B, Last Sunday of Church Year, Proper 29 - Daniel 7:14 & Revelation 1:7-8 "Jesus Please Finish the Cheese"

 

Adam Cheeseman loves cheese.  For Adam, too much cheese seemed never to be enough. Cheese was Adam’s beginning and end.

To ask when cheese came into Adam’s life, showed that asking the question, meant one did not really know Adam.  Cheese was always there for Adam. It was a part of his being.  He lived for cheese. Without cheese, life had no purpose for Adam. 

It’s hard to know when cheese first became known to Adam.  It seemed that from the time his mother weened him off the breast he had a piece of cheese in his mouth.  As he grew and his mother asked what he wanted to eat, he would say, “cheese please!”

Because he loved cheese so much, he loved what his family did – milk cows!  To Adam it seemed that God put cows on earth for one purpose, and that was for milk to make cheese for Adam to eat. 

Adam met a girl in the cheese pavilion at the local show.  He fell in love with her from the moment he laid eyes on her, carrying a platter of cheeses for sampling.  Her name was Yvonne Curdle.

The Cheeseman and Curdle families were soon celebrating a wedding.  At the breakfast they toasted the speeches with the finest cheeses to ever come from the Cheeseman and Curdle family farms.

Adam and Yvonne lived on the Cheeseman farm, they milked cows, they made cheese, and soon there were little cheese men running around as they continued to live a cheesy life.  But sadness came when Adam’s parents died. At their wakes, they ate cheese.

But the life of Adam Cheeseman was not all that it seemed.  Those who didn’t like cheese were unacceptable to Adam.  He could not understand why folk didn’t like cheeses.  And soon all hell broke loose when Yvonne wanted to make a cheese with fruit in it.  This was sacrilege, you don’t put fruit in cheese, it’s just not right! 

But things grew worse when the children did not want to eat cheese anymore.  They became cheesed off and  loathed the sight of cheese.  They wanted to make the milk into blancmange, custards, and puddings.  For Adam this was nonsense.  The Cheeseman children eventually deserted the farm to follow their craving  for the sweet desire of desserts.

Life went on day in day out dairying, churning out cheese.  Adam could not stop making cheese and eating cheese.  When he closed his eyes to sleep there was cheese, when he had a dream, it was about cheese. When he had nightmares, what was it about?  Not having… cheese!  He never went on holidays and soon enough the cheesy lifestyle caught up with him.  One might say he was addicted to cheeses.

So, he died and was laid to rest in a cheese-coloured coffin.  But even in the afterlife there was an eternity of cheese.  Was this heaven or was this hell?  One thing for sure, it was more cheese.

What is the cheese in your life? To where do you run for comfort?  What competes inside of your secret self for supremacy?  Does the cheese you choose end up cheesing your off?  What cheese do you consume? The one you can’t stop eating, despite the desire becoming sour!

What is your choice of cheese in your life?  Is it pleasurable feelings from food, drink, or sex? Is it the need to be in control, to manipulate others with your will, or any other lust for power, ordering others from your ideals of goodness?  Is it amassing wealth or assets, or other things that profit you and enslave you in this life?  Or is it position and popularity where you act to be seen, and are seen to gossip, propping up and cutting down the poppies around you.

There is nothing wrong with pleasure, popularity, profit, and power in themselves.  They are all gifts from God.  But when they become like the cheese in Adam Cheeseman’s life, they are idols that wrestle one’s attention away from he on whom our attention needs to be focused, as we move towards the end of life here on earth.

Adam’s imbalance to cheese might seem silly.  But there’s nothing silly about our sin which turns the way we live, into evil.  Despite how good we believe it to be.  So significant is the seriousness of sin that Jesus hung in the balance to save us from sin.

When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.  (John 19:30 ESV)

The sins that seem sweet at first and end up souring our lives need to be stopped, they need to be finished.  These sins are kingdoms that temp us away from God, just as Adam and Eve were tempted to start their own kingdom only to be thrown out of the Garden and God’s presence.

The question for you today?  As God’s Kingdom comes, are you for his Kingdom or are you building your own kingdom of cheeses like Adam Cheeseman?

God works to end your cheesy kingdoms that serves only to constipate your life, so you become bound up within yourself.  God wants to cleanse you from within.  He wants to finish you, your old Adam, so you give up your spirit and he can fill you with the Holy Spirit.

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:7–8 ESV)

Life is not about what pleases us!  No one has ever come or will ever come to God the Father through nice cheeses.  Rather Christ Jesus is, and he was, and he is coming.  He is the Son of Man who saves us and had ended and finished all the cheeses that we seek to please us.

And to one like a son of man is given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:14 ESV)

The greatest temptation in this life is to be deceived into believing God’s Kingdom is not coming.  This leads one into false belief, despair, and other sins.  But God’s Kingdom has come to you.  God is giving you his Holy Spirit; he has and will continue to do so. So, by Jesus finishing sin on the cross we can live a godly life of confessing our evil, letting Jesus win the battle over the cheeses that please us.

Finally, I encourage you with these words written by Gloria and William Gaither.

Yet in my heart, the battle was still raging. Not all prisoners of war had come home. These were battlefields of my own making. I didn't know that the war had been won.

It is finished, the battle is over. It is finished, there'll be no more war. It is finished, the end of the conflict. It is finished and Jesus is Lord.

To that we can all praise God and say, “Amen”.