God: The Great Oxi-Clean

Green grass and tomato sauce.

Purple grape juice and orange Cheetos.

And the Altar Guild will tell you red wine.

These are a laundry night mare.

You can home remedies like hair spray or

products like oxy-clean.

Ultra tide or vinegar.

If you are lucky you might just get out that

stain.

But more often than not, stains remain.

To get our clothes clean and bright, we

need a tough stain fighter.

Guess what?

We have one.

And our stain remover is God.

Listen today we heard the only reading from

the Book of Judges in our entire lectionary.

And get this...its about a woman.

The only woman judge in the Bible.

Deborah is judge 2000 years before Jesus.

Now there are two things you need to know about the Book of Judges:

First, we are not talking about the Supreme Court.

Judges in the bible is a holy

person, who God spoke to in order to lead the people.

Judges were military leaders.

Second, the Book of Judges tells the same

story over and over ten times.

And the story is this:

Hebrews are following God

Hebrews forget God

Debauchery and frat parties break out

Hebrews get taken over by their enemies

They cry out to God

God sends a Judge to save them

Hebrews follow God and the cycle starts over

And this is precisely what our story is taking

about.

Our Hebrews had sinned up a storm.

They forgot totally about the God who had

brought them out of Egypt.

They broke all Ten Commandments and

then some.

Now they have been oppressed for 40

years.

Enter Deborah.

God tells her to command her general to

muster 10000 and go to Mt Tabor.

God will make sure the the Hebrews win

and thus they will be freed from oppression.

Even with 10000 troops the Hebrews are

vastly outnumbered.

But God sends a freak rainstorm that

dumps inches of rain, thus clogging the wheels of the enemies chariots.

And the Hebrews are set free.

Their past mistakes are wiped away.

Their stain lifted.

Today we need cleaning.

Our souls are soiled with many things.

We bear burdens that are too painful to share.

We may be here today thinking there is no way out.

We wish to change but our old habits follow us everywhere.

Halloween may be gone but that skeleton in the closet is ready to pop out if we turn the knob.

Regrets, remembering mistakes, and unworthiness mark our psyches and stain our cores.

The past stands like shadow that we just cannot shake.

If God is faithful, where is God now?

We all could use a stain fighter.

Maybe this will help.

Look.

A woman came to a pastor for help.

Some twenty years before, had been

unfaithful to her husband.

For years that sin had haunted her.

The pastor was the first person she had

ever told about it.

After they talked and prayed for a long time, the pastor recommended she tell her husband.

The pastor knew the woman's husband very well and knew that her revelation, after the initial shock, would probably strengthen their marriage.

It wasn't easy for her, but she promised she

would tell him.

"Pastor," she said, "I trust you enough to do

what you ask, but if my marriage falls apart as a result, I want you to know I'm going to blame you." She didn't smile when she said that, either.

The pastor saw her the next day, and she

looked fifteen years younger.

"What happened?" the pastor asked.

"When I told him," she exclaimed, "he

replied that he had known about the

incident for twenty years and was just

waiting for me to tell him so he could tell

me how much he loved me!"

And then she started to laugh. "He forgave

me twenty years ago, and I've been

needlessly carrying all this guilt for all

these years!"

PROPEL

All too often we are like this woman: we've already been forgiven years ago, but we don't know God's forgiveness.

Instead, we've been haunted by a load of guilt for years.

Today invites us to put down whatever it is we are carrying around.

We can leave behind whatever we have done that doesn't measure up...our failures, our bad choices.

Because forgiveness has dawned.

"Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed!

For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;

I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,

upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.