So when Jesus went looking for figs hoping to find the first of those delicious fruits and he came away empty, how could he not think about his experience in the Temple?  Jesus went looking for lives that bore fruit, lives which witnessed to the goodness and justice of God, lives that treated no one as second class but he came up empty, just as he had come up empty with that poor fig tree. You see, Jesus was upset that the reason why God’s own people had not bore fruit was that they could not give up their need for second class. The question this poses to us, then, is this: can we let go of our need for second class? Are we indeed ready to let our lives tell the story of the God who loves us, giving his own Son, the very best, so that we might never give a second thought about being second class? If this is our wish, then our wish, our prayer, must be that God fill us with his love. As Paul teaches us at the beginning of the fifth chapter of Romans, “our hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” What if this is what we wished in our time of prayer, that God fill us with his love so that we would never give a second thought about anyone being second class? What joy, to know that we never have to give it a second thought about being second class in the eyes of God! And  what amazing joy that overflows in us when the love of God is alive in us so that we never have to give a second thought about anyone else being second class. In this certainty we can say to the Temple and the mountain it rests upon that we are done with them and the false message they proclaimed. With the Holy Spirit dwelling in us we are the new Temple because here is the house of prayer, the house which is for all people who come and are filled to overflowing with joy! They rejoice because they never have to have a second thought about being second class for here they find that the love of God fills every heart. To his honor and glory! Amen.