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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
You’ve heard of the word eccentric, and you think about those kind of people that you reserve that word to describe. Eccentric usually means someone who is different, odd, full of desires or tastes that are markedly different than the norm. Well, you’ll be interested to know that the actual literal word eccentric means out of center, rather than concentric, with the center, out of center, eccentric. And the center becomes the definition of what is right, true, godly, holy, you name it. At least, according to man.
According to the world, though, in this text, there is only one person in that entire text that we read, only one, who is eccentric, and all the rest are not. Now, I asked this of the kids this morning, and they got it right, so I hope you get it right. It’s Jesus. Jesus is the eccentric one in this text. He is the one who is different than, set apart, out of center from the norm of the world, from the norm of these Jews and definitely from the norm of Pilate. In fact, Pilate and the Jews really are definitive of the world as what is norm. They were all about scratching each other’s backs, as long as they benefited from it somehow, someway. They were all about their own rules and their own laws, and it’s really coming down to all about what they think. Jesus was not about what he thought. He was all about you and your soul’s salvation. He was not about this world.
These two groups, the Jews and Pilate, were constantly posturing themselves in this continual battle as to who would have the upper hand. You saw this verbal jousting that was going on between them. And then they pull out this blasphemous statement, “We have no king but Caesar.” Almost as if they had their fingers crossed behind their back when they said it because they knew it was not really their king, but they were going to play the game of the Romans, backing Pilate into the corner to get him to do what they wanted.
Pilate was trying to win both games together. We’re pretty good at that, you and me. We love to have our cake and eat it too. We don’t want to completely suffer. We don’t want to completely be a leader of positive energy rather than a leader of negative energy. We don’t really want to put a holy spin on something. We would rather complain and grump and blame someone else for our situation because then we don’t have to worry about it. But that’s our struggle, isn’t it? And the struggle is, do we live and believe like the eccentric Jesus? And are we eccentric in that way? Or are we really like the rest of the world?
Hence, the renewal of priorities. When you consider the priorities in your life, you think about the things you make sure gets done. And then you think about the things that are further down the list. And where’s God? You may not know this, but last month, the month of March… Our attendance was down by 50 people per Sunday as an average. Did anybody pick up a phone and call? Did anybody make it a priority that Susie Q or Bobby Joe wasn’t here for church? That’s someone else’s responsibility, isn’t it?
Not always every Sunday are all the kids brought to Sunday school. Some teachers teach one or two, sometimes they have eight, and sometimes they have none. Amen. Faithful ladies and men who take their time to study and to learn so that they can teach the children. And then there’s your and my personal life. Do we get up in the morning saying, “I am not going to drag my fellow co-workers down with negativity. I’m going to keep understanding that God’s hand is in this, whatever it may be.” Am I going to pray for that person and their life because they’re struggling? Or are my prayers only about me and my family?
You know those cats you see around the neighborhood? Almost everybody has them. And we call them feral cats, wild cats, because they’re basically cats that should be domesticated, but they’re not. They’re kind of wild and they run and go and they’re not really trusting of human beings. That’s what the world really wants to do to you. It wants to domesticate you to be one of its own. To be so comfortable in this life and in the priorities of this world that we really like it here. And God is trying to keep us, in a sense, undomesticated by this world and rely upon Him. A domesticated cat’s always fed every morning, isn’t it? One who isn’t has to rely upon someone else to feed them, God.
When we forget that we are citizens of heaven and that is really all that matters in this world, then the domestication process is a part of our life and we have to wrestle with it, which is why Lent’s a great time for renewal of our priorities. We were created to enjoy this creation. I enjoy it. You enjoy it. Reading the Scriptures, the men and women of Scriptures enjoyed God’s creation. The difficulty that Satan places us in and we ourselves place ourselves in is that we do like the things of this world and forget that this is not our world. This is not our home.
We have a lot of misplaced priorities, you and me. But the Father… Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was sent by the Father, He took priority one of your soul and never let that depart from His sight. And then when you were baptized, you were given these new desires, these priorities that are a part of your life now, with which you and I struggle, admittedly so. We have a dual citizenship? No. No. There is no such reality as a dual citizenship for a believer in Jesus Christ. There is only a citizenship in heaven. This world is merely something that we get to use and something that God uses us to use to put forth the citizenship of all in heaven.
Our life is a daily fight to resist being domesticated by this world. And our life is a daily life to walk around being eccentric, different than the rest of the norm of this world, responding different than the norm responds, loving different than the norm loves, forgiving differently than the world forgives and loves. Set apart. You’ve been given those desires. They are in you. Don’t give in to the priorities of this world.
Thanks be to God our Lord did not. That He may call us His own and never let go. In the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding. Keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus. The life everlasting. Amen.
