Self-Cleaning
Ovens and Fiery Faith
Pastor Mathew Magera – 7/15/18 – Sermon 296
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
This story is usually one
that finds itself in children's Bibles, as you heard read moments ago. It's a
story that will normally be part of a Sunday school curriculum also. It's a
vivid story, easy to follow and easy to imagine in our minds. On top of that,
we tend to take away a simple moral that is easy to understand and even
encouraging for us. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego come out of the fire we
are mesmerized and fully believe that the level of faith they had in God is
what led to the outcome of the story. They had strong faith, for who would
willingly stand up for their faith and go into that furnace like they did? And
so God delivered them from the flames unharmed. We admire their faith and seek
faith like theirs so that we too can be delivered from the flames unharmed.
But, what if I told you that this is not what we should be taking away from
this story, that, in fact, it is more dangerous than we think?
Have you ever had it happen
to you that one night you're cooking dinner in the oven and you sense that
smell that something isn't right? You go into the kitchen, open the oven, only
to find that your casserole has overflowed and is dripping or maybe even
flowing onto the oven floor, clinging to and charring itself against its
surface? After a while you know the oven needs to be cleaned. Sometimes it
takes a time for spills to add up, other times there is one great mistake that
requires immediate attention. It has to be done periodically anyway, so you
know you might as well get it done. If you're fortunate to have a self-cleaning
oven, you know that with just the push of a button or two your oven begins the
process of doing nearly all the work for you. When it is finished, all you have
to do is wipe out what's left of the remaining ashes. No hard work. Unless you
consider pushing a few buttons hard work.
Like self-cleaning ovens, we
love a quick fix. We certainly don't want to get on our hands and knees in that
oven trying to scrub, scrub, scrub that build up, do we? Absolutely not. What
do we want to do? Set it and forget it. So, when we hear this story of the
fiery furnace, usually the moral that we pull out of it is like that of a
self-cleaning oven, set your faith to high and God will protect and deliver you
unharmed. Unfortunately, as we may well know, a life of faith is not like
owning a self-cleaning oven. We can't just set it and forget it, as nice as
that would be. We want a good quick fix. We want a good simple moral, to have
lots of faith in God and know that he will protect and deliver us unharmed.
While this is a god place to start, if we fail to dig deeper into that
take-away, it has the ability to be our very downfall. I'm not saying that is a
bad interpretation of this story but I'm saying that this will not hold you up
when reality comes your way.
Yes, it's great that
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego got delivered from the fire, no harm, no singe,
no smell. But, how many times do we come out of our fires, pains and trials
unharmed, unsinged and unaffected? The reality is we don't get delivered from
fires, we get consumed by them. If we believe the basic moral of the story is
that God will be like that self-cleaning oven that whenever we have a problem
if we have enough faith he will take that problem away, how much faith are we
going to have after two or three occasions of being hurt, bruised or scarred by
the realities of our lives? Not much. The more and more we believe that we just
need more faith and God will deliver us from the flames, the easier and easier
it becomes to lose faith completely when again and again we get hurt, feel left
alone, abandoned in the fire. Why doesn't God deliver me in the same way he
delivered those three men?
How many times has it
appeared that God has let you down when you have tried to muster every ounce of
faith? The cancer didn't stay away. The pain isn't going away. The money
troubles came back. How many times have we climbed out of those fires only to
be plunged right back into them? Well, my faith must not be strong enough if I
keep going into tough times.
Faith is not a formula, as
much as we want it to be. Faith is not a to-do list where we have to be this
tall to be saved. If that is what your faith is telling you, it's a wonder you
have any hope at all. Life experience after life experience, failure after
failure, bad news after bad news, you have no hope because all you can see is a
God that is not answering you and you equate it to you not having enough faith
in him. This is a scary way to live life. Think of people, good Christian
people, who have suffered immensely or died unexpectedly. Think of the number
of martyrs who were tortured and killed. Does this mean that their faith was
not strong enough so God didn't protect them? After hearing it this morning,
think even about John the Baptist. Was his faith not strong enough?
If we don't allow our faith
to go deeper than this, then any setback we have in our lives, where the fire
does consume us and we are hurt, where we do come out singed, where we do come
out smelling of smoke, if we don't go deeper, then those disappointments have
the ability to derail and destroy our shallow faith before we even get our
bearings, when instead these experiences should act as a strengthening agent, a
reinforcement for our faith.
A deeper faith is born when
we remember that God has the last word. If you look at this story from start to
finish you'll notice the outrageousness that God works into it to make this
point. God has the last word. In all that took place in this story, God wasn't
about to let anyone else take control, yet who appeared in control in this
story? King Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar is the power figure here and we
learn this immediately when the story starts. He built an idol. This was no
ordinary small golden calf idol. No, this thing was 90 feet tall. 90 feet tall.
The height of this idol is a very humorous way of showing just how powerful
Nebuchadnezzar believes that he is. Then we see how many officials he summoned
to worship this idol. The more people he lists, the more power over others we see
him have. Clearly he's the powerhouse here. Then, when it is time to worship,
not only do we just need to the sound of the horn but sound the whole band, why
don't you, so that everyone clearly knows it is time to worship. You can't just
say, oh, did I hear the horn, is it time for worship? You would know. More
power attributed to Nebuchadnezzar. Then, when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
disobey, Nebuchadnezzar has to punish them, but not just any punishment will
do. No, he has to show his power even more. Turn the furnace seven times hotter
than normal. If I were to set the thermostat in our house seven times hotter
than normal, I'd be sitting in a toasty 525 degrees. It's ridiculous how much
power Nebuchadnezzar believes he has. He has had control this whole time. He
has had power all this time. But, as soon as he throws Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
in the furnace, his power is gone. He loses the control he has so desperately
tried to assume. He believed no one, no power, no god could challenge his
power. He was wrong. He lost control because God had the last word.
God does not promise us
deliverance from the pains, trials and fires of this world. God promises us
deliverance from pains, trials and fires in the next. Things in life may be
going so bad that we think it’s almost funny just how bad things are, but take
heart and do not fear because God will have the last word.
Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego did not go into that fire believing that they were fireproof because
of their faith. They believed God would deliver them, yes, but that does not
mean that they knew God would act the way he did. Why does God make life so
difficult for us when he could just as easily save us in the same way he did in
the fiery furnace? I don't know. But, I do know and firmly believe that in the
end God will have that last word and he will deliver us safely, fully, into his
kingdom. We heard earlier that John the Baptist didn’t even get delivered from
his situation in prison. He died. Not even Jesus was granted deliverance from
his pain and suffering on his journey to and while he was on the cross. God
spared Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the fiery furnace but he wouldn't
even spare his Son from the cross. Jesus died. But God still had the last word.
Even death does not limit or
end God's capacity to make a future for us. If Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
died in that fire, the story would have ended differently, yes, and it probably
wouldn't end up in a list of favorite children's Bible stories, but it wouldn't
change the fact that God is faithful and in control. God still would have
delivered them, just not in the physical way as we know the story. Just like
the words in Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress that say, "Though life be
wrenched away, they cannot win the day, the Kingdom's ours forever."
That's the promise and we believe and we trust in God's ability to keep that
promise.
So, back to that simple
moral we get out of this story. Have faith in God and he will protect and
deliver you unharmed. It's a lesson but it's also an opportunity for us to let
God take our faith to the next level. Our reality is that life isn't like a
self-cleaning oven. We don't get that quick fix when our life turns into a hot
mess. We are left with that greasy build up and that char and it hurts. Faith
reminds us that God has the last word. For those of us who feel powerless, this
is a freeing message. If you feel like you have been thrown into a furnace,
hardships all around you, persecution because of your faith, rough times in
general, listen to this. You may continue to suffer in this life, things may
not get better. But, God has the last word and we can rely on that, we can rest
our lives on it. Not even the most powerful king in Babylon had the last word.
Nebuchadnezzar, who thought he had control over everything lost control when he
looked into the fiery furnace. God had the last word. Not even Satan had the
last word. Even after Jesus died and was buried for three days, the day of
resurrection came and God declared his victory, our victory in Jesus. That
means that God has the last word over our oppressors too. No matter how pompous
our oppressors are, no matter how much they gloat, how much attention they
seek, no matter how powerful they are, and how badly they seek to destroy us,
God has and always will have that very last word. To God be the glory, now and
always. Amen.