The Power of God's Word

Did you read the article this week about the scientist who altered one gene in a mosquito and it had the effect of making it 100% resistant to the malaria parasite? Not 80% or 90% resistant, but 100% resistant. Mosquitoes have 14,706 genes, and yet changing just one gene has the potential of ridding the entire planet of malaria. Isn’t it incredible how one small change can make such a huge difference!

All of our lessons this morning proclaim the good news that God has the will and the power to change our lives completely as well if we are but willing to allow his life-altering and life-giving word to penetrate our hearts and minds and wills.
Take the example of Abraham and Sarah. In today’s lesson Abraham is 99 years old. Sarah is 90. For whatever biological reason, they are an infertile couple. And yet God promised Abraham many years earlier, and Abraham has continued to believe God’s promise, that he will have descendents as numerous as the sands by the sea and the stars in the sky. Today we learn that this promise is not just meant for Abraham, who fathered a child, Ishmael, by Sarah’s servant, Hagar. This promise of an heir is meant for Abraham and Sarah as husband and wife.

Our story this morning illustrates Abraham’s persistent and undying faith in God’s promise, even when he’s older than anyone else in this room. When these three strangers, who also seem to be one stranger, one of the earliest intimations of the Trinity in the Bible, when this divine three-in-one Being approaches Abraham’s tent in the heat of the day, he runs to them and encourages them to accept his hospitality. Perhaps they will provide the answer to Abraham’s perennial question of who will be the true heir of God’s promises. Abraham stands next to them as they eat, hoping that they will say something that might finally make all the difference in the world, such is his faith in the power of just one word, one phrase, one statement from God. And he is not disappointed. This time, the word of God comes to Abraham and Sarah, who is listening in the tent, and who laughs when she hears what God has to say, that she and her husband will have a child even though she is way beyond her child-bearing years.

What I find so encouraging about this story is the fact that God is not put off by Sarah’s almost scornful, if understandable, laughter. It is like the scorn that a scientist might have for a fellow scientist who thought he could eradicate malaria from the face of the earth by altering one gene of a mosquito. As the story continues to unfold after today’s reading, the Lord confronts Sarah’s laughter as the sign of disbelief and disrespect that it was. Sarah was understandably afraid at such a direct and divine rebuke, so she says and says, “I did not laugh.” But the LORD doesn’t let her get away with it. “Yes, you did laugh,” he says to her.

I believe that the Lord’s rebuke of Sarah was her spiritual gene-altering experience. Even though it stung to have her disbelief and her lie exposed, it was the very fact that the LORD exposed and challenged her disbelief that made it possible for an otherwise infertile couple to finally have the pleasure and blessing of a son, Isaac, a name which roughly translated from the Hebrew means laughter. God had the last laugh, and Abraham and Sarah were not too proud to join in and celebrate God’s wonderful and amazing grace as they listened and took in and fully absorbed the word that was spoken to them outside their tent by their three-in-one divine Stranger.

Let’s consider today’s gospel story of Martha and Mary. We are told that Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying, and yet the only words of Jesus that Luke records of that visit are the words that were directed to Martha, and not to Mary, presumably because they were the most important and powerful words spoken in that house that day: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Like God’s loving rebuke of Sarah, so do we discover that Jesus’ loving, five-second rebuke of Martha has a profound effect on her. Jesus’ rebuke changed Martha forever, just like the scientist who altered the one gene of the mosquito. The next time we encounter Martha, she is the one who comes out to Jesus after her brother, Lazarus, has been dead and buried for three days. Martha is the one who is eager to hear what Jesus now has to say. If Jesus can cut through all her domestic distractions and social conventions, perhaps he can even cut through the ultimate distraction of death. Perhaps even the dead can listen and hear and be transformed by a single word from the LORD. Jesus recognizes just how much Martha’s faith has grown, just how different a person she has become since that earlier rebuke, and so he challenges her faith to grow even more by asking her if she believes that he is the resurrection and the life, and that he has the power to raise up her brother from the dead, bringing life out of death by a simple command, “Lazarus, come out!” And she does have faith in the word of God to change everything, because she is not the same Martha who had once been distracted, thinking that somehow her service of the Lord was necessary or on par with what the Lord was prepared to do for her. As Jesus said, I came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many. Through me and my death and the subsequent gift outpouring of my Spirit, my words will spread to the ends of the earth with the power to alter every human being who is willing to listen to me.

This is what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Colossians. He is explaining to them that the gospel has the power to transform even hostile-thinking and evil-doing Gentiles into new people. Once a person truly and sincerely listens and hears and accepts the truth of the gospel, once they begin to take in the reality of what God has done in and through his Son Jesus Christ, they become a Christian, a copy of Christ, still subject to further growth and maturity to be sure, which is the job of the church to promote, but a new creation nonetheless, able to resist temptation like never before nor to be quite as lethal a carrier of sin in the lives of others, but rather a channel of grace, capable of infecting others with the same new life they have received just as Paul did as an apostle to the Gentiles in the power of the Spirit.

That is why listening for and listening to the word of God is the better part, because it is the very means by which our lives can be forever altered into the image and likeness of the new man, the new Adam, of Christ. The power of the Gospel is like the power of the BBC or Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, penetrating the political, economic, social and cultural assumptions of communism, and the deliberate jamming of the airwaves, to give the people behind the Iron Curtain a vision and a hope for a different life. The word of God will lovingly rebuke any and every false belief or practice in every person and in every society and culture which seeks to find life apart from God. This life-changing word of God will not be taken away, as Jesus promises Martha. Those who are willing to listen will hear and their lives will be changed, wherever they live, whatever their circumstances may be.

This sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to what he has to say, is what the monks call lectio divina, holy reading. It’s reading the word of God expecting God to speak a life-changing word, of humbly listening, hearing and taking in that word, even if it’s hard to swallow, like it was for Sarah or Martha, but accepting it nonetheless, chewing on it, inwardly digesting it, trusting that it has the power to remake us more and more like the person we long to be, like Christ.

So as you sit outside your tent, like Abraham, in the heat of a summer day, or as you entertain in your air-conditioned homes, invite God to be your guest by reading and meditating on a word or a verse or an entire book of the Bible, trusting that God wants to change you by his word even more that that scientist wants to rid malaria from the face of the earth by altering one mosquito gene, no matter how old you are, not even if you’re spiritually dead. AMEN.