Title: Provoking
Scripture: Hebrew 10: 11- 29
Thesis: Belief in Jesus as our high priest leads us to worship and to encouraging each other.
Antithesis: We can believe in Jesus as our great high priest and live our lives without changing.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer? In the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen
Have you ever watched two siblings provoking each other? They seem to know exactly how to annoy the other and what to do in order to get the biggest response. Two kids will be sitting in the back seat of the car and when Mom and Dad are busy talking one will reach over and smack the other or pitch them or take their toy. The second child screams and Mom or Dad turn around and tell them to settle down. That works for about half a minute and then you hear the first one yell, “ Mom make her stop.” Mom says, “Stop what?” And the child says, “She’s looking at me.”
When I read today’s scripture and I got to the end where it says we should provoke one another to love and good deeds, all I could envision was long car rides with siblings taking turns provoking each other. Somehow when we provoke each other, it is not usually a good thing. And yet that is exactly what we are told to do.
Last week and the beginning of this week’s scripture is the preacher telling us who Jesus is. Great care is taken to prove to us that our priest is in every way superior to the priests that have come before him. Jesus is the perfect priest. Unlike the previous priests that had to sacrifice over and over again sacrifices that were insufficient to the needs of the people, Jesus sacrificed once and for all. Because he gave the perfect sacrifice of himself there is no need for any other sacrifice ever. There is no need to sacrifice for sin because the price has already been paid for that sin. The law is fulfilled in Jesus and the first covenant has been replaced by the new covenant that fulfills the old and frees us to live in the freedom that is written on our hearts and minds.
So if we are freed from the condemnation of sin and the keeping of the law to maintain the covenant with God that brings salvation, what are we to do in response to the great gift that Jesus has freely given to us? We do not have to do works to earn our way into heaven. We do not have to offer endless perfect sacrifices to atone for our sin. We do not have to seek out a priest to enter into the Holy of Holy for us. Instead we are invited to enter into the sanctuary. Not the imperfect sanctuary that people make, but the sanctuary where God resides. We are called to worship. The response of the people of God to God’s gift of forgiveness and adoption is worship, entering into the presence of God and accepting the gift.
This is a foreign thought to most of us and countercultural. We live in a society that tells us that we must earn everything. We must earn our grades when we are in school. We earn the respect and love of others. We must produce in order to have worth and merit in our society. Our society tells us at every turn that worth is what we earn. It is shown in where we put our priorities and who we pay the most for their services. Daycare workers and nursing home workers are some of the lowest paid workers in our economy. Entertainers and sports players are among the highest. Babies and the elderly in nursing home can do little to earn money while entertainers and professional athletes bring small fortunes to those that employ them. We cannot imagine that God gives us grace without us earning it. We want to be in charge of our own salvation. If we sin we want to be able to do something to earn forgiveness. We cannot believe that all God asks of us is that we accept Jesus’ great sacrifice and then enter into the sanctuary to worship.
We come to the sanctuary to worship this morning. We come to worship in thanksgiving that we no longer need to earn our salvation. We come to worship in thanksgiving for the freedom that we live in as God’s redeemed children. We come to provoke each other. Usually we think of provoking another as causing them to be angry, and that is indeed one meaning of the word. But it also means to stir someone to emotion. We want to remind each other of the love of God in Jesus Christ so that we are stirred to love, to joy, to the peace of knowing that we are adopted into the family of God.
We also want to provoke each other to elicit a response. We want to invite each other to respond to the high priest by living lives of service in gratitude to Jesus’ action as the perfect priest. Here we share the stories of Jesus life so that we can respond to emulate his life of service.
We want to provoke activity. In telling and retelling the stories of God’s actions and interactions with humans we encourage each other to tailor our activities to the joy of living in the assurance of Jesus’ redeeming actions. We are assured that we can live with peace in our actions because Jesus has already perfected them. Our actions have a certain carefree abandonment because we know that our forgiveness from sin is already accomplished and we are now living in anticipation of Jesus calling us home to live with him in perfect harmony forever.
Our happiness is complete in entering into the sanctuary where we provoke each other to love and good deeds.
Let us pray. God of love and good gifts, help us to return again and again to your sanctuary to worship you and provoke each other to live into the freedom that you have granted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Amen
