I opened the sermon with a clip from the movie Wicked.
It showed Elphaba right after she was born and later as a
child. In both scenes, Elphaba was
rejected by many of those who should have loved her, including
her peers, but also and especially her mother and
father. Now here's the sermon.
There is no doubt that Elphaba had challenges.
Elphaba grew up being rejected by most of the people around
her, including the people who are most responsible for loving
her and welcoming her and receiving her into the world.
Her parents, her family, her peers that were there, and her
childhood all rejecting her. Now here's one of the sad
realities of life that we tend to expect the future to be much
like the past, and so if we've experienced rejection from very
early on in our life, then we can tend to expect rejection in
the future. When we are rejected by people
who are supposed to love us, we assume that people who we want
to love us will reject us as well, or at least might reject
us. And that's the challenge, one of
the many challenges that Elphaba was facing.
There's a very real sense in which the the Wicked movies are
are a a grand adventure story of the battle of good versus evil.
There's also a sense in which the Wicked movies are a love
story, a loves, a very deep, a very personal love story.
Elphaba grows into a young woman, and she finds herself
falling in love with a young man named Fiero.
And she has a lot of fears and a lot of anxiety and a lot of
worry about that because she's green and people aren't supposed
to be green. And, and everyone that she has
wanted to love her over the years, except for a very few
exceptions, have rejected her or looked down on her or scorned
her because she's green. Because this thing about her
over which she has no control and people her rejecting her for
that. But Alphabet finds herself
falling in love with the the dashing and charming and
handsome and wealthy Fiero anyway.
And when she does, she worries. Now at this point, I'm going to
invite. I forgot to turn on the back
monitor, so I got to get that back on having grown up
rejected, I'm going to invite. Well, not the way I said that.
That might sound like Ida grew up rejected.
Ida did not grow up rejected. Her parents love her a lot.
And she'll tell you that and they'll tell you that.
But I just going to come up and sing for us.
Would you like the microphone? You can, you can.
You can hold it. And then if it works for her,
I'm going to go back and get in the sound booth before I start
the music so I can adjust the volume as needed.
But this song, the song that I just singing is called I'm Not
That Girl. And in this song, Elphaba is
wrestling with the fact that she loves Fiero, but she's afraid
that Fiero will never love her in return.
At this point, Ida Patterson beautifully sang the song I'm
Not That Girl from Wicked. Due to the technical
difficulties of getting a good live recording with the
equipment I have available, I can't include it here.
I described the details of the song later in the sermon, so I
won't get into that here either. It's a wonderful song, and I
encourage you to listen to it. You can find it easily on
YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes. Now back to the sermon.
Thank you again, Ida. She sung that three times this
morning and done a beautiful job every single time.
We have this thing within us that we long to be loved and we
want to love someone else and we want that love to be returned.
And that's part of our story. That's part of the story of
Wicked. That's part of the human story.
And, and any good story, I believe, points us to the great
story. And in the great story, the
story of God and his relationship to this world and
the people in it. There is certainly an A sense in
which that story is an epic battle of good versus evil.
But there's also a sense, and I believe a deeper sense in which
it's a love story and that the good versus evil part, most
folks that have grown up in the church, been in church for a
while, they can, they kind of sense that and see that and have
noticed that in Scripture, you know, the devil shows up and all
of these things happen and good versus evil, the love story is
in the Bible as well. And, and, and if if you've
missed it before, go back and read your Bible again.
It's there all the way from the beginning all the way through
the very end. The climax of the entire
Scripture is Jesus returning to earth to claim his bride to be
united not in a governing relationship with his people,
but in a marriage relationship with his people, a relationship
not built on force, but on love. So there's a very real sense
that we are part of this love story, the same kind of story
that Alphaba was in. Now Alphaba again, she had these
challenges. She'd been rejected so much.
She had so much pain and suffering.
It was very hard for her to believe that this man that she
loved would love her in return. And that's the tension in a lot
of romances, a lot of love stories that you read about or
see in books, TV's, movies, that sort of thing.
That tension is I love him or I love her.
Will, will He, will she returned my love.
I just don't know. The problem arises when we take
Alphabet story and how we look at how that applies to our
relationship with God or the connection that it is because
there is a tendency among humans for us to look at God the way
Alphabet looked at Fiero. He's wonderful, he's great, he's
amazing. But I'm not sure he'll love me.
I'm not sure he'll accept me. I'm not sure he'll welcome me.
And so I want to walk through those lyrics just briefly again
and talk about those, and not just in terms of, of a woman's
love for a man, but in terms of our love for God.
Hands touch, eyes meet. I, I, I'm not going to sing.
I make that promise to you now and forevermore.
I'm not going to sing to you. And I'll read the lyrics.
Hands touch, eyes meet. Sudden silence, sudden heat.
Hearts leap in a giddy whirl. If you've ever been in love, you
know that feeling that, that, that in love kind of feeling.
And every, the whole world seems like it's full of rainbows and
sunshine and unicorns and, and, and, and everything is going to
be wonderful and everything is going to be great because we're
going to be together. And it's wonderful.
It's wonderful and it's a beautiful and it always fades.
That feeling always fades. That in love feeling.
There's a biological phenomena that's going on.
That's part of that, but it, it, it, it always passes and then
and then suddenly we don't feel exactly the same way we felt
before. And we can worry that did I just
imagine it? Was it just fake?
I, I, I see this a lot in people's faith lives where they
have had a mountaintop experience with God.
Maybe it was at their baptism, maybe it was at some sort of
retreat or at camp or at vacation Bible school.
But there's this or youth group and there's this, this
mountaintop experience where God feels so close and so real and
so personal and, and, and, and people pledge their lives.
They give their lives to Jesus. They raise their hands, they
come forward, they kneel, they pray, they get baptized,
whatever they're doing to publicly say I love Jesus, I
will follow, oh, Jesus. And they feel the presence of
God in a very vivid way. And then it fades and they start
to wonder, did I just imagine it?
I see this so often. I've taken to telling people
before baptism, you know, not little kids, they don't quite
get this, but but, but teenagers and adults before baptism, look,
you know, you're feeling God's presence right now and it's a
beautiful thing and it's a wonderful thing.
There's a time when that feeling is going to fade and the devil's
going to start to whisper in your ear that it was never real
to begin with. It was all just your
imagination. All just your imagination.
The next verse, don't dream too far.
Don't lose sight of who you are. Don't remember that rush of joy.
We begin to doubt, we give it a doubt, we begin to pull back on
the dreams and the hopes that we had about our relationship with
God and what that might be and what that might look like and
where that might go. And we don't want to lose
ourselves. It's one thing to lose ourselves
to an all powerful God who loves us.
It's another thing to lose ourselves to a fantasy that
might not even be real. Every so often we long to steal
to the land of what might have been.
But that doesn't soften the ache we feel when reality sets back
in. Reality we get that emotion, we
get that high, we get that feeling and then reality comes
in and reality threatens and, and when we accept, we hear
these promises. God loves me with an everlasting
love. Jesus says I'll never leave you
or forsake you. Jesus died for us.
Jesus promises to love us and redeem us and be with us
forever. And then suddenly the God that
felt, well, maybe not suddenly, maybe gradually, but we reached
point where the God that felt so close now seems infinitely far
away. And the hope that we had for a
joy filled life with God becomes a pain filled life of heartache
and sorrow and grief and loss and disappointment and
rejection. And we begin to ask ourselves,
if God really loved me, how could all of this be happening?
How could I be experiencing this?
How could I be feeling this if God really?
And if I am feeling this, maybe it was just a fantasy.
Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe God isn't real because the
pain and the heartache and we know that's real.
It just hits US in the face over and over again.
Then we look at others who always seem to be happy with
God. How are you doing?
I'm blessed, blessed to be alive.
I love Jesus, Jesus is wonderful.
God is good all the time, all the time God is good.
And we those folks. And that seems to be their
everyday ongoing reality. And we hear these lyrics.
Blithe smile, live limb. She who's winsome, she wins him
gold hair with a gentle curl. That's the girl he'll choose.
God chose them for this joy, for this peace, for this love, for
this, this ongoing, you know, close relationship.
But apparently God didn't choose me for that.
What's wrong with me? What defect do I have?
What's broken in me? What's defective in me?
That God won't be that way with me, That God won't share that
joy and that love and that ongoing intimacy with me like he
seems to do for these other people?
Don't wish, Don't start wishing. Only wounds the heart.
I wasn't born for the Rose and the Pearl, We begin to think
that was never for me. Whatever I felt before, whether
imagined or real, that's not life now, and I have no reason
to expect that ever will be. Maybe God is real, but if God is
real, God loves other people but not me.
God welcomes and receives other people, but not me.
I'm not that girl, not that woman, not that man, not that
boy. If we approach our relationship
with Jesus with that mindset, if that's how we're thinking about
it, then we've gotten this whole story backwards and upside down.
When when we view that the risk in the relationship is that God
won't love us as much as we love him.
That that we're worried about that.
Because here's the reality in the testimony of Scripture is
that Jesus, who is God in the flesh, longs for you and would
go to great lengths. I might say any links to when
your affection, your devotion, and your love See all the risk
is on God's side here. We see it over and over and over
again in Scripture. It's not that that people are
reaching out and longing for a loving God and God is
disappointing them by rejecting them.
It's that God is reaching out for his people even though they
often reject him. But God continues to reach.
God continues to love. That story is told in so many
different ways and in so many different places in Scripture.
We're going to hit just one of them this morning, and that's in
Hosea chapter 2, where God speaking to his people through
the prophet Hosea, and he begins talking about his people and
then to his people. Therefore, I will now allure
her. God's the one doing the wooing
here. God's the one doing the winning.
It's not people out there trying to win God's effect.
That's paganism, by the way, that that is the the Baal
worship that's also mentioned in where, where human beings have
to do the right thing to gain God's favor.
And then if they do, they're just the right things to gain
God's favor, then they hope that that God will stay faithful and
loyal to them if they don't mess up with us.
It's the opposite. It's God trying to win our
favor. God has already loved us, and
God is trying to woo us even when we've been unfaithful.
Bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.
I will take you to be my wife forever.
I will take you for my wife and righteousness and injustice and
steadfast love and in mercy. I will take you for my wife and
faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.
This is the promise of God. This is the way the great love
story works. Not with us trying to win God's
favor and fearing that God will reject us, but with God trying
to win our love and our devotion to make us His wife.
That's the climax of Scripture, Jesus coming back to the earth
to receive his bride in love, in joy, in peace, and in devotion,
forever and ever and ever. That's the story that we're in.
To Jesus, who is God in the flesh, you are that girl, you
are that woman. You are that man.
You are that boy. You are the one that God is
longing for and calling to him. Jesus himself said no one comes
to me unless they're drawn by the Father.
God is doing the wooing. God is doing the drawing.
God is the one placing his life, his heart, on the line in the
hope that we will return that love.
And to God it's worth it. Every scar, every wound, every
sacrifice that Jesus made is worth it so that we might come
to him. Jesus loves you and longs for
you to love him too. Let's consider Mary.
It's Christmas time. Why not consider Mary, right?
Here's Mary, an ordinary girl from a little town, a little
little town of Nazareth, that when people thought of Nazareth,
they only thought negative, that Nazareth had such a bad
reputation that it was a proverb, nothing good can come
out of Nazareth. That was just the standard
thing. And and Mary grew up in
Nazareth. Nazareth was a very conservative
Jewish community and there is no doubt that she grew up longing
for and hoping for and praying for the Messiah to come.
The Messiah prophesied the one who God said God said, a
descendant of David will sit on David's throne forever.
It had been generations since the descendant of David had sat
on the throne. Herod was a Pagan king and he
was on the throne of David. But there was this promise that
Messiah would come, this king. But there is no way that Mary
ever dreamed she would be the mother of that Messiah.
God would never love her like that.
Surely God would choose the Princess.
Surely God would choose the one with the wealth, the one with
the position. Surely God would choose the one
that had the big beautiful palace and the rich clothing for
their child, for his child to be born and nestled and wrapped in
as an infant. Surely that's who God would
choose. But God chose Mary, this
ordinary girl from this small town in a backwards part of the
world, so thought everyone else, to be the mother of his son, to
be the mother of God himself. God chose her.
She never had to worry about being good enough for God.
She just, God just wanted her to love Him and be as devoted to
Him as He was to her, whether that was God presenting himself
to her through the Angel and glory or through this innocent
little baby who was resting in her arms to love and be as
devoted to Him as He was to her. And that's what he asks of all
of us now in all of this. Part of this story, actually.
Yeah. Well, I'll say it because it's
up there. We're going to get into this in
more detail next week. Part of this challenge, this,
this desire to be loved and loved as we are, not to have to
change, become a whole completely different person in
order to get the person that we love to love us, too.
Will they love us as we are? Alpha belonged for Fiera, to
love her as she was. That's where the movies end.
He loves me as I am. She loves me as I am.
That's not where the Bible story ends.
God loves you as you are. God will not leave you
unchanged. God will spend the rest of our
existence making us more and more into and like Jesus.
To think like he thought, to love like he loves to do, like
He does. We'll talk about that more next
week. God does not leave us.
God loves us just the way we are.
God does not leave us unchanged. It's not easy.
It's not easy wasn't easy for Alpha.
But to be green, the letter, to be rejected, despised and
scorned. We all have these different
things in us, these green things that lead other human beings at
times to reject us, to despise us, to scorn us.
We never have to fear that from God.
We're not the one trying to win God's love.
God has already died for us. God is the one trying to win our
love and inviting us to love him in return.
In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.