Shane Hughes 8-30-26

Said, my name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. It's a delight to have you with us. One of the experiences that I love the most here at Highland is Christmas Eve. And I don't know if you've ever been to our Christmas Eve service or you've been to a Christmas Eve service, but it is an inspirational experience.

But I didn't grow up going to a church that celebrated Christmas Eve. In fact, we were debating whether you could celebrate Christmas at all. In fact, even to this day, if you go to my home church in Denver in December, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Christmas and Easter. It's kind of all the same. But I love Christmas Eve here.

And everybody's favorite part of Christmas Eve is, of course, the sermon. No, it's not the sermon. It's the candles. You've been holding that candle the entire service. And then, then it's time for Silent Night.

And the lights go down to dark and everyone gets ready. And here at Highland, we light our candles from the Advent candle. And then it begins. And sometimes it's a child or sometimes it's an elder. And they take that one flame and they go and they light one candle.

And then as the song spreads, the light in the room spreads. And about two and a half way, two and a half verses through everyone is. The whole room is lit by candlelight. It is beautiful. It's one of my favorite moments the year.

You know, I think we lose something if we don't engage in the season of Advent. Because growing up, I never knew what holy anticipation could feel like. Getting ready for Christmas and getting ready to open presents may have taught me what frustration and patience feels like, waiting feels like. I know that in my life, I've had expectations about a person or an event or anything that's going to happen. And sometimes I'm disappointed.

Expectation and anticipation are not the same thing. But Advent teaches us about holy anticipation, waiting for God to do something. And so I want to take that moment, verse two and a half of Silent Night on Christmas Eve. I don't want to use that as kind of a metaphor for what we're going to talk about today, about election, about being called to something important, about the purpose in your life. So I want you to imagine with me a room with millions of candles.

Imagine with me a cathedral that you can't quite see the edges or the roof because it is so enormous. But inside are billions of candles, the whole sanctuary full of them. But they're not lit. The room is dark.

But then someone comes in with a match and you can't light all those candles at once. You have to start somewhere. And so you light one. Not because that candle has the best wax or the straightest wick or somehow is more deserving than all the rest. You light it because the fire has to start somewhere.

And once it's burning, you can do what a match by itself never could. Pass this flame on, wick to wick, until the whole room is lit. And so this is kind of long conversation that's been happening throughout Christian history about the idea of predestination and free will. This conversation is 2000 years old. And it.

One of those voices was Augustine. He was one of the most influential theologians of the first thousand years of Christianity. And he was arguing with this priest from kind of Britain, England area about the nature of human beings. Because this priest was saying, hey, I think that I could choose not to sin, at least for a moment. I think I could choose right from wrong.

And if I could choose it for a moment, then maybe I could choose it for a day or a week or a month, or in theory my life just never making a mistake. Now he would say, I don't think it's possible, but in theory I think I could. Augustine realizes the threat that this was for Christian theology. And he said, absolutely not. Scripture speaks that we bear within us the stain of sin from our first parents, Adam and Eve, we would call that original sin, that you cannot choose God without God first acting in your life.

You have no ability to choose right from wrong without the spirit of God dwelling in you. And that conversation continued later in history between John Calvin and Jacob S. Arminius and asking the question, do we choose God or did God choose us? And we as a church kind of live in that conversation because we were born on a kind of frontier revivalist movement where we firmly believe that you can choose the right path. We know what it is. And if you're not with us, that's a problem.

We firmly believe that.

Do we choose God or did God first choose us? And since some people obviously have the spirit indwelling in them and we can see it, they must be chosen. Does that mean these others aren't?

And if you've ever endured. I'm sorry, let me say that again. If you've never endured the misery of sitting by yourself in a lunchroom or standing next to a chain link fence with two other people desperately hoping that you're the last one picked, you may not understand the emotional weight of imagining that there are people whom God created, but whom God does not want. And I think part of this is a false dichotomy. Is free love, freely given, more important than the sovereignty of God?

And anytime you have those kind of questions in theology and somebody's pushing you far to the extreme, you should stop for a minute and think about what you're doing. Because when we face those kind of dichotomies, we. What we're being invited into is the mystery of the presence of God. To wonder. Not to decide, but to wonder together.

But this question gets even more and more complicated because if God chooses some, what does that say about everyone else? And this is why I think that image, that metaphor of a cathedral of candles is as close as I can get to that whole narrative of scripture in just one picture. God does not begin by sorting candles into winners and losers. The way that God begins in the story of God's people is that God lights a match. And so I want us to follow that logic into Genesis chapter 12.

This is the call of Abram that Eric read just a moment ago. What you have to realize is that history has gone sideways, right, right before this moment. Eden has been lost. Brothers are murdering brothers. There's a flood, there's a Tower of Babel where at humanity grasping for a name to get itself gets scattered into confusion and hundreds of competing tongues.

And into that scattered, fractured world, God does not decide to convene a summit of nations to sort this all out. God doesn't fix everything all at once.

Instead, God walks up to one man in Haran. Not a prophet, not a priest, by the way, just a childless old man from a family of moon worshipers and says, go. Go from the country, your people, your father's household, to a land I will show you. And then I want you to see what happens next in the text. Three.

Three verses. And then in some form, blessed shows up five times over. I will bless you. I will make your name great. I will make you a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you. And then there's the hinge on which this whole promise turns. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Abram is not chosen. Instead of the nations. Abram is chosen for the nations. The blessing that God offers was never going to stop at his tin flap or the edge of his family. God lights one candle in Haran.

The text tells you, before Abram has taken a single step, exactly where that flame is headed. That flame is going everywhere. Every family on earth, every nation. And I need you to feel the Tension here. God's relationship exists with Israel for its own sake.

Israel is not God's tool that he's going to use for the sake of everybody else. This love is the way that a parent loves a child or a husband loves a wife. Not as a means to an end, but as a relationship in its own intrinsic worth. We cannot treat Israel's election or chosenness as temporary, a discardable stage now that the church exists. I think this happens a lot of times.

I think you may have experienced this in your own life when you as a child of parents, realize that those parents had a life before you were born. And that life was actually pretty fun and they were pretty cool and they had money to do things then. Like there was this life that existed before you, this relationship that existed before you, and it existed not because of you.

I mean, this may be hard to hear. They weren't just waiting for you to show up. They were actually having a great time. They're still having a great time. But then it was good too, too far, too much.

Doesn't care who. Doesn't matter. All right, so now, but now I want you to skip forward about 400 years of slavery and 40 years of wandering in the desert. That was Genesis 12. Now I want us to look at Deuteronomy chapter 7 together, because this is Moses standing at the edge of the promised land.

And he's trying to give a people of God a sense of who they are. He's trying to provide them with an identity of chosenness.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be his treasured possession. I love the way that Eric read that. Treasured possession. It's a word used elsewhere in the Bible to talk about a king's private wealth, the jewels that he keeps for himself and no one else. This is what Moses calls Israel treasured.

What's your treasure?

In my parents life, my mom collected as gifts from my dad a certain amount of jewelry. And some of it, you know, depending on the year and how things were going, some of it was more beautiful than others. Some of it was more expensive or more valuable than others. But I bet you dollars to donuts, if you were to ask my mom what was her favorite treasure that she was given. It was not probably the most expensive gifts.

It was the early gifts when they had nothing, when they were dirt poor, when they were just trying to make it. And then my father found a way to give her something that he loved to show her that she was loved. Being God's treasure might actually do the opposite of what you might think it does. And Moses immediately in the next sentence tries to head off the very conclusion that you'd expect. It was not because you were more numerous than the other peoples, the that the Lord set his affection on you, for you were the smallest of them all.

It's not because you were more. It's not because you were more impressive or numerous or strong or had one thing to recommend over the Hittites or the Amorites or anyone else in that list. Back in verse one, Israel was the runt of the region and Moses wants it carved permanently into the reason for their chosenness, not hidden from it.

So why?

Why then? It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors. And that's the whole explanation. And Scripture doesn't bother in giving a fuller one. That's simply how love works.

I have a suspicion, and you could probably do this if you listed out every good quality in the people you love. Would that list add up to an explanation for why you love them? It would not. The Bible doesn't say God has love the way you might have a hobby. It says God is love.

And love like that doesn't wait around for a reason good enough to justify itself. Which means that Israel's chosenness was never a credential. It wasn't something they gathered and earned their way into and therefore could lose it by underperforming. It was not a gift handed to the rather it was a gift handed to the least likely candidate in the room for the reason it had nothing to do with the candidate. And so when we Put Genesis chapter 12 and Deuteronomy chapter 7 side by side, you gather the tension of the whole shape of what it means to be chosen by God that is chosen for the world, but not from it.

I want to pause here for a moment because I want to be honest here about something, because it would be easily. It would be easy to explain this way too fast. On its face it looks exclusive. One fan family singled out over all the families of the earth while everyone just watches from the outside. And you're not wrong to feel the strangeness of that.

The Bible doesn't pretend that election isn't strange. It simply tells us what election is for, not from it. Deuteronomy wants to make sure that you can't read your closeness as achievement. You didn't out qualify anyone. You weren't the best candidal in the box.

If anything, you were the stub that nobody wanted for the world. Genesis makes sure you can't read Your closeness as a private prize. The flame was never meant to stay where it was lit. Which means that election or chosenness, rightly understood, is one of the least flattering things that could happen to a person or a people. It isn't a comment on your worth, or it isn't a trophy or a ranking.

It's an assignment born entirely out of somebody else's love hand it to you, because grace starts somewhere and God has chosen you to let it start with you. And I think the church has wrestled with this every century, including our own has wrestled with these ideas. The temptation to read Israel's election as scaffolding for the final story that finally outgrew it. And it can all be taken down once the building is up. But that's not what these texts say, and that's not what Paul says either.

In Romans, chapter 11, he is still calling Israel beloved for the sake of their ancestors. God doesn't discard the candle once the fire spreads. The oath sworn to Abraham doesn't expire. Grafted branches, Paul says, don't get to forget the root that sustains them. Which means that the church, us, you and I, grafted in Jew and Gentile both, everyone in this room included, does not replace Israel.

We are gathered into the story that began before us. We inherit the same shape of calling. Not chosen because we were more rather chosen that so through us, someone else can see the light.

So let's bring this to now. And I want to pause here because I want to tell you I really struggle with an application of the idea of Israel's chosenness and election. How is that supposed to land on you in a way that makes your life different? Because I think sometimes in church, what you're wanting to hear is two or three ways that I can improve my moral behavior or my thinking, or my effort to somehow make my life slightly better this week. And I don't think this sermon leads you to that path.

In fact, I think this sermon might remind you of the opposite, that there's a lot about this story that has nothing to do with us. Most of this story, in fact. I would say every breath of the story of God is about God's love, God's faithfulness, God's commitment, and we are merely witnesses. And so I want to encourage you to do things that, like, help you live into the calledness that you have, the chosenness that you've received. But I also want you to realize, like this may not this time.

It may not have a lot to do with you, but everything I've said today leans hard on Paul's word that is irrevocable. God calling Israel didn't expire. It wasn't transferred. It was. It wasn't up for renegotiation.

Now that the church exists, that matters. Because most of Christian history, plenty of Christians didn't believe that. They read themselves as the fulfillment, the replacement of all the things. And if you've read it that way, that might be a misreading of what Paul's trying to say or what Moses is trying to say, what the author of Genesis is trying to say.

And I think I failed if that's what you walk away with today. The church was grafted into a promise. It didn't uproot the tree.

And the other thing I want to say very carefully, and I want you to lean in carefully, closely to listen to this part, because it's easy to blur. And blurring doesn't do anybody any favors. A theological conviction that I hold, that Paul holds, that God has not abandoned the Jewish people is not the same claim as a political judgment about the modern nation state of Israel, its government, its policies, the conflicts it's involved in. I think these are genuinely different questions. And so faithful Christians that completely agree on Romans 11 disagree completely on the geopolitics of the Middle East.

And they can do that in good conscience because Scripture settles the first question, but it does not settle the second.

A sermon on two Old Testament texts isn't the place to adjudicate a modern conflict. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise from up here.

And what I will tell you is this. Whatever you think about the politics, and you're free to think carefully and differently about that, the covenant claim stands on its own. God loved a people not because they earned it. And that love didn't come with an expiration date. Whatever complicates else, complicates our moment, that part is not complicated at all.

But here's the good news to that piece. The same promises and covenant and commitment that God made to Abram and his children, God has made to you through Jesus Christ, God will not break his covenant to his people. And those people are us. Before Abram did a single thing, before he'd taken one step toward the land he had not yet seen, the blessing was already spoken over him. Before Israel had kept a single commandment.

Moses had already told them the reason that they were loved was love itself, running backwards past their birth to the promise made to their father, Abraham.

So maybe hear it today, this way you. You may. In fact, I would say almost more positively, you were not chosen because you were the best candle in the box. You were not chosen because you finally got your act together. You were chosen because God loves, to begin with, the unlikely.

And the good news today is that candle is already lit. It was never up to you. The flame was always grace. And what it's for is to give the light away. And that was never up to you either, because that is what light does.

Would you stand with me for our benediction today?

I want to challenge you to be light to the people around you. But I don't know how Israel's election really shapes or changes that. So instead, I want to offer you this.

You have been selected to be part of God's kingdom. You were called, and you've heard that, and it has changed our lives. So maybe spend a little time today, maybe spend a little time this week asking yourself, how can I live in light of the promise that God has given Israel that has been graciously offered to me? May you go with God's presence and go in peace.