God Taps #4 | “Wonderful Deeds?”

0:00 This fall, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church has been exploring biblical stories in which God taps someone on the shoulder and says, I have a mission for you. I have a plan for you. Thus far, we've looked at God's powerful call to Isaiah, God's cautionary call to Balaam, and last week, God's call to courageous Queen Esther. Each of these stories has shaped our understanding of how it is that God communicates, what it is that God expects of us, and what goes through people's heads when heaven comes knocking at your door. This week we're going to consider the call of Gideon. In the good book, Gideon plays a brief but memorable role. He's a judge and when the good book speaks about judges, I think it might be helpful if you were to picture a sheriff from a western movie, a tough and principled person dedicated to protecting a group of farmers from bandits and marauders.

1:22 Where did Gideon's toughness and bravery come from? Let's see. Let's see what it looks like when God taps this fellow on the shoulder. Our passage for this morning comes from the book of Judges chapter 6 beginning with the 11th verse. Now, the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash, the Abizrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites. The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to Gideon, The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior. Gideon answered him, But sir, if the Lord is with us, then why has all this happened to us?

2:25 And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? But now the Lord has cast us off and given us into the hand of Midian. Then the Lord turned to Gideon and said, Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. I hereby commission you. Gideon responded, but sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I'm the least in my family. The Lord said to him, but I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them. Then Gideon said to him, If now I've found favor with you, then show me a sign that it is you who speak with me.

3:29 Do not depart from here until I come to you and bring out my present and set it before you. And the Lord said, I will stay until you return. So Gideon went into his house and prepared a kid and unleavened cakes from an effa of flour, the meat he put in a basket and the broth he put in a pot and brought them to him under the oak and presented them. The angel of the Lord said to him, take the meat and the unleavened cakes and put them on this rock and pour out the broth. And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes, and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened cakes, and the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. Then Gideon perceived that it was the angel of the Lord. And Gideon said, Help me, Lord God, for I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face. But the Lord said to him, peace be to you. Do not fear and you shall not die.

4:47 Then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord and called it the Lord is peace. To this day, it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abba's rights. This is the word of God. for you the people of God. Thanks be to God. So Gideon was threshing wheat. He was picking up the sheaves of wheat, thwacking their heavy heads against the ground, removing the husks, readying seed kernels for the mill, preparing grain to be turned into flour. Typically threshing was done in the open air, preferably on a hilltop. It helps to have a healthy breeze when threshing. That way as you toss the kernels in the air, the wind will carry the chaff away. Gideon was threshing in a winepress.

5:52 In the ancient world, winepresses were circular pits in the ground carved six feet or more down into limestone. People would place bushels of grapes into these stone tubs and stomp on them, squeezing out the juice to make wine. Wine presses worked great for their intended purpose, but they were not so great for threshing wheat because the walls of the wine press sheltered a person from potentially helpful breezes, it made separating the wheat from the chaff a lot more difficult. So why was Gideon threshing in a pit? The answer provided by the good book is that Gideon was hiding. He was hiding from the Midianites, a group that had for the past seven years raided Gideon's family farm and other nearby homesteads at harvest time. These raiders, scripture says, were like locusts. They would take fruit off the trees, wheat from people's sheds, livestock from the pasture. So after years of loss, Gideon was keeping his head down. He didn't want anyone to see that he had grain to thresh, wheat to steal. Gideon was adapting.

7:22 In a harsh season, in a what's yours is mine world, Gideon was doing his best to help his family survive. Have you ever threshed wheat in a wine press? Have you ever taken a job that didn't use all your capacities that shelved your talents, a step down from what you can capably accomplish, all so that you could keep paying the bills? Have you ever hunkered down, circled the wagons, done what needed to be done to care for a sick loved one, to try and survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Gideon is doing what needs to be done. He is threshing wheat in a wine press.

8:17 And it's at this humble moment when God's angel shows up. Heaven's herald greets this stooped man, his head ducked down so as not to be seen by any Midianite scouts. The angel greets this stooped man with words that sound almost sarcastic, given Gideon's posture. The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.

8:48 According to the text, the hunched farmer responds, as you might expect, with an eye roll and an indignant chuff. But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us? Where are all those wonderful deeds? As a pastor, I've heard this question a thousand times. heck I've asked this question a hundred times where is the God who parted the Red Sea who tossed Pharaoh and his army aside like grains of sand who opens a safe passage through life for good people hard-working people people going the extra mile to make ends meet to to to battle a tough diagnosis to care for themselves and their families?

9:51 Where is God when good people have to thresh wheat in wine presses, when they struggle to make progress because the rules of engagement are so unfair, so tilted against them? Looking up from his father's wine press, covered in chaff, Gideon wipes grit from his face and questions his luminous visitor. Where is the God who does these wondrous deeds? Can you point out this magnificent figure for me? Because I haven't heard anything from this reputedly powerful deity since Miss Jamie was telling me the old stories back in Sunday school. Now here I want to pause and notice something. I want us to pause and marvel at the fact that without batting an eye, the good book records Gideon's frustrated and incredulous question.

10:56 Where is the God who supposedly does all this wondrous stuff? every once in a while I find myself in a conversation with a hurting soul who seems to think that they're one of the few folk to ever have entertained doubts about the power of God the presence of God the wonderful deeds of God and this is of course not true These honest doubts, these important questions have been around forever. They've been voiced by atheists, but they've also been voiced by saints. They were voiced by prophets of old. They were even voiced by Christ on the cross. To ask, where is God during difficult times is normal. It's intelligent.

11:55 it demonstrates faithful awareness a deep-seated longing for things to be better and in a way a kernel of hope that's just waiting for a little water to help it sprout because my friends there are times when all we can see from the tough places where we thresh our wheat hiding from forces that would steal our very lives are the stone walls of the wine press there are times when all of us wonder whether faith is anything more than empty promises and fantastic stories. In other words, we understand Gideon. We get Gideon. In today's text, when the angel says, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior, we can picture Gideon's face twisting into a pained grin. Nice, he says to the angel. How about a little situational awareness here. Like a doctor walking into a hospital room, paging through a thick chart, looking down at her distressed patient. The angel asks, how goes it, champ?

13:21 And to Gideon, who doesn't feel anything like a champ, those words land with a thud. Is God's messenger being mean? Or is something else going on here? What if the angel's greeting to Gideon is more an aspiration than an accurate description of present circumstances? What if the angel sees something that Gideon cannot see? The winged messenger actually applauds Gideon's spunky response. She suggests that Gideon take his passion and put it to work. What if, my friends, God is not put off by our struggles, but drawn to them? What if this is how God works?

14:25 What if God has a thing for people who are wounded and weary and ready to snap? What if God sends angels to people who are threshing their wheat in wine presses, pointing folk toward a future that they cannot at present imagine? One of my preaching heroes, Fred Craddock, once told a story about a family out for a drive on a Sunday afternoon. It's a pleasant afternoon. The family is cruising along at a leisurely pace through the countryside. Suddenly, the two children begin to beat their father on the back. Daddy, daddy, stop the car. There's a kitten back there on the side of the road. The father says, so there's a kitten on the side of the road.

15:22 We're having a drive. But daddy, you must stop and pick it up. I don't have to stop and pick it up. But daddy, if you don't, it will die. Well, then it will have to die. We don't have room for another animal. We've already got a zoo in our house. But daddy, you're just going to let it die. Be quiet, children. we're having a pleasant drive. We never thought our daddy would be so mean and cruel as to let a kitten die. At this, the mother turns to her husband and says, dear, you're going to have to stop. So he turns the car around, returns to the spot, pulls off to the side of the road. You kids stay in the car. I'm going to see what it is that we're dealing with here. He goes out to pick up the little kitten who's just skin and bones, sore-eyed, full of fleas. And when he reaches down to pick it up with its last bit of energy, the kitten bristles, bearing tooth and claw. He picks up the kitten by the loose skin of its neck, brings it over to the car and says, don't touch it. It's probably got leprosy. Back home they go. When they get to the house, the children give the kittens several baths, about a gallon of warm milk and intercede. Can we please just let it stay in the house tonight? Tomorrow we'll fix a place for it in the garage.

16:54 The father says, sure, put it in my bed. The whole house is already a zoo. They fix a comfortable little bed fit for a pharaoh. Several weeks pass. Then one day the father walks in, feels something rub against his leg, looks down, and there's a cat. He reaches down toward the cat, carefully checking to make sure nobody's watching.

17:22 And when the cat sees his hand, it does not bear its claws and hiss. Instead, it arches its back to receive a caress. Concluding, Craddock asks, Is that the same cat? my friends when God reaches out to tap us on the shoulder we aren't always in the most receptive of places and this is good news God has a habit of tapping the shoulders of discombobulated harried and all-around worried people look at Gideon the farmer offers the angel angry doubts demands for proof, and a litany of excuses. I'm not your guy. I'm sorry, but wondrous things don't happen anymore. And if they do, they certainly don't happen to a dude who's hiding from bandits in a wine press.

18:21 but this is the moment when the good book starts to stir doubt into our own doubts. Gideon, hunched in the wine press, angry at the world, what sort of people does God go around recruiting? And yet, if you read on in the book of Judges, spoiler alert, Gideon does become a mighty warrior. He defeats the marauders who terrorized his family. In fact, irony of ironies, Gideon accomplishes all sorts of remarkable things in his life. He turns things around in such a stunning matter that successive generations, people like us reading his story will be tempted to say, how come God doesn't do wondrous things like, you know, Gideon anymore?

19:19 I wonder how Gideon would respond. I wonder if he might reply, that's a good question. I was asking the same thing, even as God was tapping me on the shoulder and tapping me on the shoulder. God's scratched up hand kept reaching out to me and reaching out to me until one day I woke up and realized that I wasn't the same old cat.