“Please excuse my daughter's tardiness. I forgot to wake her up and did not find her until I started making the beds." So reads one of those little marginal quotes in a popular magazine..."People say the funniest things."  We all make excuses from time to time, don’t we?
God is used to excuses, even more so than grade school principals. Fresh from the wonder of seeing the burning bush on the crest of Mount Sinai and hearing God's plans for the liberation of the people from Egyptian slavery, Moses says, "But don't send me, God. I am not a good speaker...I stutter when I have to stand up in front of a Pharaoh." Jonah not only made excuses, he ran the other direction when God called him to a task. Jonah was supposed to go to Nineveh...instead hoped the first boat out of town. When a huge storm blew up, Jonah went down to hold and fell asleep. "Storm brewing? God's angry? Sorry, I fell asleep!" Jesus told a story about a man who was on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem when he was overtaken by robbers, beaten, and left for dead. Three folks walking by on that road saw him...all had a good excuse and passed by on the other side...all but the Samaritan. The point is not to condemn the ones who passed by, they were on task; it just was not God's task. 
When Jesus preached at his home church, as we heard last week, he preached with vision of God's reign in which all who were captive would be set free. At first his audience loved him for it. They rejoiced in the notion of a local boy made good...but then as they listened, they realized that he was not just talking about them. When he spoke of the forgiveness of debts and the refreshing of sight and hearing...the restoration of the broken and the afflicted...he was not just talking about their need, their special hopes and dreams. He was also talking about the outsider: The prisoner who had been shut away...out of sight. Jesus evoked Isaiah's promise that the prisoner should be released. The crowds turned on Jesus at that point. 
They rushed the podium and in their momentum, might have thrown him over a cliff, says Luke. "The crowd which praised Jesus when it thought he was proclaiming liberty for people like them, tried to kill him when it realized he was proclaiming liberty for all people -- even those whom they despised and feared."
Our real enemy is fear...fear of complications, fear of the other-the stranger. Excuses come from fear of our being found out...to be less than we think we ought to be. "The Devil's trick," writes psychologist and theologian Ann Ulanov,1 "is to make us let go of the good to fight the evil, and even worse to lead us to let go of an evil we can do something about to work for an abstract and idealized good that can never be realized."
That's the kind of phenomenon I see in all this high talk of "family values" which comes from all sectors. The "idealized good" is this notion of the perfect family where children are supported, loved and nurtured, and where mom and dad are both fulfilled and happy in their work and home life. Some think the way to get "back" to that perfect world is to blame the victims. It is the fault of these unwed mothers who are cashing in on as much as say, $50.00 a month in the State of South Carolina, a little more in the state of Iowa, by bringing more children into the world. 
The fathers of these children are being locked away in prison at a rate that exceeds any other nation in the western world, with a huge cost to society to maintain the penitentiaries...yet we have eliminated training programs, recreation programs, and drug prevention programs and blame those young men again; saying the problems that poor persons have stems from absentee fathers who won't assume their responsibilities for their children. 
There is irresponsible behavior, there is abuse of the system, and more tragically, of people as well. But it is not an easy formula. Putting more cops on the street will not solve the problem, noted the Chief of Police of Cedar Rapids when he was here last month, unless they get out of their cars and begin to get to know the people of the neighborhood…. as neighbors.  As long as it remains “us” and “them” – the “Chicago People” or the “immigrants” verses the good old Iowa folks, we may feel better about ourselves, but our fear of the other builds and so do the problems.
Julie Polter of Sojourners Magazine puts it this way, “This is the big lie the world [the Devil’s Trick] tells us: that the universe is connected by trade agreements, electronic banking, computer networks, shipping lanes, and the seeking of profit—nothing else. Whereas this is the truth of God: all creation is one holy web of relationships, and gifts meant for all; that creation vibrates with the pain of all its parts, because its true destiny is joy.
There are no easy answers for issues such as these...the gap is growing between those who have and those who have nothing, and the despair and the anger and the violence is building. Especially in a time when many people are hurting economically from the top of the heap to the bottom, we need a voice – a prophetic voice to help us move off beyond these paralyzing excuses. God needs the church to be the source of that voice, our church here and globally, the Christian community in all the places and ways it gathers.
 Jeremiah describes God's call..."now I have put my words in your mouth...See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." The word we are given, the vision, which calls us, unfortunately, like that of Jeremiah is not soft and is not necessarily comforting. It talks about change.  About changing the way we live and act and relate to one another...in radical ways, "to preach good news to the poor." As one theologian has put it, "the function of redemptive love, both God's and humanity's, is not to make the sinners feel better about the past. It is to give them back a future.” 2 God doesn't seem to be saying, "let's all get back to the way things used to be." God seems to be saying, "Let's get moving on the vision...let's make justice the goal."
There is not one person of faith who doesn't know that this is God's word for our world.  No wonder we hesitate...and fall short. No wonder we procrastinate. It is a hard message to deliver. 
To really know God is to understand that. To really hear God calling is to try to run the other way. As Paul Tillich said in one of his landmark books, Shaking the Foundations, which he wrote after World War II when the world was poised to make some hard decisions as it prepared to rebuild itself. "[People] of all kinds, prophets, and reformers, saints and atheists, believers and unbelievers, have the same experience. It is safe to say [that one] who has never tried to flee God has never experienced the God who is really God."3
Paul looks at the issue from a slightly different way – “If I have prophetic power to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing…if I give my body to be burned – if I give everything that is, including my life – but have not love – I gain nothing.” This passage, 1st Corinthians 13, is one of those most beloved in the entire bible. Of course, it is a mainstay of weddings – and consequently it has been lifted to almost “Hallmark Card Status” as being lovely – and thereby adored abstractly. It is about love, after all. 
Such reverence for the words can distort or distract one from their meaning. Love is active, according to Paul and engaging. It is not passive but protective and patient, hopeful and shuns competitiveness – it is a ‘best case’ resource for those who are in the midst of conflict or stress. Paul creates the contrast between a kind of childish, romanticized notion of love which is like a shiny mirror – verses the love which becomes tangibly powerful in the face-to-face meeting of one and another.
That is the love we fear, I think.  God said to Jeremiah, "don't worry, I am with you,” never-the-less, Jeremiah spent his whole ministry saying, “God where are you?” What we know is that God’s love is strong enough to take us anywhere, but often it takes us to places we would not have chosen ourselves. Barbara Brown Taylor says that we need to be challenged and upset by the truth, by the "people sent to yank our chains and upset our equilibrium so we do not confuse our own ideas about God with God." We don't like "being told that our enemies are God's friends," she writes; "No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries. God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way."4
The reason that the congregation in Nazareth was so upset is not that Jesus did not have the credentials to preach; it was that he seemed to be talking about another God than the very proprietary God of the Jews under the Roman Empire. He was talking about a God who had concern for more than them and wanted, of all things, for them to have concerns for their neighbors as well. We confuse Paul’s explanation of “love” in 1st Corinthians with our own understanding of it in the same way. Love is not gooey; the macho guy thinks love is not manly; the hard working woman with too much on her plate thinks love is something for the weekend only; love is not just hugs. 
So many people interviewed in the wake of the Haitian disaster have talked about just wanting to pick up those little babies and “hug them into wellbeing.” Well, that’s a nice sentiment, but to love them is to remember that they are part of a people who have been living on the edge for generations – earthquakes in places like Haiti are so devastating because there is no infrastructure; decades of neglect set the scene for the horrible images we are witnessing on our T.V. To love, in Paul’s way is not to hug, it is to sacrifice something of yourself in order that the Haitis of the world might evolve in the 21st Century with adequate food and dependable shelter and healthcare for all their people. 
It is God who does the calling, God's love that moves through the church and through each of us. Most of us, I am sure, have found ourselves out on a limb at some time in our lives and wondered, "How did I get here." It is God who not only calls us, but also leads us through our life's encounters to be God's voice and to make God's word and will come alive. As each of us grows and stumbles around in our faith, trying to do what is right...trying to deal with our fears and face the risks of faithfulness, it is God's love and grace which allows us to fall and get up again...God's love and grace which puts us on course when we are lost, and gives us the words to say, when we need to say them. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan has said, "It is this grace which scatters the darkness, whether it be the darkness of open evil or the darkness which substitutes a false gospel for that which has grace at its heart."
So.... are you a procrastinator? Do you find yourself saying, "I'll get to that tomorrow?" St. Augustine used to say, "preserve me from all temptation...and keep me on course.... so I might serve you next year." "I'm too young," said Jeremiah. "I'm too busy, too old, too weak, too short, too tall...." It is because the Lord loves you that you will not be left alone. It is because the Lord created you and all of us to be "children of God" that we are destined to feel called again and again...to be in the world with words of judgment and words of healing and hope. – That is to be the church. 
God’s love is going to make us get up and do something – but let’s not be afraid of it! That is the nature of faith – to trust the love beyond the surface of the mirror – to trust the love for our church, our world and ourselves. If you resist it, and try to put it off, that is because you are only human and humans are afraid of change. If the word keeps coming; and you feel it changing you, encouraging you, that is because you are God's. God’s love never ends. Amen.