Scripture lessons like the ones we just heard are the stories of Our God reaching down into the lives of His chosen people. His Grace, and Blessing to a people who truly didn’t understand the gift that they were receiving. A people that had done nothing to deserve this grace. God didn’t wait for a change of heart from His people; He made the first move.

Come let us imagine that night with Jesus and the disciples as they enter the upper room for their Passover meal. Jesus had sent the disciples ahead to make the preparations. They assumed it would be like the other Passover meals that they had shared with Him in the past. Little did they know, this Passover meal would be different, much different. It would be the last meal with Jesus before He went to the cross. 

Caesarea Maritima was a fabulous city built by Herod the Great – the Herod that was the King of Judea when Jesus was born. It – not Jerusalem – was the capital of the Roman province of Judea. It sits right on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, and Herod built the first man-made harbor there. The trading of goods and flow of people all came through it.

It had a large outdoor theater, a hippodrome where they would have chariot races and gladiator fights, and numerous temples including one to Emperor Tiberius. And Herod built his palace on a promontory reaching out into the Mediterranean, with the sea on three sides. He also had a large freshwater swimming pool in the middle of it. Very impressive.

 Of all our modes of transportation, trains are unique: they go where the tracks take them, by design, not merely by schedule. The tracks set where they go. Freight trains, Amtrak, commuter railroads, subways, even streetcars go where they go. I’m not talking about schedules, planes and buses run on schedules. I mean the rails. They run on tracks. Those tracks are necessarily parallel. They go to the same places, but they remain distinct. And the cargo or the people go with them.

Jesus’s life has two distinct and related themes that run parallel, as straight and true as railroad tracks. One rail is the Kingdom of God. That is the culmination of God’s will. The other is the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, who came into the world to accomplish his Father’s will. That is the culmination of Jesus’s will, which is his own and is aligned perfectly with his Father’s will. The Kingdom and Jesus at the Father’s right hand go together, parallel, forever.

Many Christians have been raised by Christian parents in the church and have known God all of their lives, which is a truly beautiful blessing. Many Christians come to faith through an adult conversion experience, which can be sudden or it may grow over time. And many Christians fall somewhere in between, with some mix of belief, sense of the goodness of faith and moral grounding, and a growing understanding of its importance.

No matter who we are or where we fit into that complex stew, there comes a point of personal revelation that Jesus is Lord and we’ve got to respond to him.

The name John Newton may not ring much of a bell with many of us. But if I say that he wrote Amazing Grace, we recognize him as having written perhaps the most beloved Christian hymn of all time.

Sometimes a full moon looks so big, so close, that it seems as though we could reach out and touch it: so beautiful, so close. Sometimes it is actually closer, but mainly it’s the atmosphere acting like a magnifying glass. But of course, we cannot touch it.  But a few people have. The first, of course, was Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” from Apollo XI. 

The world watched and everyone remembers exactly where they were in that moment.  Those of us in central Florida during the 1960’s had a front row seat. We could see the launches. If you went to Titusville or Cocoa Beach, you could feel the whole world shake.  I remember my parents getting my brother and me out of bed to watch Armstrong walk on the moon on TV.  It was exciting and is generally regarded as the greatest human technological achievement of all time.

But it wasn’t just a moment.

We learn almost everything in two ways. Our senses tell us about the world around us and we think about what our senses tell us. Now we can extend our senses with technology, sensing things we cannot see or hear, and we can extend our thinking using computers. But the harder we look, and the better we get at analyzing and thinking, the questions grow faster than the answers.

For example, we can look into a night sky and see far too many stars to count. We can see more in the winter, when there is less humidity. We can see more when there is no light pollution. We can see even more from a high mountain out west, where it is really dry and clear. The stronger the telescope, the more stars we see. The best telescopes are in space. They have no atmosphere, no light pollution.

This past week, our landscaper, Kevin, and his crew began to restore the plants that had been killed by our recent freezes, and trim back the burned portions of the ones that survived. Kevin does beautiful work. I wonder if he realizes how biblical it is! Adam and Eve’s initial job description is to till the land in the garden of Eden and keep it, just like Kevin.

Being created in the image of God means Adam and Eve are capable of seeing things as they are, imagine how they ought to be and then bring that vision into reality. A garden isn’t just nature. It’s nature tended with purpose, shaping nature, improving upon it.

In the Bible, most often we see God’s Word shared through patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or prophets like Elijah and Isaiah, or through the authors of the Psalms, Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. We note their authority in our service when we say, “The word of the Lord...Thanks be to God.” The witness is usually brought to us through divine inspiration: inspired human witness, inspired human writing, inspired choice of which writings to include, and inspired human translation.

Along with divine inspiration, we recognize its truth because it has also stood the test of time. God’s Word holds up. It applies today, to our own times and circumstances, thousands of years later, as it did for the writers in their own time.

But the way God spoke to Moses and Israel in this morning’s passage from Exodus is not that. Everything about this witness and the larger story from which we’ve nipped out these seven verses, is a whole other thing.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday.  Any Patriots fans here? Any Seahawks fans? Any “anyone but New England” fans? And “I don’t care”? Be nice.

By 10:00 or so, one team will win the trophy, many of them will quickly put on hats and t-shirts. Soon, they’ll get rings. Usually the entire organization, players, coaches, support staff and front office people, get rings. They are the team behind the team, after all.

The fans will buy their own keepsakes. I was eleven when the Dolphins went undefeated in 1972. I bought a book about that season. I got a jersey with my name on it. That’s what fans do, if you’re into that kind of thing. I saw an Indiana shirt here a few weeks ago after they won their college championship. Fans become walking advertisements for their teams.

Or, you might say, we become salt and light for our teams. Some fans are a bit saltier than others. Some shine more brightly than others. Note how that loyalty and visibility come easily to people. Now let’s look at how Jesus instructed his followers in the Sermon on the Mount.

When our oldest son was in Scouting for 10 years, I volunteered to do some fundraising for the Gulf Ridge Council.  I’d go to local businesses and say something like:

“I believe that one of the biggest problems we have in society today is young men.  Many of them are essentially lost.  They fill our courts and prisons, leave unwed mothers stranded and alone, and those problems get compounded over and over again.  Scouting works directly on that problem by helping to shape young men who will be responsible citizens and good fathers.”

It worked because it’s obviously true. Scouting is not as popular today as it once was and it has had its own controversies and changes with which I have not kept up. But who would argue against the Scout Law?