Last week, as some of you know, I flew to Florida to attend both a wedding and a funeral.  As part of an airline family, I’ve logged a lot of passenger miles over the years.  On days of good visibility, I love to look out the window as the plane descends, seeing towns and cities spread out in pretty and pleasing patterns.  You can make out interstates, streets laid out in a geometric grid, and beltways looping around the larger cities.  From the vantage point of an airplane, the streets and highways are laid out in proper order, and the pattern of how you get from one place to another is quite easy to make out.

Then it gets dark, you land, find your rental car, and under the very dim glow of the car’s interior light and the very small print of the rental car map, you try and figure out just exactly how you’re supposed to get out of the airport, much less get to your destination.  What looks simple from afar becomes vastly confusing when you’re in the midst.  Those lovely little lakes you see dotting the landscape as you approach Orlando from the sky become major obstacles as you’re navigating streets around them on firm ground.

It seems to me that that’s not a bad analogy for what life is like as we live it day by day.  From a distance, we know the way to live.  It’s set out in a pattern called the Ten Commandments, remembering our reading today from Exodus.  We know the Commandments, we subscribe to them, and we believe in them.  We know the Beatitudes and The Great Commandment too – the big lessons in life and love that Jesus taught us.  We recited the Great Commandment at the very beginning of our liturgy this morning.  It’s right there on page 2 of your service leaflet.

In principle, we get it.  The Ten Commandments, The Beatitudes, the Great Commandment.  The ethical framework for life as Christians.  But in practice?  It’s a daily struggle.  In the duties and obligations and just the every day-ness of daily life, it’s not that we purposefully forget them but rather they are not exactly on the list of things we have just got to accomplish for the day.  Meetings, groups, classes, errands, household chores, family responsibilities and appointments take up most of our attention day in and day out.

And then, making things even more difficult, there are strained relationships with family members, parishioners, colleagues or co-workers, gut-wrenching decisions we have to make, difficult problems we’re having, huge issues that suddenly come to the fore, and awful emergencies that come out of the blue – these are the things that seem to rule and overrule our daily lives.  It’s not that we’ve forgotten the ethical pattern or template for how we’re supposed to live – the rules that are to guide us day by day – it’s just that they seem “out there somewhere” and we’re down in the midst of very pressing, very urgent, very important things, sometimes life or death issues right now.
Maybe that’s what led the Apostle Paul to talk about the amazing disconnect he felt between what he knew, at some level, what was “good and right so to do” and what he actually found himself doing.  When we take the step back, just like seeing things out of an airplane window, it all makes sense.  But when we’re in the thick of it, navigating our way through the streets and highways of daily life, we lose all sense of the larger map – the larger picture.

We constantly do what is wrong even while we know what is right.  We do what is unethical, even while we know what is ethical.  And it’s not just those former Enron employees under indictment and on trial who are owning up to their misdeeds.  Paul says with complete and utter honesty: “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  We say, “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed against thy divine Majesty.”

Paul goes on to say that the disconnect between knowing how he’s supposed to live and how he actually lives and the spiraling failure – or sin – that results from that disconnect is reconciled – or reconnected – through Christ.

Through Christ and with Christ and in Christ, we are reconnected – that’s why we speak so lovingly and thankfully of Christ as our Savior.  In aligning ourselves to Christ, not just one time but all the time, we are able to transcend, through Christ, our faults and failings and reconnect with the God whose property is not just to have mercy but whose property is to love us, work with us, redeem us and save us every day. 

It’s the words of our worship, once more, that express what we believe, and elegantly phrased at that: “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was in every way tempted as we are, yet did not sin; by whose grace we are able to triumph over every evil, and to live no longer unto ourselves, but unto him who died for us and rose again.”

In the gospel passage from John today, we have the story of Jesus clearing out the moneychangers from the Temple.  It’s one of the few stories we have of Jesus really losing his temper and letting people have it.  And what he was after ultimately was for people to recognize that we can go through the motions of life day by day without any real sense of what we are doing and why.  Sacrificing in the Temple had the potential to become one more thing on the “To Do” list while running errands in Jerusalem, and as completely disconnected with a real relationship with God as our own actions – at home, at work, or in the church – can be.

The good news is that Christ is connected with our daily life.  We just have to call on that connection that is already available to us. The Spirit of Christ surrounds and envelops us, enabling us to transcend our own limitations.  On our own, we’ll continue, like Paul to have to confess that “we do not understand our own actions.  For we do not do what we want, but we do the very thing we hate.”
But when we cling to and call on Christ, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute - we find ourselves rescued from ourselves.  When we connect to Christ on a daily basis, we rely on his strength to survive what is difficult for us, his love to love others, his spirit to serve others, his support to practice what is right and moral and ethical and in the best interests of all humanity.

The wide angle view – the view from the airplane – is still that life has a pattern and a purpose and that it is beautiful to behold.  God looks out at all that God has made and says, “Wow.”  And then God sends us his Son to show us the map for how we’re to navigate life day by day.  But even that’s not enough for a God who says, “Wow.”  Finally, God sends his very Spirit to be inside us as we navigate life’s highways and byways day by day.  God looks out on the world, God comes into the world, and God comes inside each of us.  That is what we mean to say that God is Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Remember this week that you are saved and supported in Christ; you are loved and cherished in Christ; you are sustained and encouraged in Christ.  And that the God who looks out on the beautiful pattern of humanity, of which you are a cherished piece, says, “Wow.”   

Amen.