God, The Liberator
Mother’s Day 5/11/2014 Genesis 3:1-15 and John 14:1-10
Today is a day of celebration for the women that God has placed upon this earth. We call them friends, teachers, mentors, cousins, nieces, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-great grandmothers and on that rare occasion even, great-great-great grandmothers. God’s final act in creation at the end of the creation in Genesis was the creation of the woman. Ladies you have been placed on this earth to help right what has gone wrong in this world today.
As we celebrate today, let us all take a moment to remember that not only are the girls and women who are precious to our lives are gifts from God, but girls and women everywhere on this planet are created in the image of God and deserve to be so treated as such.
Each month we support an orphanage in Nigeria called the Rotolu home under Rev. Julius and Mary Lawal in Nigeria. Most of the children educated in the home are young girls who are given an education and a family they would not have had, because Julius and Mary believe in making sacrifices for the silent voices of young African girls.
No doubt Rev. Julius and Mary are in deep sorrow with their brothers and sisters in Nigeria over the abduction of 276 teenage girls by the group Boko Haran. Less than a week later 11 more girls ages 12 to 15 were kidnapped and dragged into the forest by men carrying AK-47 weapons. I can’t be imagine the fear and the horror they must all be experiencing.
As believers in Christ, we are called to demand action for these young girls, and for women throughout this world who are being treated as objects, as toys, as slaves and as punching bags. We are called to do this because the God we serve is a liberating God.
Jesus himself said in Luke 4:18-19 (NIV) 18 "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
In this passage, Jesus is not only a spiritual liberator he is a physical and psychological liberator as well. In our New Testament Scripture, the passage was familiar because it is often read at funerals. Jesus speaks of going away to prepare a place for us in one of the many rooms in his Father’s house.
He tells the disciples that they know the way, to the place where he is going. Thomas said to him, we do not know the way to where you are going. Jesus says that I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Jesus goes on to say, if you really know me, you would know my Father as well. From now on you do him and have seen Him. Phillip joins the conversation, and says “show us the Father and that will be enough.” Jesus counters with, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me.”
We all know that Jesus came to save us from our sin. But we should recognize also that Jesus came to show us what God the Father is like. Most of us have a bad image of God the Father because of our own fathers or because of the men that have been in our lives. We project back to God the Father, the frailties, the abuse, and the failings of our earthly fathers and men, and think God is just a slightly better view of our fathers on earth or of men.
Some women have no problem with Jesus, but do have problems with God the Father. Yet Jesus says, if you want to know the Father, you have got to know me, because I am showing you what the Father is really like. You don’t get an understanding of who God is, by looking at your father. You get an understanding of who the Father is by looking at Jesus.
Jesus is a great liberator of women, only because the Father is a great liberator of women. Jesus says, I don’t do anything that the Father is not already doing. Ladies, Jesus came into this world to show you, your true value to God The Father.
God’s liberation movement began the moment that we as human beings fell into sin. Adam and Eve had a choice to obey God or not. God gave them the freedom and the liberality to enjoy the fruit of every tree in the garden except for one. They were warned in advance that to eat from the tree would lead to death.
Often times when it comes to making a choice, we will choose what looks new and exciting over what is safe and in our long term best interest. We risk the thrill for the moment, while hoping, we can run back in time to what is safe and in our long term best interest. There are some sins we commit, that the thrill does not last as long as we had hoped for, and we find out that we cannot regain what we traded away.
For all of you mothers and grandmothers, who carry the guilt of thinking, if only you had of done something differently, your children would not have made the choices they made you need to remember this Genesis passage. Know that unlike you, God was a perfect parent.
Got put Adam and Eve in an absolutely perfect environment in which to live, but that did not keep the two of them from taking a chance to try something they knew they should have left alone. God gives us all freedom of choice. Each child, each teen, each young adult, and each older adult all have a choice on sin. You can’t guarantee your actions will keep another person from choosing to sin.
You can become a liberator for those who fall into sin by helping them find their way back to God. The moment Adam and Eve fell, they knew something was wrong and that something was lost. They lost Paradise and were barred from the garden of Eden. They were not sent out, but it was not because God was angry and vengeful.
They were sent out to keep them from having to live with the effects of sin in their lives forever. God did not want them to eat from the tree of eternal life. God wanted to liberate them from sin, and no one knew more than God how much love, pain, and sacrifice it was going to cost. Before God sent them out, God gave them the promise that he was going to make it possible for them to destroy Satan and regain their position..
One of the great tragedies from the fall was the breakdown in the relationships between male and female. Once sin entered Adam, he immediately blamed Eve for his own choice to sin. That tendency has continued in a much more abusive form all the way to today. A man beats a woman and tells her she is the blame for his losing control.
God knew that sin was going to spiral out of control. He tells Eve, that she needed to be aware that things were going to change for the worse. He tells her in verse 15, that she will still desire to be with her man, but He was going to rule over her. This is not God giving men authority over women, but God warning women of what sin was going to do in the hearts of men.
Without God, we deteriorate into might makes right. Eve went from the prized protection and equal partner at Adam’s side, to someone to be dominated, not because of the plan of God, but because of the effect of sin in the human heart. The Ancient Middle East culture had an extremely low view of women. Women were seen as property, either of their father or husband.
Women could not testify in court, women could not inherit property, and women could not claim a right to an education. These were not things God the Father set up or approved of. In the midst of this, sexism God never had a problem with using women. When the nation needed delivering, it wasn’t the courage of Barak a commander of the army that led them to liberation, it was the presence of the woman judge Deborah that brought about freedom.
When the Jews were being threatened with the first Holocaust, God the Father chose an adopted orphan, by the name of Esther to save his people. When women challenged Moses on their right to inherit their father’s property, God the Father said, “listen to them Moses because they are right on point. Give them their father’s property.” When King Josiah, the last really good king needed someone to interpret the part of the bible they found hidden in the temple, he sent the priest to go find Huldah the prophet, so that she could inform the king and the nation what God was saying. So even though the culture was saying one thing about women, God was saying something else by using women in leading his people on the highest levels. God the Father was truly a liberator for women.
That role as liberator intensified in the life of Jesus Christ. I want you to meet a woman whom I will call Dorothy. Dorothy’s life started out pretty much as yours and mine. Then one day, Satan chose to attack her. I don’t know how it happened but this attack led to a defect in Dorothy’s spine and it wasn’t long before she was completely bent over and could not straighten up.
She had to learn to walk again. Going out in public was very embarrassing. People pointed at her. Kids laughed at her. Religious people shunned her. After all during this time it was thought, that if you had a sickness or disease you had sinned and God was punishing you for it. She prayed for a healing for years, but it didn’t happen. Many people would have given up all hope and walked away from God.
But 18 years after this injury had started, Dorothy had accepted, this is what my life is going to be, and despite it all I will still worship God. On the Sabbath, (which for the Jews was like our Sunday), Dorothy made her way to the synagogue or for us the church. It just so happened that Jesus, who had been sent to show us what the Father was like, was teaching at the synagogue that day.
Dorothy was there in the back, and Jesus was so moved to compassion that he stopped in the middle of his sermon, and pointed to Dorothy to come forward. I want you to notice, Dorothy was not making a scene. She wasn’t begging for a miracle. She just wanted to be included in the house of God.
She had no idea what Jesus was going to say to her, neither did the other people. It must have seemed like a long ways down to the front. Here comes this woman, who on a good day had probably been called a funny walking lady and on a bad day she was called things that none of us should repeat.
This woman, who as a person was invisible to the world, but not to Jesus who wanted to show us the Father. Jesus said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” And because Jesus was the Great Liberator, he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God. This woman saw the goodness of God, and she loved God for it.
But there were those there who had looked at this woman as though she was less than an ox or less than a donkey. The leader got so angry that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, that he told the people, there are six days to be healed, come on one of those days and be healed, but don’t come back in here to be healed on the Sabbath.
God created the Sabbath as a day for us to find rest and restoration. God never said you cannot do good on the Sabbath. But the religious people had come up with a list of rules of what you could and could not do on the Sabbath.
Since it was a doctor’s job to make people well, a healing was considered work. Since Jesus healed, Jesus was considered to be working. Keeping the rules of work, was more important to the religious people than liberating people from bondage, especially a woman.
Jesus busted them for treating this woman as though she was entitled to less relief than an animal. He said, “how many of you untie your ox or your donkey on the Sabbath to take them to get a drink of water? Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan kept bound for 18 years not have been set free on the Sabbath.”
The leaders prided themselves on calling themselves the Sons of Abraham, but Jesus raises not only the status of this woman, but of all the women in the culture by declaring she is a daughter of Abraham. Jesus is the first to use inclusive language concerning when speaking of the privilege of being a descendant of Abraham.
Jesus is saying, You should treat her just as you treat the sons of Abraham. God the Father has always been a liberator for women and we find it in Jesus, doing what the Father told him to do.
I want you to meet Sandra. Sandra had found herself becoming a toy for the boys to play around with. She exchanged sex for the feeling of being close to somebody. The money she got wasn’t bad either. One day Sandra, decided to stop going from man to man and being used by them. She decided, if she couldn’t have a husband of her own, she’d be the mistress of a man already married. She thinks a married man is safe.
She goes for Doug and Doug sees her as just another toy to play with and another body to use. Somebody finds out about Sandra and Doug, and they decide to use this situation to destroy the teachings of Jesus on love, compassion, and liberation.
They watch as Sandra and Doug meet at the rendez-vous point. They watch through the windows as the couple begins to undress. They went until the two have become one, when they spring into the room to catch them in the very act of adultery. The couple is surprised.
They tell Doug to get his clothes and get out. He has a reputation to maintain and after all he is a man. They don’t give Sandra the same opportunity to get dressed. All she has is the covers wrapped around her. That will give more credibility to their story of being caught in the very act of adultery.
They know that Jesus will be teaching early that morning in the temple courts. While he is there before the people, the teachers of the law, and the Pharisees bring in Sandra and made her stand in front of the bible study group. Nobody seems concerned about her embarrassment, her humiliation, her desire to just die on the spot if she could. They said Jesus, “this woman is caught in the very act of adultery, the law says for us to stone such women, but what do you say?”
The law said to put to death the couple that was caught in adultery. God the Father has seen the sin of men and women equal when it comes to sex. We still have a hard time accepting that today.
It’s kind of hard to catch one person in the act of adultery all by herself. This whole thing was a trick to discredit Jesus, if Jesus said, “Just let the woman go”—he would be accused of tossing out the Scriptures in the Old Testament. If Jesus said, “go ahead and stone her—he could no longer be seen as the teacher of love, forgiveness and liberation.”
The only problem with trying to trap Jesus, is that Jesus reads what is in our hearts. Right now even, Jesus knows the very thoughts that are on each of our minds. When it came to sex, Jesus demanded a much higher standard of men in dealing with women. Jesus took sexual harassment and sin to a whole new level, when he said, “if you even look at a woman with lust in your heart, your are guilty of adultery.”
Women God the Father does not even want men, looking at you in a way that dishonors your body. Do not sell yourself short. Don’t get a short term pleasure at the expense of what is best for you and your life in the long run.
Even today, the short time pleasure of having sex to win over a man’s heart, has kept more girls and young women from getting a high school diploma and a college education than anything else. The good news from Jesus is that your failure does not have to be final, because Jesus is a liberator.
Jesus know the game being played and he says, to those who have the stones in their hands, ready to destroy this sinful woman, go ahead and stone her, but let the one who is without sin, throw the first stone. Jesus then went back to writing something on the ground.
I don’t know what he wrote, but as each person saw it, he dropped his stone and remembered he had something else to do and somewhere else to be.
Finally its’ just Jesus and the woman. Jesus stands up and says, “woman where are those who wanted to get rid of you? Does anyone condemn you. The woman said, no one sir.
Jesus said, “neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.” Jesus wanted to liberate this woman from the crowd that wanted to oppress her and even kill her and he did. She probably never thought she would leave that place alive.
But Jesus was limited in the future choices that she would make with her life. He knew that she was guilty and what her past had been. He accepted this woman right where she was, but he wasn’t content letting her stay there. He said, “you need to make a change. Go now and leave your life of sin.” Those same words are being spoken to some of us here today.
God wants to liberate each and everyone of us here today. But liberation is not only just about blaming others and pointing the fingers at what they have done. Liberation is about recognizing the sin in our own lives and choosing to walk away from it, into the direction of God.
As much as we would have liked to have grabbed the leader of Boko Haran and beat the daylights out of him as he bragged about what he was going to do with those 276 girls, we have to ask ourselves when have we treated our own girls the same way.
When we look the other away at incest our sexual abuse in our homes, we are guilty. When we commit date rape, we are guilty. When we use our power of authority to coerce people to do things, we are guilty. When we participate in things that dehumanize women and girls we are guilty.
When we participate in Prostitution, Clubs with women dancing on poles, pornography, and gang rape we are guilty. When we use women and girls for own pleasure and not give them the dignity and respect they deserve, we are guilty. When we buy or listen to music that degrade women, we are not much different than Boko Haran. Our actions may not be as dramatic, but they are still sinful and harmful to women.
Women God has made you part of the crown of creation. God wants to liberate you from your past so that you can enter into a living relationship with God the Father today through Jesus Christ. Jesus has come to show us all the Father and for us to understand God’s love for us all. Christianity is the one faith in which God is the liberator of all people for the Scriptures state in Christ there is neither Galatians 3:28 (NIV) 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
