A reading from the letter to the Hebrews, For you have not come
to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and
gloom, and a Tempest in the sound of a trumpet and a voice
whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be
spoken to them. For they could not endure the
order that was given. If even a beast touches the
mountain, it shall be stoned. Indeed, so terrifying was the
sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.
But you have come to Mount Zion, into the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem, into innumerable angels and festal
gatherings, and to the assembly of the first born who are
enrolled in heaven, And to God the judge of all, And to the
spirits of the righteous made perfect, And to Jesus the
mediator of a new covenant, And to the sprinkled blood that
speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
See that you do not refuse him who is speaking, or if they did
not escape when they refused, him who warned them on the
earth. Much less will we escape if we
reject him who warns from heaven.
At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised
yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the
heavens. This phrase yet once more
indicates the removal of things that are shaken, that is, things
that have been made in order that the things that cannot be
shaken may remain. Therefore let us be graceful,
grateful for receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken, and this
thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with
reverence and or for our God is a consuming fire.
The Word is the Lord. Well, good morning, Emmanuelle.
We just absolutely always love coming back here to see your
faces, to be refreshed, to be filled by words, spirit and
sacraments, and to be encouraged and set back out.
Thank you. Thank you for letting us be here
with you this morning. As Father In said, we've been
missionaries in the Czech Republic serving young leaders
across Central and Eastern Europe for the last 5 1/2 years,
having started at college four years ago and a bunch of other
initiatives to help fuel the movement of God among young
people in Central and Eastern Europe.
Just to give you a taste of the sorts of people that we draw, we
have this rather small ministry team in Hungary that was just
starting out and doing. Evangelism and discipleship
working with local churches. And they had these three young
people that had come through had been discipled and they came to
us and said we we would love to hire them on as staff members,
but we don't have the capacity to train them.
Would you train them for us? And we said, yes, please, we'd
love to do that. And so for three years, we've
been able to pour into them and give them a solid foundation in
biblical training and theology and prayer and in.
Mission and all the while they've been able to remain
engaged in their local ministry, serving in their local youth
groups, participating in their broader hungry Hungarian team
and and one student in particular has has been a real
inspiration to me. Her name is Dorca and she is she
was 19 when she came and studied with us.
Started studying with us and as she started learning and
absorbing and. Being exposed to all the things
that God was doing. She would go back to her local
church and honestly, with a little disappointed, little
discouraged. They weren't being as ministry
focused or as discipleship orientated or as missional as as
she had hoped. And in these sorts of situations
it's easy for bitterness to take root.
But she took that as a call to action, and she decided that
with her small group. In the youth group, she would
get each of them connected to an older person in the church,
developing discipleship relationships.
She was going to start teaching about the mission of God and
encouraging this small group to reach out to their community.
And as she started doing that, you know what it started
spreading to the rest of the church.
Now 22 year old, 22 years old, she's graduated and she is
having a massive impact in her community but also across all of
Hungary, clipping people to. Join in God's mission.
We're so thankful for stories like this, for students like
this that we get to share with you because as our sending
church and as our supporters and partners, you get to benefit
from this sort of fruit. So thank you.
Now it's easy to tell the good stories, but especially the last
two years have also been full of challenges and full of fear.
Actually, just a month ago, and maybe it's two months ago now, a
few weeks before we were supposed to come over here to
the States, I was talking to my wife, Laura and I just started
shaking, shaking from fear, trembling.
Out of all the challenges that we are facing right now that I
don't see a way out of, we're looking for new partners in our
ministry. We need finances.
We need a house to be built. We need new students.
We need capacity and margin in our life.
We need our kids to be healthy. And as I looked at all of this
mess in front of me, I was just overwhelmed.
And it resulted in shaking, in literal trembling.
And for me, when I get in that in the zone, which doesn't
happen very often, but what it does, it's it's intense.
I get tunnel vision. I can only focus on the
problems. I can only see the out of my
fear, and it's hard to get out of that.
There's plenty for us to be afraid of.
In fact, a recent survey of American pastors, they asked
they asked this question. Do you observe a growing sense
of fear within your congregations?
And seven pastors out of 10 said, yes, there's plenty to be
afraid of. There's fear for our loved ones,
for our parents, for our kids, for our family members.
There's fear for our future, for the future of this country, for
the future of our vocations, for the future of this church and
finding a place. There's fear for provision.
Will we have enough? Will we have a place to call
home? We have a place to grow.
There's also a reason for fear for justice.
God, how long will this war in Ukraine continue?
There's also fear for the lack of hope that many of us
experience. God.
Is there? Is there a way forward?
And fear often is like this tunnel vision.
It it narrows our fro focus and it blocks out everything else.
And some of us seem to be more wired to toward panic and
withdrawal. And that's that's definitely me.
When I get overwhelmed and get tunnel vision, I I lock up and I
want to escape. Others of you might be more
wired toward anger, toward an outburst for the lashing out in
the face of fear. But either way, the question is
how do we have faith in the face of fear?
We all know that ignoring it's not going to work.
Just when I try to tell my wife, just think it's fine, don't
worry about it, just ignore it doesn't work.
Acting like it's not as bad as it could be is not going to work
in the long run, and we still have these real concerns.
These real needs So how do we cultivate faith in the midst of
our fear? We end our summer looking at the
book of Hebrews, learning to walk by faith, we're going to
listen once more to these ancient words, which have
something very real and tangible for us.
This morning, and in this text that we have had read to us
already, we are introduced to a situation that.
Feels very familiar. Fear.
And in this case, they're actually pretty good reasons to
fear. Let's take a look at our text.
If you'll open up your bulletins to page 10, we'll take another
look at this and be a little bit deeper.
For you have not come to what may be touched.
A blazing fire and darkness and gloom, and a Tempest, and the
sound of a trumpet. And a voice whose words made the
hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.
This, of course, is referring back to Exodus, to the mountain
of God, to the creation of the people of Israel, to the
establishing of the covenant that we heard also read for us
from Exodus 19. This place loomed large in the
imaginations of the Israelites. This is the place of Amazing
Grace and also amazing threat. After the people of God were
rescued from slavery, they were brought through the desert to
this mountain, to the mountain that was promised to Mount
Sinai, where God would take them to be his own.
And this is an amazing moment of grace where God says, I love
you, I want you, I want to walk with you, I want to use you, I
want you to be a blessing to the whole world.
But we're going to need to learn how to work together, how to
live together, how to love one another.
Because God is a holy God. He's the God of power and might.
And on the one hand, the people receive this amazing challenge
to be a Kingdom of priests, to be God's missionary people.
But also they come to face, to face with God's greatness.
Do not even touch the mountain. Don't come near.
Make sure that you're consecrated.
Make sure that you're in a in a place.
Where you acknowledge your distance between you and God,
and there are real reasons to be afraid, as we're warned in the
text from Exodus 19. One biblical scholar talks about
God's holiness as a sort of radioactivity.
Anybody seen the Oppenheimer movie recently?
So after the bomb, they developed nuclear power plants
and the. The thing about nuclear power
plants is that there's incredible power in them By
splitting an atom that releases exponential amounts of power.
That can be a blessing to so many, but just take a look at
Fukushima and what can happen if that energy is not handled
correctly. You can spill out and cause
massive destruction. God's holiness is the same way
they're do approach God with reverence and awe.
And with obedience, recognizing that this power is a blessing
but could also be a curse. So as Israel comes to this
mountain, Hebrews says that they could not endure this experience
was overwhelming. They couldn't handle the
tension, they couldn't handle the the real reasons to fear and
they got tunnel vision. Ian Moses says I tremble with
fear and the people said don't even speak to us, we don't even
want to hear. This is the first stop in our
journey this morning, The Mountain of Fear.
But thankfully, there's another stop as well.
Another mountain, but more importantly, a city on a
mountain. This is a culmination of many of
the author of the book of Hebrews, pictures and arguments
up to this point where our perspective is widened to see
the greatness of this place to which God has invited us.
This is not a place for tunnel vision, for fear, for anxiety,
for panic, but this is a place for awe and reverence.
This. Is the city of the living God
with angels and endless worship, where the Saints of old have
gathered with the Saints of new to the very judge of all, and
finally to the mediator of a new covenant, Jesus, the little
hidden in our English translations.
But it really does culminate like that in the Greek It it
leads, it it withholds. Jesus is named till the very
end, till this moment of a mic drop.
Jesus. Slowly but surely, the text
helps us to widen our perspective, to see the city
which we have been invited to, to which we do pilgrimage, but
even more significantly, to the one that is calling us and this
one calling Jesus. Offers two solutions to our
tunnel vision, to our dual response of either panic or
anger. In the face of panic, he offers
wonder. Our eyes are lifted to see the
bigger picture of God's renewal of all things.
And in the face of anger, Jesus offers forgiveness.
Says here that Jesus, the mediator of the New Covenant.
And the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the
blood of Abel. This is imagery from earlier in
the book. The blood of Abel calls out for
vengeance with the blood of Jesus calls out for forgiveness.
In all of this, what assuages our fears is not necessarily
where we are going, but to whom we have come.
And this is faith, is it not drawing near to Jesus?
So does this mean we just ignore all of our fears, Leave them to
the side, even the ones that are valid, Our needs for provision,
for safety, for hope? Do we just need to be more
optimistic, maybe than the Israelites?
Oh, it's really not as bad as you thought.
Yes, God's dangerous, but he also loves you.
It's Okay. Well, in verse 25 we are
reminded that there is still much to be alert to, but there's
a difference. We're not told to be alert to
all the reasons for fear, but to the one who is speaking in the
midst of our fear. Verse 25 says see that you do
not refuse him who is speaking. It's Sinai.
God was speaking to His people, exhorting them and warning them
they could not listen. Now Jesus is speaking to us,
exhorting us as well and warning us as well.
Will we listen? Some of His words might not be
comfortable like the ones that are quoted here from Hagai.
Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the
heavens. There is more shaking up to
come, but there are also words of hope assuring us that we that
he is working toward establishing that which cannot
be shaken. It says in order that the things
that cannot be shaken may remain.
And what is that which cannot be shaken?
It's God's very own Kingdom, verse 28 says.
Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a Kingdom that
cannot be shaken. This is God's Kingdom dwelling
in our midst and also still the place to which we pilgrimage,
the new creation of a world of beauty and order and justice
through the sacrifice and resurrection of.
Jesus, in this heavily Jerusalem which has been painted for us,
is a place to which we may come. Even now we're able to taste it
in our worship, in our obedience, and in our mission.
And all this hope leads us back to God.
Even in the face of fear, there is still much to fear.
After all, the text ends with for our God is a consuming fire.
But this fear is different, because it's not the kind of
fear that leads to tunnel vision, to panic, or to anger.
But this fear or reverence or awe leads us to gratitude and to
worship. The text says let us offer to
God acceptable worship and let us be grateful.
This kind of a fear leads us to an exercising of faith in the
one who is worthy. My encouragement to you and also
to myself. Experiencing fear walking,
trying to walk by faith. Is that in the face of fear?
Walk by faith by listening to Jesus's voice and receiving his
unshakeable Kingdom? Listen to Jesus's voice and
receive his unshakeable Kingdom. Have a couple ideas of what that
could look like practically for us this morning.
First, maybe identify your fear response.
Reflect back on the times where you've experienced fear.
Or maybe you're experiencing fear right now.
Do you lean more towards panic and withdrawal, or do you lean
more towards anger and lashing out?
Do you withdraw like the Israelites at the mountain?
Or do you become angry and cry out like the blood of Abel?
Ask God for his perspective. Ask God for his forgiveness.
Second idea for us is to listen to the voice of Jesus in our
gospel reading. We we He heard Jesus's words to
his disciples in the face of fear, first walking up to
disciples who thought they saw a ghost.
And what does God's what does Jesus say?
He says take heart, take courage.
It is I do not be afraid. And then as Peter attempts to
step out in faith and asks God, is it okay, Jesus says.
And when Peter doubts and experiences all the fear rushing
back in the tunnel vision and he cries out for help, Jesus
reaches his hand out and says, you have little faith.
Why did you doubt these baby words that you need to hear this
morning straight from the lips of Jesus?
Take courage. It is I.
Do not be afraid. Come, you have little faith.
Why did you doubt? My last stop for us is to expect
some more shaking up. We often hope in the face of
fear that things will get to a stable place that will kind of
be able to push aside the things that that shake us up in our
life. Well, Jesus says I'm, I'm going
to shake things up a little bit more, but I'm doing it so that
that which is unshakable will remain.
So expect a little more shaking up, but even now receive an
unshakable in the face of fear, walk by faith, listening to
Jesus's voice and receiving his unshakable Kingdom.
Now in a paraphrase of our text, Dear Emmanuel Anglican Church,
you have not come to a mountain that should leave you in fear,
either anxious or angry. You have received and will yet
receive in full the city of the living God.
In this city the praise of angels is joined with the praise
of Saints, even you, where the Son of God is lifted high for
all to be drawn to him. And while you journey, and when
you were afraid, have faith in Jesus who speaks, Take courage.
It is I do not be afraid. There will be more reasons to
fear as the world will be shaken, but not forever.
We are receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken.
God is building His Kingdom even now.
Here in Uptown, here in Chicago, in the Czech Republic.
Cross the whole world. Let us be thankful.
Let us draw near to him in faith and worship in the name of the
Father and the Southern in the Holy Spirit.
Let's take a moment to offer to the Lord whatever is getting in
the way of us, taking that step of faith toward the mountain
where God dwells and the path upon which Jesus calls us to
walk as Tyler preached and shepherded us through.
Maybe it is that. The anger.
Maybe it is the fear. Perhaps it's something else but.
Often it is one of those two things keeping us from walking
on water, taking the step of faith, rusting Jesus.
Go ahead and give those things to the living God, now and.
Now, Lord, we pray that you would send your Holy Spirit and
move us, activate us on that journey.
We pray that you would remove obstacles from within us and
around us. From joining your unshakable
Kingdom in Jesus name. Amen.