Of a Sunday

Dulling the Edges

2012-02-12T10:30:00.004-05:00

“Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” This is old, old wisdom, a minor variation on Jesus’ rebuke to Peter in Matthew 26, and a pattern which we see over and over in history. The people of Pergamum knew this well, for theirs was a city that had lived by the sword. Its early prominence rested on its prominence—a thousand-foot-high granite mesa overlooking the Caicus River which made a formidable natural stronghold. Pergamum maintained a high degree of independence under the Persian Empire, before joining with the Greeks and Macedonians as Alexander the Great swept through; after his empire broke into four pieces, the rulers of the city broke free and established themselves as a small kingdom along the river valley. When the Gauls moved into the Anatolian peninsula, Attalus I of Pergamum was the first to defeat them. Unfortunately, his successors overreached themselves; in an effort to expand their kingdom, they allied themselves with Rome, which ultimately brought their independence to a permanent end as a part of the Roman Empire.

Even so, Pergamum maintained its prominence for some time. Ephesus may have been the richest city in Asia Minor by the time John wrote, but Pergamum was still the capital of the province; and while Ephesus had surpassed it as a center of Caesar worship, that was a recent development, and the imperial cult was far more important in the city of Pergamum. Attalus I only claimed the title of king of Pergamum after his defeat of the Gauls; at the same time, he also claimed the title “Savior,” and a great temple to Zeus Soter—Zeus the Savior—was built as a consequence. His descendants also built a temple to themselves, and one of them formally claimed the title “Theos”—“God.” Worship of the ruler was part of the life of Pergamum long before the Romans came; once the city accepted Roman rule, worship of Caesar fit right in to that tradition.

Given that, it’s easy to understand why Jesus would say to this church, “I know you live where Satan’s throne is.” The first Caesar to be worshiped as a God was Augustus, and the first temple built to him, in 29 BC, was in Pergamum. The temple of Zeus Soter, associated from the beginning with the worship of their kings, loomed large in the city with its thronelike altar. Pergamum had been well ahead of most of the empire in its adoption of Caesar worship, and it was common there very early on to refer to Caesar as “Savior” and “Lord of the world”; and because it was the capital, it was there that Caesar had his throne in Asia Minor, and there that the proconsul ruled in his stead. The symbol of his power was the gladius, the leaf-bladed two-edged sword of justice.

As such, the religious pressure on the church in Pergamum was immense. Jesus commends them for their faithfulness in the face of that pressure; they would not deny their faith in him even when persecution built to the point of the death of one of their own. They were bearing up under the weight of public hostility and refusing to break, continuing to bear witness to the love of Jesus Christ against all the hatred of Satan.

But if they would not break, they were beginning to bend. The lines between the church and the culture were sharp—as sharp as the edges of the proconsul’s sword of judgment; the differences between those who worshiped Christ and those who worshiped Caesar and Zeus were clear and unmistakable, and it was on those lines that they faced persecution. It’s no surprise that some were looking for ways to avoid persecution by blurring those lines and dulling those sharp edges, and so the Nicolaitans had arisen and gained a foothold in the church. It appears they were teaching that it was acceptable for Christians to participate in idol worship—with the worship of Caesar no doubt the primary focus—as long as they didn’t really believe in the idols, the way most Romans undoubtedly didn’t. The church has always affirmed that Christ alone is Lord and he alone is to be worshiped; the Nicolaitans were setting that aside.

Now, this doesn’t mean they were trying to destroy the church. Most likely, they believed that joining in the festivals of idol worship with their sacrificial feasts and their sexual immorality was harmless, just an empty gesture that would fulfill patriotic obligations and enable Christians to keep their jobs and their businesses. Maybe they even argued that participating in the festivals honoring Caesar or Zeus or Asklepios was a form of cultural engagement, a way to be relevant to the culture and thus make their Christian outreach more popular and effective.

Jesus rejects this, comparing the Nicolaitans to Balaam. You might not remember his story, except for something about a donkey; he was a prophet whom King Balak of Moab hired to curse Israel as they traveled through the wilderness, but who blessed them instead, because he was a true prophet. You can see that if you look at Numbers 22-24. However, he also wanted the money Balak had offered him, and so he taught Balak to use the women of Moab to lure the Israelites astray—to have sex with them and join them in their feasts worshiping their pagan gods. Balaam couldn’t curse them, but he could teach Balak to tempt them into sin so that they would curse themselves, and they did.

What the Nicolaitans are doing is anything but harmless, because we become like what we worship, and what we do shapes how we think. If you’re familiar with the story of the Facebook game Cow Clicker, it was created as a satire on social games like FarmVille, but it quickly became a serious game which thousands of people played devotedly—why? Because the action of playing the game changed how they thought about it. Going out and saying “Caesar is Lord” or affirming by their actions that Zeus deserved their worship would have the same effect on the Christians of Pergamum. You can’t keep doing something you don’t believe in for very long—either you’ll quit doing it, or your beliefs will begin to change to match your behavior. And of course, far from convincing others to worship Jesus, seeing Christians worshiping the gods of the culture would only teach the culture that it didn’t need to change.

The same is true with our own Nicolaitans today. There are a lot of voices in the church urging cultural compromise for the sake of being relevant, or non-judgmental, or loving, or enlightened; and to those who feel that temptation Jesus speaks now as then as the one who has the sharp two-edged sword. Hebrews tells us that God’s word is so sharp, it pierces even to the division of soul and spirit—which is to say, it’s so sharp it can even do the impossible, dividing the indivisible. We need to feel the sharp edge of his word, and we need to live accordingly.

We are not faithful to Jesus when accommodating ourselves to the desires and idolatries of our culture is more important than submitting ourselves to his will; nor are we faithful to him when we are willing to publicly compromise our worship of him to keep people from being mad at us. It doesn’t matter whether our idols are “conservative” or “liberal,” or what part of our culture holds our allegiance; the only thing that matters is that they are not God and do not deserve our first priority. God alone, Christ alone, is to be worshiped; everything else must come second.

Through Death to Life

2012-02-05T10:30:00.002-05:00

(Psalm 23, Psalm 135:15-18; Revelation 2:8-11)

What do you think of when I mention myrrh? It was one of the gifts offered by the wise men to Jesus and his parents, and as the carol “We Three Kings” reminds us each year, the perfume of myrrh was one of the smells of death. Myrrh and aloes were used in funeral preparations to make the body ready for burial; and during the Crucifixion, Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh to help ease the pain. Myrrh is strongly associated with suffering and death. Wondering why I’m talking about this? The Greek word for myrrh was “smyrna.”

Now, this is almost certainly a coincidence, but it was understood to be a significant one, because Smyrna was a city of suffering in both mythology and its history. In myth, it was connected with the story of Niobe, who mourned for her children (who were killed by Apollo and Artemis for her pride). In recorded history, as the Kingdom of Lydia was rising to the power that would make its King Croesus famed for his wealth, Smyrna fought them off for many years before they were finally overcome. In revenge, the Lydians destroyed the city. People continued to live there, but they were not allowed to rebuild the walls, mint coins, or do anything else that a city could do. It was over three centuries before the city of Smyrna was allowed to come back to life—and they did think of it as a resurrection, comparing their city to the mythical phoenix.

Another important point about Smyrna is that it was regarded as an unusually beautiful city (especially by Smyrnians, who loved to brag about it). They praised it for its harmonious architecture, rising symmetrically to its battlements, and then to the fortified top of Mount Pagus that rose behind the city. They used various images to express this, but their favorite was the crown; this became the primary symbol for the city, appearing on all its coins. It was not, however, a crown of life. When the city of Smyrna sought to honor one of its citizens, the highest honor it had to give was a crown—and in every case we know of, the crown was awarded posthumously.

Finally, it appears that the Jewish community in Smyrna was particularly unpopular, and particularly hostile toward the Gentiles of the city; this resulted in a stark division between Christians and Jews in Smyrna, with almost no Jewish converts, and exceptionally vicious persecution of the church by the local Jews. To give you an idea, when Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was burned alive a century later, some of the Jews actually went out on the Sabbath to gather fuel for the fire. Combine that with everything else that we’ve talked about, and you can see why the church in Smyrna was suffering.

Which makes it remarkable that Christ has no complaint against them, only praise and encouragement. They have been suffering, they are oppressed and poor, but they have remained faithful, and their hearts have not grown hard or cold; they have not lost their first love. There’s no major problem with the church, nothing big they have to address—they just need to be prepared to hold fast, because as bad as things have been for them, worse times yet are coming.

This is why he says in verse 10, “Do not fear.” You are going to suffer, but don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, because the one who’s speaking to you is the first and the last, the one who died and came to life. He was there at the beginning, he’s already there at the end, and he’s here all along the way, all through life, every step. He is always present, always faithful, and he’s already faced the worst this world can possibly do to you. They can abuse you, they can torture you, they can kill you—he’s been through all of it, he knows it all well, and he knows what he’s asking you to bear, because he already bore all of it for you. You will not have to bear it alone, because he bears it with you.

And here’s the key: “Be faithful even to death”—not just up to that point, but all the way through it—“and I who died and came to life will give you the crown of life.” Here the echoes of culture ring loud. They could look out at their city, which had been destroyed and then reborn, which gave out crowns but only to be put on people’s tombs, and which had the power to take their lives, and know that they did not need to fear because someone far more powerful was on their side—the one who is Lord even of life and death. They did not need to fear because death was not the end, and did not mean defeat; even suffering and death were included and overcome in the plan of God.

This wasn’t a new thought. After all, the psalmist doesn’t say, “Even though you lead me near the valley of the shadow of death, you show me a way around it so I don’t have to pass through.” The thing is, though, a lot of people live as if God had made them that promise, and they don’t hear his word telling them otherwise. We see the reason for that in Psalm 135: we become like what we worship. What we put first in our lives is what we worship most truly, and when we set our hearts on things other than God—when what we want most and love most are things of this world—then we grow spiritually deaf and blind, because the things of this world cannot give sight, and cannot teach us to hear. That’s why these letters are addressed to “him who has an ear.

Being deaf to the voice and call of God is a terrible thing, but never more than when suffering comes—and it always does. We all pass through the valley of the shadow of death sometimes; for those who are there because they’ve wandered in by themselves, it’s a fearful place, with no certain hope and no clear direction. But if we find ourselves in the valley of the shadow and we know ourselves to be sheep of the Good Shepherd, then we have hope and we have a direction; we know that we’re only there because he has led us there, that he is guiding us through it each step of the way, and that he will lead us out the other side.

And yes, the time will come when the shadow will close around us completely, and we will finally emerge not into the light of this world, but into the life of the next; but for those who walk with Christ, even that is nothing to fear, for it is the final victory. Those who are faithful even to death share the victory and resurrection of Christ, and live to die no more; the one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death. This is our promise through times of trial and tribulation; this is our hope in the face of our enemies.

Light Under a Bushel

2012-01-29T10:30:00.002-05:00

(Genesis 2:8-9, Isaiah 6:1-10; Revelation 2:1-7)

What would you say are the four most important cities in the world? According to the global management consulting firm A. T. Kearney—I saw this in National Geographic at my in-laws’ house a couple weeks ago—they are New York City (no shock), London, Tokyo, and Paris, with Hong Kong at #5. Now, that factors in things like cultural experience—Paris is that high in part because of the cathedrals and the museums—so if you’re thinking in terms of power, you might arrange that differently; for my part, I think they’re crazy to list Beijing down at #15, given the looming significance of China as a military and economic power. Still, if we all made our own lists and combined them all, I’d bet it wouldn’t be much longer than four.

In the Roman Empire at the end of the first century, the list was even shorter. Rome was most important, of course, but among the provincial cities, three clearly dominated: Alexandria in Egypt, Syrian Antioch, and Ephesus in Asia Minor (which covered the western part of modern-day Turkey). Asia Minor was perhaps the richest of all Roman provinces, and Ephesus was its biggest and most important city—it had a quarter-million people, which was huge in the ancient world. It was a great seaport with a superb natural harbor at the mouth of the Cayster River, and through it flowed three major trade routes between Rome and the East; this made it an extremely important commercial center, and contributed to its great wealth.

Now, I said two weeks ago that we must understand the historical and cultural context if we’re going to be able to understand Revelation. I spent some time laying out the general context—if you weren’t here that Sunday, it would help to pull up the first sermon in this series and either read it or listen to it; we also need to look at some specific things for Ephesus, because this letter—like the next six—uses the particular history and situation of the city to make its point.

First, the city had been completely destroyed twice, and each time rebuilt on a completely different site—if you wanted to mark Ephesus on a map, you’d have to ask which one, at what point in history. The great biblical scholar William M. Ramsay dubbed it “the City of Change.” At the time of this letter, there was the threat of yet another change: the silting-up of the great harbor by the Cayster River, which would destroy the city. That did eventually happen, which is why the ruins of Ephesus now sit several swampy miles from the Turkish coast.

Second, Ephesus was a city of tremendous religious importance. I noted two weeks ago the temple of Domitian that was built there—as a center of Caesar worship it was second in importance only to Rome; but that paled in significance next to the great temple of Artemis, one of the famed seven wonders of the ancient world. The donations and gifts it attracted had done as much as trade to make Ephesus rich and powerful. And of particular importance for our passage, while the temple was the largest building in the ancient world, the original shrine out of which it had grown was a tree shrine. The tree was the emblem of the presence of the goddess in her sanctuary at the heart of the vast building; it was the principal symbol of Ephesian religion. The promise of the tree of life, then, isn’t only drawing on Genesis 2, it’s also an assertion that what the Ephesians claimed for Artemis in fact belonged to God.

Besides the cultural context of this letter, we also need to note the biblical context. If you remember a couple years ago when we worked through 1 Timothy, or if you happen to have pulled those sermons up more recently, you know that I argued that Paul’s central concern in that letter is to help Timothy deal with a group of false teachers who are doing great damage to the church in Ephesus; it’s clearly an urgent situation, and everything in the letter is aimed at stopping the spread of heresy. The purpose of the letter is to keep the false teachers from leading the church completely astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So what do we see here? “You have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.” They have overcome the false teachers and held fast to the truth, even in the face of hostility and opposition from their society. Paul’s concerns are no longer an issue—the church is strong, they’re working hard, they know the truth, they’ve got it right. They are an example to the other churches.

But. “I hold this against you,” Jesus says: “You have forsaken the love you had at first.” Some commentators believe this means they had lost their love for one another—that they had spent so much time and energy fighting for the truth that their hearts had hardened; suspicion and mistrust had eaten away at their relationships with each other. Others say that this clearly refers to their love for God, though really, you can’t separate the two; if one, then the other. Gregory Beale argues that the point is that they were no longer expressing love for Christ by witnessing to him in the world; that’s too narrow, but it is an emphasis in the broader point.

We need to understand the letter as a whole in the light of verse 1. You may have registered that Christ describes himself here in language that refers back to chapter 1; this is true of all seven letters, and in each case, it ties in to the message of the letter. Here, the reference comes from 1:13 and 16: Christ is the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands. He has authority over the angels of the seven churches—they are in his hand, in his control—and he is present among the seven churches, watching them and watching over them. He knows what’s going on, he knows what they’re doing and not doing, and he has both the right and the power to command them to change. As well, this language reminds the Ephesians (and us) that Christ is the source of their light, and the one whose light they are called to shine. It’s about him, not about them, and not about us.

Ephesus was a proud church. Theirs was a mighty city, and they were the mother church from which the other churches of Asia Minor were planted; and unfortunately, fighting for truth against those who are servants of the lie, as Paul says in 1 Timothy, tends to breed more spiritual pride. They had been fighting these battles, and all their energy and passion had gone into the fight, and all their focus had been on the fight; and when that happens, when you pour yourself into a fight like that, it will change your heart if you’re not careful. You start off fighting for truth because you love Jesus, and after a while, you’re fighting for truth because you love truth; given long enough, you fight because you love being right, and it’s all about you.

Is that where the Ephesians were? It seems a reasonable guess. Christ begins his message to them in a way that emphasizes his primacy. This isn’t all about the Ephesians, it isn’t about them proving their supremacy or superiority by winning theological arguments; it’s about Jesus. The light of the church, the light of the stars and the lampstands, doesn’t come from the church, and it doesn’t belong to them; it comes from Jesus. Doctrinal purity is important, because our teaching is one of the glasses through which the light shines—false doctrine obscures or distorts the light—but it is not itself the light. The light is the character and goodness and love and grace of God, and though the church at Ephesus has their doctrine all in order, the light of God is nevertheless being hidden by their lack of love. Just as their city is fighting for its life against the silt that threatens to fill in its harbor, so the church is fighting for its life against the pride and harshness that had silted up its people’s hearts. If they do not repent of their sin and return to the love of Christ, they will cease to be truly a church, and he will remove them.

Now, we know from Ignatius that the Ephesian church took this warning to heart, but they still stand for us as a cautionary example. We must stand for truth, because God is truth, and false teaching can be absolutely destructive; we cannot let it slide. We must also remember what Paul wrote in Ephesians, that “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” Love cannot exist without truth, but truth is not truth without love; and unfortunately, fighting with people doesn’t tend to make us love them.

As we fight for the truth, we must take care that the fight does not harden our hearts, that we do not grow proud and cold. As we stand against our former presbytery, we must be intentional about loving them, and about praying for them and for the PC(USA); and more than that, as we fight for the truth, we must take care to remember why we fight. We must never let our focus be on the battle, but only on Christ. Everything we do should be about him, not us, and for him, not us; everything we do should be out of love, because we love him and we love the people he has placed in our lives, and we want to please him.

Sword and Flame

2012-01-22T10:30:00.000-05:00

(Isaiah 44:6-8, Daniel 7:9-14; Revelation 1:9-20)

In his 1920 poem “Gerontion,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign’:/The word within a word, unable to speak a word,/Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year/Came Christ the tiger.” That was, incidentally, seven years before his conversion to Christianity. It’s a striking passage. The world asks God for a sign and gets the Incarnation, which Eliot captures vividly—“The word within a word, unable to speak a word, swaddled with darkness”—which was quite a swerve for the world, quite unexpected, but of course familiar and comfortable to us now; and then we get the swerve, the jolt from out of left field: “In the juvescence of the year,” in its youth, its springtime, “came Christ the tiger.” Christ the tiger. That’s not what we expect; which rings true, because neither was he. That image brings us back up against a Jesus who doesn’t fit our storyline of how things are supposed to go.

What is the tiger? Well, here’s another line, later in the poem: “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.” Christ? Well, uncomfortably, yes. In a number of ways. For one thing, it’s not biblical language, but it captures the way that the Spirit’s work of purifying our hearts sometimes feels threatening, as if it were an attack on us. That’s just part of the picture, though; Christ the tiger is Christ as judge, as the one who not only passes sentence but executes it. That isn’t Jesus as we like to think of him; increasingly, our culture wants to boil Jesus down to being all about love, and then leave that as vague as possible so that it’s nice and stretchy. That’s not how Jesus appears to John. We see Jesus here as the Son of Man of Daniel 7, and also as the Ancient of Days; we see him as the judge of all the earth.

Notice John’s reaction: “I fell at his feet as though dead.” Coming to grips with the holiness of God and the reality that he will judge the world has that effect; it tends to make it clear why the Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because in the light of God’s glory, our evasions, rationalizations, and self-justifications are exposed as the inadequate things they are. When we see Jesus as the holy judge, we cannot deny that we deserve judgment.

And yet, we want to deny it, and so the modern reflex is to deny that we have to see Jesus as judge. After all, didn’t he say, “Don’t judge?” (He didn’t, actually, but good luck making that point.) Talking about judgment is negative, it’s Old Testament religion, it’s reactionary and intolerant and even un-Christian. Worst, we’re told, it’s a denial of the love of God, because the spirit of the age insists that love and judgment are incompatible; thus you have Rob Bell write a book arguing (rather mushily and without quite standing up for it) that no one goes to Hell, and what does he call it? Love Wins. Because if there’s such a thing as eternal judgment, that must mean love has lost.

But here’s the thing, and we talked about this last year on 1 John: that’s a human definition of love. That’s not God’s definition, and that’s not how he sees it. Look at the context of Isaiah 44, where our passage this morning is immediately followed by a polemic against idols and those who worship them; on either side, we see God’s promise of redemption, but we also see the warning of judgment for those who dishonor him. The two are woven together; his love for his people emphatically does not mean that he doesn’t care what they do or whom they worship or how they live. In truth, he judges them because he loves them; it’s because he loves them that he wants them to change their ways and repent of their sin.

Put another way, we might say that God judges us because we matter to him and what we do matters, because we are important enough to take seriously. If God never judged anyone and everyone ended up in heaven regardless, that would mean that this life doesn’t matter, and that what we do with our lives doesn’t matter. Our lives would be of no consequence—they would be inconsequential. Which means that we would be inconsequential. We would be unimportant, too insignificant to bother with. This is the logical conclusion of a judgment-free faith; and it leads ultimately to Hell breaking loose on earth. Part of the gospel message is that our actions have eternal consequence, because we are beings of eternal consequence—and that God loves us so much that he took the consequence of our sin on himself, that he who is our Judge might be our Redeemer. This is why the first and the last, the living one, is also the one who died and rose again. Judgment is morally necessary if anything meaningful is to be real, even love.

That’s a countercultural statement these days, but deep down I think we all know it’s true. On the one hand, we resist the idea of judgment because we don’t want to face the idea that we might deserve it; no one wants to be in the wrong, no one wants to be guilty as charged. On the other, we know the hurts we have suffered, we see the abuse of children, the suffering of war and the evils of tyranny, we see the damage we have done to our world, and how can all that belong in heaven? It isn’t possible to acknowledge all that and refuse to judge unless you reach a state of total indifference, or total despair.

The fact of it is, we cannot stand nowhere, and we cannot see the world from no point of view; we cannot believe without someone or something to believe in, and we cannot act without a reason and a goal—some idea that there is something good we can accomplish, or some way that we can make things better than they are. To insist that there is nothing and no one deserving of judgment as sinful, to hold that view consistently, we would be forced in the end to conclude that there is nothing and no one we can truly call good; and if that’s the case, life is little more than a ghastly joke. Otherwise, there must be a judge. The only question is who, and on what grounds, and by what right.

Of course, for all of us, there is the clamoring voice of the ego that insists that I am the center of the world, and thus I am the only one who has the right to judge; the trouble for the church comes when we give into that temptation without realizing it, when we start passing our own judgments in the name of God. That breeds a terrible spiritual pride because it blinds us to a critically important truth: the judgment of God begins with the people of God. We see that here. Christ appears to John as the judge of all the earth, he commands John to write to the seven churches, and where does he begin? Not with the judgment of the world, but with the judgment of those seven churches, both praising them and calling them to repentance. The judgment of God on sin begins with us.

If we are to speak with any integrity of the judgment of God, we have to begin there, in the reality that judgment isn’t just for everybody else. We do not face God as judge by faith in our own merit, figuring that he doesn’t need to judge us because we’re better than everyone else. Rather, we face him by faith that he is a loving God, that his judgment on sin flows from his love for us sinners, and that because of his love for us he took the full weight of that judgment on himself, paying the penalty for sin that we could never pay and serving the sentence of death that should have been ours. The one whose word is a double-edged sword and whose eyes are aflame is the one who died and rose again and holds the keys of death and Hell—for us. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us a kingdom of priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

Christ the Center

2012-01-15T10:30:00.003-05:00

(Exodus 3:13-15, Zechariah 12:7-13:1; Revelation 1:1-8)

You’ve probably been told that if you place a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, while if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it, the frog won’t perceive the danger and will ultimately let itself be cooked. I’m not sure where that idea came from, but I can’t think it was from anyone who knew much about frogs. Drop a frog in boiling water, it will go into shock and die. Put a frog in cold water, though, and it will try to jump away whether you heat it or not—frogs have absolutely no interest in sitting still for you. It’s a useful metaphor about life, but a lousy way to cook frog legs.

The funny thing is that the metaphor works because human beings often aren’t as smart as frogs; or maybe we should say that we aren’t as simple, that we’re more easily diverted and misdirected. Either way, we’re a lot more prone to miss threats, or fail to see them for what they are. We need someone to warn us of what’s happening, to call us to wake up and pay attention before it’s too late.

Which is, I think, why we have the book we know as Revelation; or much of the reason, anyway. I must admit, I feel a certain trepidation in beginning this series; Ecclesiastes says, “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and that’s certainly true of books about Revelation. I’m pretty sure there have been more commentaries written about this book of the Bible than any other; in many periods of Christian history, it hasn’t been close. There are a lot of opinions flying about, many with considerable force, and it’s easy to get caught in the crossfire—or to flinch and start ducking at every sound.

As such, I feel the need more than usual to lay out a thorough introduction to this sermon series, just to make it clear what we’re doing and where I’m coming from. In the first place, we’re not covering all of Revelation, so my apologies to anyone who’s disappointed to hear that. The core of this sermon series is something I’ve been thinking about doing for years, looking at the letters to the seven churches; obviously we’ll begin with chapter 1, and then we’ll conclude with chapters 4-5, which begin the main body of the book but also, I think, give us important context for the seven letters.

That said, even though I intend to stop at chapter 5, it’s important to let you know how I approach the book as a whole. Answer: the same way porcupines kiss—very carefully. In all seriousness, I’ve said more than once that we live between the times, that the kingdom of God has already come in Jesus Christ, but has not yet been fully realized; in Oscar Cullman’s famous image, we live after D-Day but before V-E Day. The war has already been won, but the battles are not yet over, because the enemy is fighting hard. We see this tension between “already” and “not yet” all over the New Testament, not least here in Revelation. This is important because we need to understand that “the last days” aren’t something way off in the future; biblically speaking, we have been in the last days ever since the birth of Jesus.

Third, one of the big disputes is where we look to find the fulfillment of the prophecies of this book: were they fulfilled in history, is their fulfillment still to come, or are they symbolic? For my part, I’d say the answer is “yes.” If you were here New Year’s Day, you might remember me talking about typological interpretation. For those who weren’t (or don’t), it’s something we see quite a bit as the New Testament authors, especially Paul, read the Old Testament. They find patterns and events and characters in the Old Testament which point to Jesus, not literally but by analogy. Thus Matthew draws on Isaiah 7:14, which was a prophecy given to King Ahaz of Judah and fulfilled in that time, and he applies it to Jesus. Does that negate the original fulfillment of the prophecy? No, but he sees that it was fulfilled again, in a greater way, in Christ.

I believe we have something similar in Revelation, only we’re standing in a different position in history. The church in John’s day expected his vision to apply to them, and they found connections. Was the prophecy fulfilled in their time? Not completely, no, but I believe they saw it partially fulfilled. Throughout the centuries, whenever the church has passed through trials, the people of God have turned to Revelation and found comfort and encouragement. I don’t think anyone will ever completely understand the great visions that fill this book until their final fulfillment comes, and that it will be a great blessing and comfort to the church in that day—but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that it has been a great blessing and comfort to the suffering church all the way along, as John keeps assuring the people of God, “I’ve seen the back of the book, and we win.”

Fourth, how we understand the historical setting of Revelation makes a big difference in our interpretation of the letters in chapters 2-3. Scholars disagree on this, too, since disagreement is what keeps them employed, but I think we can safely trust the witness of the early church that Revelation was written in the 90s AD, late in the reign of the Caesar Domitian.

Over the course of his reign, Domitian was increasingly addressed as “Master and God” both by those who sought his favor and by those seeking to avoid punishment, and increasingly came to demand divine homage; this probably has something to do with the expansion of the imperial cult during his reign, including increased persecution for non-Jews who refused to worship Caesar, and the establishment of a formal site of Caesar worship in Ephesus, complete with a huge statue of Domitian.

Interestingly, the push for that temple came not from Domitian but from the social elite of the province of Asia Minor, which included Ephesus and the other churches to which John wrote. They wanted to gain favor and influence with Rome, and they used Caesar worship to make a great display of their loyalty to Rome and devotion to Caesar. Naturally, then, they became less and less tolerant of those who refused to worship Caesar; and so while there’s no real evidence that Domitian himself sought to persecute Christians in any major way, intolerance and persecution were rising in the provinces.

In addition to the political pressure on Christians, there was also cultural and economic pressure, through the institutions of the trade guilds. You didn’t have to participate in a guild to be in business, but they were the social networks for the various trades—and each had its patron deity, which you were expected to worship at least once a year. These patron gods, along with Caesar, were given the credit for the empire’s health and prosperity; refusal to show proper gratitude was considered bad citizenship.

What we have, then, at the time of John’s writing, is a situation in which there has been sporadic persecution of Christians—most likely why John is on the island of Patmos—but nothing major; yet the pressure to compromise the faith is building, and significant persecution looms in the near future. An old bullfrog might be smart enough to jump out before the water boils, but the church doesn’t see the crisis coming. John’s role is to warn them. And understand this: that doesn’t mean telling them to hunker down or get ready to protect themselves. In a sense, it means telling them not to do either. Instead, it means encouraging them to stand strong against the culture, knowing full well that doing so will bring the wrath of the culture and government down on their heads.

That’s a lot to ask of anyone; which is why John begins the way he does. He’s not primarily calling them to stand against something, but rather to stand for something—or rather, someone: Jesus Christ. It’s easy to begin by decrying the culture and the state of the world, or pointing out how bad this is or that is, but John doesn’t do that. He begins at the center of our faith, with the one who is the reason for our salvation and should be the reason for everything we do. He begins with praise and promise, giving glory to Jesus who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us a kingdom of his priests, and who is coming again to complete the victory he has won.

Christ is the center, and the reason, the beginning and the end; everything else John is going to say, and everything else we may say about our faith and life, flows from that truth. Is it worth resisting the world, is it worth going against the flow, even if it means persecution, even if it means death? Yes. Why? Because of Jesus.

True King, False King, Wizard, Priest

2012-01-01T10:30:00.002-05:00

(Isaiah 60:1-6, Micah 5:1-5a; Matthew 2:1-18)

God leads us in odd ways, sometimes. I began this week with no real idea what I was going to preach on; when I did my sermon planning for this past year, I hadn’t been able to settle on anything for this Sunday, so I’d left it blank. I had ideas floating around, but nothing fit; and then I sat down Tuesday, and God just put it together for me. There were several things that contributed to that, including the fact that I’d recently been reading about the new movie version of John Le Carré’s book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I’ve never read the book and don’t know much about it, but the title is resonant; and as this passage from Matthew was bouncing around in my mind, it bounced into that title with a loud clang, and suddenly I had a sermon title.

Which might not seem like a big deal (and often it isn’t), but in this case, it was, because it gave me a framework for the passage. You see, there are really four characters in this section of Matthew, the four in the sermon title; and there’s something rather shocking about this combination of the four of them, something which familiarity has dulled in our minds. I was thinking about this, too, thanks to a post on the Desiring God blog from Christmas Eve titled “We Three Kings of Orient Aren’t.” “We Three Kings” is a marvelous carol for many reasons, which is why we’ll be singing it later, but the people who came to visit Jesus weren’t kings, they were magi. Which I knew, but I hadn’t fully registered the significance of that until I read this:

They are pagan astrologers, not too far from what we’d call sorcerers and wizards.
Gandalf and Dumbledore are coming to worship the baby Jesus.
These magi are not respected kings but pagan specialists in the supernatural, experts in astrology, magic, and divination, blatant violators of Old Testament law—and they are coming to worship Jesus. . . .
The whole Bible, Old Testament and New, plainly condemns the kind of astrology, stargazing, and dabbling in the dark arts typical of the magi. In biblical terms, the magi are plainly marked as “sinners.”

The magi are the spiritual descendants of the priests of Egypt who struggled against Moses and Aaron before the Exodus, and of the Chaldean magicians who opposed Daniel in the presence of Nebuchadnezzar and Darius. Really, to say Gandalf and Dumbledore are coming to Jesus isn’t strong enough, given the biblical view of these folks; this is more like Salazar Slytherin and Severus Snape. Everywhere else in Scripture, these people feature as the enemies of God. Yet here, they come to worship Jesus. What’s going on?

Two things. One, we have a gospel inversion going on here—God’s work of deliverance inverting the established order, as both Mary and Zechariah prophesied. Who are the characters here? On one hand, you have Herod the king, and you have the religious leaders—the priests and the seminary professors. These are the people who have the power and the position; they’re the ones who are supposed to be leading Israel in the ways of God. But the king is a false king—installed by Rome, holding power through military conquest, with no real legitimate claim to the throne in Jerusalem; in consequence, he’s becoming increasingly paranoid about his position. Somewhere in here he will execute his favorite wife on the barest suspicion of treason (she was innocent). And the priests aren’t challenging him, they’re serving him.

On the other hand, you have these foreign wizards, and you have Jesus, born among the animals. The wizards are hardcore pagan bad guys, and Jesus is so insignificant as to be completely beneath official notice. In the normal course of the story, they would be the threat to the people of God. Instead, Jesus is the true king, and the wizards are coming to worship him, while the priests of his people are indifferent and the man on the throne is the true enemy. The characters don’t line up in predictable fashion, because God is doing something very, very different from anything he’s done before; the previous rules and storylines don’t necessarily apply.

Two, that fact tells us something important about what God is doing. To understand what, let’s look first at Micah 5. Bethlehem, you who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, are nevertheless not least among them, because out of you will come the king of Israel—and not just any king, but the one “whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days.” This is the Messiah God had promised, the Deliverer, the Redeemer, who would gather all the people of God back to Israel, who would rule over them as a king faithful to God, and who as a result would bring them peace and security.

What’s in view here is more than merely national and political deliverance, as we can see from the vision of Isaiah 60. The glory of the Lord rises among his people, drawing all the nations, their kings coming humbly to Israel, bringing their wealth. Note in particular verse 6—the NIV says that they will come from Sheba “bearing gold and incense,” but in fact that last word is more specific in the Hebrew: it’s frankincense. The magi aren’t actually kings, and they aren’t from Sheba, but their appearance with gifts of gold and frankincense is another sign that Jesus is indeed the Messiah—and more, that he is the glory of the Lord promised in Isaiah 60, rising among his people to be their light.

That’s not all that’s going on here, though; there’s one more thing that must be said. It’s foreshadowed in the reference to Micah—the king who comes from Bethlehem will cause “the rest of his brothers [to] return to the people of Israel”—but it really comes into focus in verse 15, in this strange citation of Hosea 11:1. Pull out your Bibles and let’s look at this a moment. The chapter begins, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Hosea is clearly talking about the Exodus—so why is Matthew applying this verse to Jesus? And why is he using it here, when Jesus and his family are heading down to Egypt, rather than a few verses later when they return?

The second question is no big deal, I think, since Matthew makes it clear in verse 15 that Jesus’ stay in Egypt was temporary. The first is the important one. If you look a little further on in Hosea, at verses 10-11, you see the prophet says that the Lord will roar like a lion, and his children will come to him: “They will come from Egypt, trembling like sparrows, from Assyria, fluttering like doves.” It’s a promise of a second exodus, a new exodus, in which the Lord will bring his people back from exile as he brought them up from Egypt, and establish them again in their land as he had done before.

The key here is that at the time of Jesus’ birth, those promises had really only been partly fulfilled. God’s people had indeed returned, mostly, from their places of exile to Jerusalem and their homeland—but when they returned, they were still a conquered people, and so they had mostly remained. Certainly they had seen nothing like Micah 5 or Isaiah 60. As such, there was a sense that the new exodus God had promised was still to come; that was why they were waiting for the Messiah, the prophet like Moses who would lead the new exodus as Moses had led the first.

This is what Matthew’s on about in verse 15; it’s a form of what we call typological interpretation. Jesus is the new Moses, the one who will lead his people out of slavery, and more than that, he’s the new Israel. He is the one who will perfectly keep the law Israel could never keep; he’s the one who will perfectly fulfill the mission Israel could never fulfill. And where God called Israel his son because he had chosen them as his people, Jesus of course is God’s Son at a much, much deeper level. And so just as Israel, in its infancy as a nation—just one large extended family—went down into Egypt, then was brought back up into the Promised Land in God’s good time, so Jesus will go down into Egypt as an infant, and then return.

In other words, in this passage we see Matthew laying down some of the evidence that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus is the true Israel; he is the new Moses, the one who will lead the new exodus of his people; he is the one whose light will draw all the nations, at whose feet kings will lay down their wealth, including gold and frankincense. He will be opposed by the powerful, who will scruple at nothing to strike him down, but they will not succeed; though they will murder the innocent—first the babies of Bethlehem, then in the end Jesus himself—yet they will not silence him, for he will rise again from the dead.

And in the end, no one who truly sees him will be able to stand indifferent; the priests were at his birth, but they wouldn’t be once they really got to know him. In the end, either you see him like Herod, a mortal threat, or like the shepherds and the magi—and you worship. There’s nothing else to do.

Extraordinary Obedience

2011-12-25T10:30:00.004-05:00

(Isaiah 7:10-17; Matthew 1:18-25)

It hadn’t occurred to me until just now (I don’t know why, it seems obvious once you see it), but in these two passages—Matthew’s account of the angel’s message to Joseph, and Isaiah’s message to Ahaz, which Matthew references—there’s a remarkable contrast between the two men who received those divine messages. The obvious one is between their social status; but more than that, there’s a sharp contrast between the two in faith and obedience.

Doesn’t it seem strange to you—lots of people ask God for signs; the Old Testament is littered with examples—but here, God’s prophet actually invites someone to ask for a sign, and Ahaz says, “No thanks.” He cloaks it in false piety, saying, “I don’t want to put the Lord God to the test”; which sounds great until you remember that God made the offer. Why does he do that? I could be wrong, but I think it’s because he honestly didn’t want the sign; he had his own plans for political and military deliverance. He’s fighting Syria and Israel, and his idea for dealing with them is to bring Assyria down on them—to ally himself with the tiger to get rid of the fox.

Really, that wasn’t all that bright an idea, as the long-term consequences would be severe; but he was trying to deal with his problems on an ordinary level—ordinary for a king, anyway—by means of plans he could devise and events he could at least hope to control. He was trying to solve political and military problems by political and military means, and here’s the prophet coming along with an offer from God to solve them in a way that was completely out of the ordinary and beyond his control. To that, he says, “No, thank you. I don’t want that.”

In retrospect, knowing how the story ended, we can see how foolish Ahaz was; but in our own lives, in our own context, it’s much, much harder to see. Intellectually, we understand that God is out there and doing stuff—we say it, and at some level, we believe it—but in terms of the day-to-day operation of our lives, we don’t live by faith in what God is doing, we live by faith in what we can see and touch and quantify and control. When we have big problems (as certainly Ahaz did), we tend to look to big people rather than to God—to politicians, to the rich, to the famous, to the influential; to big corporations and big government. And yes, God can and does work through them as much as through anyone else; but he doesn’t need to, and he doesn’t rely on the powerful to accomplish his purposes. This time of the year above all others, we should remember that, because the birth of Jesus dramatizes the point with exceptional force.

Jesus’ parents came from Nazareth, a small town which lay in a high valley among the hills of Galilee; they were far from rich or powerful. They may have been poor, given that when they presented Jesus at the temple, they offered the sacrifice of the poor, two small birds, rather than a lamb; but it occurred to me this week, those were unusual circumstances—they had just made the trip to Bethlehem, and their families were mad at them. In a world with no bank accounts, ATMs or credit cards, the fact that Joseph couldn’t afford a lamb right then doesn’t mean he was poor in general. We think of Joseph as a carpenter, but in our terms, it would be better to call him a builder, even a general contractor; no doubt he did work with wood, but he probably did a lot more with stone, and the bulk of his work was most likely in construction.

That said, while economic times were pretty good, and building houses was a good way to make a living, this was still a man working for a living in a small town; Joseph was not a man to whom Rome would have paid any attention, save at tax time, nor a man who you would ever have expected to wind up in the history books. History is usually about those who are blue in blood, not in collar. Sure, he probably hoped Messiah would come, just like many in Israel did—but to have any part in his coming? Messiah was for Jerusalem, and he was for Nazareth, and his plans for his life would have been much smaller than that. No doubt when he and Mary were betrothed, he looked for nothing more than a happy marriage, a healthy family, and at least one son to learn the trade.

And then one day, Mary came to him and told him she was going to have a baby. One would think he must have been the first person she told; and one would also think he must have felt like one of his houses had fallen in on him. I don’t know if it made it better or worse when she then took off for Judea to visit Elizabeth and Zechariah, leaving Joseph alone to wrestle with everything; either way, it had to have been agonizing.

He had been dishonored—or so he thought, and so the whole society would think—and he had no option but to divorce Mary; engagements in that culture were as binding as marriage, they could only be ended by divorce, and not only Jewish but Roman law demanded that a husband divorce his wife if she were guilty of adultery. If Joseph failed to do so, he would have two choices: let everyone think he had gotten Mary pregnant, or be subject to arrest by the Romans for facilitating prostitution. Either way, he would be shamed, subject to the scorn and contempt of everyone around him. What’s more, in divorce proceedings, Joseph could have claimed her dowry—whatever assets she brought with her into the marriage—and reclaimed any bride-price he had paid, thus coming out of the matter with his revenge and a tidy profit.

But instead, we see the first indication that Joseph, for all his ordinary life, was truly no ordinary man. Where financial considerations, the desire to save what he could of his reputation, and simple anger and hurt would all have pushed him toward a public divorce, instead he decided to do the best he could for Mary, rather than for himself. He had to divorce her, but he resolved to do it as quietly as possible, minimizing her public dishonor at considerable cost to himself. Justice would have permitted him to do much more, but he chose instead to treat her with mercy, which was a remarkable decision. Indeed, it was truly Christlike.

So Joseph comes to this decision, then goes to bed; he tosses and turns for a while, no doubt thoroughly miserable, and finally falls asleep. And in his sleep, an angel comes to him and says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And then the angel was gone, and I imagine Joseph sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, the room dark, but the light of the angel still shining in the backs of his eyes.

And then—he didn’t try to fight it, he didn’t say it was just a dream or try to explain it away: he did what he was told. He believed the angel, and he accepted Mary’s story, and he acted on it. Sure, it was impossible to believe; but then, what had happened to him was impossible to believe, too, but it had happened. It would cost him his honor in the eyes of his community, it would mean great shame for him and all his family, but God had commanded him, and he obeyed. This showed remarkable faith in God, and an even more remarkable willingness to follow God into the teeth of all the displeasure and contempt the world, and his family, could throw at him. It’s hard, hard as a door slammed shut, to buck the demands of family and society for God’s sake, but he did it.

We really need to appreciate this: Joseph gave up his life when God called, with no idea how much of it he might ever get back. He gave up his reputation, he gave up revenge, he gave up his own plan for how his life should go . . . he surrendered his life. He could have rejected the dream; he could have refused the call and chosen to keep control of his own life. Instead, he chose to put himself in God’s hands and accept the part God had for him, even though it meant being a fool to the world and a pariah to his family.

And because of that, he got to be there when God came to earth, a baby who would become a man whose footsteps would shake the world; and in so doing, in surrendering himself to the plan and the hands of God, Joseph surrendered himself to joy: the joy of the angels; the joy of the shepherds; the joy of all creation. His extraordinary obedience brought extraordinary reward.

The Sign of the Manger

2011-12-24T17:30:00.003-05:00

(Isaiah 9:1-7; Luke 2:1-21)

There’s a pastoral couple out in New Jersey in my home denomination, the Reformed Church, Seth and Stephanie Kaper-Dale, who Sara and I knew at Hope. Before they went to seminary, they spent a year working with an RCA-supported orphanage in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Some years ago, Seth wrote a piece about the birth of Jesus, and in the course of the article, he told this story from the orphanage:

A few months into our time there we started taking the kids from the orphanage on field trips into the wealthy parts of the city . . . One day we took a group of kids to a new shopping mall—malls are the rage in the rich sector of Ecuador. When we arrived at the mall by bus we jumped off, and our child companions looked with amazement at the building before them.
“You mean, you’re going to take us in there? We can’t go in there.” Only one boy spoke, but it was clearly the opinion of all the orphans.
“Of course you can go in,” I said. “This is a public shopping center. You are just as entitled to walk around in there as anyone else.”
The kids shrugged their shoulders, and with the permission they needed, they ran off ahead of us to the front door—where armed guards promptly stopped them. Only when the guards saw us, and saw that we were with these kids, were they even allowed to enter the shopping center. Inside, I began noticing shopkeepers and shoppers giving nasty looks to the beautiful children with us. Apparently, the rich could see the impoverished reality of these children, as if their poverty were a visible garment.
There was no place for them in the mall that day.

In society’s eyes, they were unworthy; and just so were Mary and Joseph. We hear the traditional translation that says there was no room for them in the inn, and we tend to project our own experience into it and assume that the inns were all full. The thing is, though, Bethlehem probably didn’t have an inn—only the big cities did; Bethlehem was too small, and too close to Jerusalem. Also, the word Luke uses here isn’t the normal word for “inn”—he uses that one in the parable of the Good Samaritan; rather, it’s a word meaning “guest room”—the same one he uses for the upper room in which Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Last Supper. Which fits, because in that day and age, people didn’t travel all that much, and when they did, they usually stayed with friends and relatives. Given that Joseph was going back to the home of his ancestors, where he would have relatives—distant cousins, perhaps, but family is family—the normal plan would have been to stay in the guest room in one of their homes.

So there’s more going on here than we usually realize. Which shouldn’t surprise us. Stop and think about it—put yourself in the shoes of Mary’s father or mother: your teenage daughter, who’s engaged to a good man, turns up pregnant (disgracing your house, incidentally), and when you ask her who got her pregnant, she says, “God did!” Do you believe her? No, you probably don’t—and judging from the fact that the gospels never mention them, neither did they. In fact, nobody did, unless angels had given them reason to do so. Elizabeth believed her, being herself miraculously pregnant, but Joseph didn’t, until he had his own angelic visitation. As far as the world was concerned, here was a teenage girl who had fooled around, gotten pregnant, and had now concocted this ridiculous story to try to excuse herself; she had brought great shame on herself, Joseph, and both their families, which was no small matter.

This, I think, is one reason Mary went to visit Elizabeth and stayed three months: it got her away from her parents and their disapproval. When she did go back to them, she doesn’t seem to have stayed very long, since Matthew tells us that after Joseph had his dream, he took Mary into his home; it isn’t certain, but it sure looks like her parents kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant, shaming the family, and then lying about it (and perhaps committing blasphemy in the process). The only person Mary had who was both willing and able to care for her was Joseph.

That’s probably why she went with him to Bethlehem. Legally, she didn’t have to; she was neither a taxpayer nor eligible to serve in the Roman army, and thus didn’t need to be registered. As far along as she was in her pregnancy, traveling to Bethlehem wasn’t the best of ideas—better to stay home, if she could. So why did she make the trip? Because she had no place else to go. Her parents had rejected her, Elizabeth had a baby, and she had no other option.

And then, in Bethlehem, she found the same rejection. You would think the extended family should have made room, however crowded things were, for a woman in the last stages of pregnancy—but they refused. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to turn Joseph and Mary out, but they were completely unwilling to show any real hospitality to anyone who had brought such shame on them. They finally allowed Joseph and Mary a grudging spot in the house of one of the family, but not in the upper room, with the honored guests—and not in the part of the main room where the family lived—but only in the lowest part of the house, with the animals, where their dishonor would be plain.

In other words, there was no room for Joseph and Mary in that guest room because their family refused to make room; it was less that there wasn’t room on the floor, and more that there wasn’t room in their hearts. Joseph and Mary had dishonored the family; let them be treated with dishonor. No respectable bed for such a woman, or for her illegitimate child, the fruit of her shame. And so the mother of God was given a place with the sheep and the cow, and the Lord of the Universe was laid in a feed trough dug out of the floor; the Messiah came home to his own people, and his own family rejected him, because he didn’t come on their terms.

And yet, even in this we see the grace of God. Isaiah says, “To us a child is born, to us a son is given,” and that the child’s name was to be Immanuel, “God with us,” and God meant all of us—look whom he invited to the birth. Shepherds filled a critical role in the economy in Israel, but increasingly, their only role in Jewish society was at the bottom; yet they were the first outside witnesses to the birth of the Son of God. Would they have been welcome in the guest room of a respectable house? No; but in the lowest part of the house, where the animals stayed, they belonged. If there was no place for the shepherds in polite society, and if they were to be welcome at Jesus’ birth, there couldn’t be a place for him in polite society, either.

This, I believe, is why the angel tells the shepherds, “This will be a sign for you.” It’s not just about telling them how to find the right baby—there’s a message here. God has come to Earth, love has come to his people, and he came to a place where anyone could come, so that right from the beginning he was God with all of us—no exceptions, no ifs, ands, or buts, end of sentence.

Which is both comforting and discomfiting. On the one hand, it means that I am welcome, you are welcome, to come to him. Nothing that any of us are or have been or have done will make Jesus turn away from us; we cannot be so unworthy as to outweigh his love for us. At the same time, though, it means that he doesn’t cater to our comfort zone, either, nor does he reject those whom we reject. We can’t say to Jesus, “I’ll come to you, but first you have to get away from the animals and move someplace more comfortable—I don’t like the smell, and there’s no place to sit down.” We can’t say, “I’ll come, but only if you get rid of those shepherds. I don’t like being around people like that, and I certainly don’t want to be seen with them.” Jesus came to those who he knew would reject him, and he calls us to follow him shepherds, stable reek and all.

The Herald of the Sunrise

2011-12-18T10:30:00.001-05:00

(2 Samuel 22:1-4, Micah 7:8-20; Luke 1:57-80)

I have to admit, this passage from Luke gave me fits. There’s a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I don’t just want to stand up here and tell you interesting stuff; and I had trouble finding the sermon in it. To be sure, it’s a great story. Elizabeth gives birth, and her family and the whole community rejoice. They wait to name the baby until he’s circumcised, and everyone around assumes he’s going to be named Zechariah after his father—until Elizabeth interrupts, “No, he’s going to be called John.”

Well, now that wasn’t how things were done, because sons were supposed to be named after fathers or grandfathers, and John wasn’t a family name. The neighbors seem to have figured Elizabeth was cutting her husband out of the decision—they clearly thought he was deaf as well as mute—so they asked him directly; to their surprise he wrote, quite emphatically, “His name is John.” Note that—not will be, but is. God named that baby before he was even conceived, and he’s been called John since before he even existed. With that, Zechariah’s speech is restored, and he begins praising God—and the community falls back in fear, recognizing that God is at work, wondering who on Earth this child is going to be. It’s a great scene, and it would be easy to talk about Zechariah putting his faith in God and receiving his reward; but is that really the point?

Then you have this great song of praise, commonly called the Benedictus; interestingly, he’s praising God for giving him a son, but that’s really not the focus of his song. It’s been said that every man wants his son to be a star, but we don’t see that in Zechariah’s words; instead, he essentially says, never mind the star, the sun is rising—and my son, you get to go ahead of him to let everyone know he’s coming. It’s a wonderful declaration, drawing once again on Malachi, which we read a couple weeks ago. It would be easy to turn it into a nice little moral lesson about how we should value people for how they point us to Christ, not for how impressive they are in themselves; which is true enough, but that isn’t the gospel heartbeat in this passage.

More interesting is verse 72, which our English translations blunt a little bit. Zechariah declares that God has raised up a horn of salvation for his people—the image is of the horn of an ox, with which it strikes and drives back its enemies—and then he says, “to do mercy to our ancestors.” Again, the idea here is the Old Testament word hesed; our concept of mercy tends to be pretty passive and pallid, just a matter of letting the guilty off the hook, but here we see the biblical concept of the faithful, covenant-making love and mercy of God as an active force, God taking decisive and powerful action to deliver his people. And even more interesting, Zechariah says that in bringing his people salvation from their enemies, God is doing mercy to their ancestors—he is fulfilling the covenant promises he made to them.

If you really stop and consider what Zechariah is saying, you have to be struck by the grand sweep of his vision; and here, I think, we strike something that is the gospel word for us this morning. We have the real tendency to collapse our view of God’s salvation to just one thing. Classically, for evangelicals, it’s personal individual spiritual salvation from sin, which can lead into a sort of “me ’n’ Jesus” isolationism. Equally classically, for liberals, it’s social justice—political liberation from oppressive societal structures. With the American evangelical move into political engagement that began a few decades ago, salvation began to be somewhat identified with moral transformation of the culture. You wind up with dueling theologies as political campaigns.

None of these visions of salvation is big enough; none matches the vision God gave Zechariah. There is definitely a political element to the deliverance he foresees, as the enemies of the people of God will no longer be able to oppress them—they will be removed as enemies, either by their destruction or by being brought to repentance. That cannot be removed from the picture, because the deliverance God promises is not merely internal and subjective. At the same time—and this is where so many in Israel missed the boat—his deliverance is not merely political, either; the language of verses 77-79 goes far beyond that. The Lord will deliver his people, not merely from political bondage to Rome, but from spiritual bondage to sin; he will free them, and guide them by his light, so that they will at last walk in the way of his peace.

Now, here again we have a word that cannot be captured by its English translation, though shalom is rather better known. This doesn’t just mean “peace” as in “peace and quiet” or “not fighting.” Rather, the idea in this word is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will, and thus, second, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety; this in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life to which Jesus will call those who believe in him, and which he will make possible for those who believe in him.

Along with this, there’s also the aspect of his salvation we see in verses 74-75: God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is what we might call the social aspect—the bridge between our individual deliverance from sin and the political deliverance of the people of God from those who do evil: God saves us in order that we may serve him with our whole lives, and in fact that opportunity to serve is part of the blessing he gives us. That service is not merely activity on God’s behalf, but is a way of life submitted in humble obedience to him—conformed to his holiness and righteousness, accepting his definition of what is good and right rather than insisting on our own ideas and preferences.

The salvation of God in Jesus Christ unites all these elements, because God is on about redeeming a people for his name; he saves us as individuals, but not just as individuals, and he isn’t saving us only from our individual sin, but from all the sin of all of us together. That’s why Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the work Jesus has entrusted to us as “the ministry of reconciliation,” because in delivering us from our sin and giving us peace with him, part of his purpose is to give peace between us—to cleanse the sin not only from our own hearts, but from our relationships. As he gives us the humility to bow before him and accept his good instead of our own, so too he gives us the humility to bow before each other and accept each other’s good instead of our own.

God is on about redeeming our hearts, our relationships, our families, our churches, our culture, our society, our nation, our world—in fact, all of creation. His deliverance comes at every level; his salvation operates in every area, in every aspect. He will not stop until the knowledge of him fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, and all people bow the knee to him as the only Lord and God, the only authority, the only one to be obeyed, the only one deserving of worship.

In the Middle of the Ordinary

2011-12-11T10:30:00.002-05:00

(1 Samuel 2:1-11; Luke 1:39-56)

God didn’t come when he was expected. He didn’t come during the crisis of conquest, or the heady days of the Maccabean revolt, or the hopeful (if brief) period of independence; in any of those times, the opportunity for a national deliverer to arise and restore Israel to its glories under David and Solomon was apparent, but God didn’t come then. He didn’t come where he was expected either—he didn’t show up in a palace, or among the priests, or with the rich and powerful; indeed, he didn’t even come to the capital city of Jerusalem, the city of God. His coming was not in an extraordinary time, or an extraordinary place, or to anyone whom the world would have considered special or important in any way.

Instead, God came where the world wasn’t looking, when its head was turned. He came at a time that was like most times—neither one of great prosperity and success, nor one of crisis and great need. He came to a place that was like most places, not a center of culture nor a community of power and wealth, but just an ordinary small town where nothing much ever happened once, let alone twice. And he came to an ordinary family, no one to whom society would have given a second glance, people who were completely anonymous in the broader scheme of things. The most extraordinary event in human history—the birth of God as a human being—began in the most ordinary context you could possibly imagine.

And in this we see the gospel. We see God working salvation completely by his own initiative and power and grace, completely apart from any human effort or plan or expectation. Mary does nothing to earn this or make this happen; neither did Elizabeth or Zechariah. Yes, Zechariah and Elizabeth were faithful and godly people, and Mary seems to have been a young woman of deep and serious faith and character as well, and that’s clearly part of why God chose them; but the choice was all God’s, none of their doing—for them, there was only to receive his blessing with gratitude and faith.

We also see here that God does not judge people the same way we do; as he told Samuel, where we look at the external stuff, he looks at the heart. The world would never have chosen Elizabeth or Mary for anything important, but God did—because he knew better. He doesn’t honor our hierarchies, our evaluations, our priorities; he inverts and upends them. He doesn’t follow our agendas, he does what he will and calls us to follow him—and he does so in a way that drives home the fact that we neither know nor control as much as we think we do.

Now, there are those who use Mary’s song in political ways, as justification for their political agendas, but to do that is to miss the point and drastically shrink its vision. Human revolutions may bring down the proud, but they only replace them with other proud people; in most cases, they end up being hijacked by those who are hungry for power and greedy for wealth, and you wind up with folks in power who are no better than the ones they overthrew. Human schemes to humble the rich and raise up the poor don’t really change the system, they just shift the balance of winners and losers. That’s all they can do, because they’re all about our goals, our agendas, our efforts, and our desires—they’re about us, and focused on us. What God is doing is very different.

The great theme of Mary’s great song of praise—underscored by God’s choice of her and Elizabeth—isn’t rich vs. poor, but the humble vs. the proud. God has brought down those who are proud “in their inmost thoughts”—those whose pride is deep in their bones, who think they have no need of God. They are oppressors, perhaps of whole nations, perhaps of their wives and children, because they don’t respect others—and they don’t respect others because they don’t respect God. They feel free to use and take advantage of other people if they can because they’re strong enough to do so and they bow to no law but their own; but God has brought them down.

Now, to be sure, we can’t hide from the fact that if we look around, we can see a lot of the proud doing just fine, to all appearances; God keeps bringing them down, and more keep rising up. As we’ve said before, we live between the times—the kingdom of God broke into the world with the coming of Jesus, and is already here in us his people, but it has not yet been fully realized; in the vivid image of Swiss NT scholar Oscar Cullman, we live between D-Day and V-E Day, when the outcome of the war has been decided, but the enemy has not yet given up fighting. The proud may not know they’ve been brought down, but Mary is right: their final defeat has already been accomplished.

If we lose sight of that, it’s probably because we’re looking for hope in all the wrong places. We keep looking to the proud, to the powerful and influential, for deliverance. We look to politicians to fix our country’s problems, to government or big corporations to solve our economic issues, to people we see on TV to reverse our moral decline—and we forget that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who’s famous is proud in their inmost thoughts—though being famous tends to breed that pride—nor am I saying that God doesn’t or can’t use powerful people. Obviously he can and he does. But we need to remember that “God helps those that help themselves” is Ben Franklin*, not Scripture, and Scripture doesn’t tell us that God gives grace to the mighty. God gives grace to the humble.

This is the key, and it’s the crux of Mary’s song: God is holy, and his hesed is for those who show him reverence. If you haven’t been here when I’ve talked about hesed, stick around and you’ll hear about it—this is one of my favorite Old Testament words, in part because it’s so rich there’s no good way to translate it. Our English versions render it a lot of ways—mercy, lovingkindness, covenant love, covenant faithfulness, faithful love; but really, it needs a sentence at least. Hesed means love in action, steadfast love that always keeps its promises, unswerving loyalty and faithfulness, complete commitment and unfailing reliability; it’s the way God treats those with whom he has made covenant. It’s what the Jesus Storybook Bible calls his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

This is the love of God, the mercy of God, the faithfulness of God, for his people whom he has chosen—not because we were impressive, wise or wealthy or powerful; indeed, as 1 Corinthians tells us, God quite deliberately chooses the unimpressive in order to make it clear that the wisdom and the power and the riches are all his. He chooses us in our weakness and foolishness, and he gives us his Holy Spirit; and by his Spirit he gives us Jesus, whom he has made our wisdom, righteousness and holiness and redemption. He fills us with his love, and he teaches us to worship him, and him alone. What matters is not that we are good enough, talented enough, important enough—none of us is; what matters is that he has chosen us, and he is more than able.

* Note: though not original to Franklin, the phrase is best known in the US through its inclusion in Poor Richard's Almanack.

Eternity Contracted to a Span

2011-12-04T10:30:00.002-05:00

(Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38)

What we see here is God announcing his plan to do the impossible. In the first place, it’s physically impossible—Mary’s a virgin. She’s betrothed to Joseph—and just so we’re clear on this, betrothal is what they had back then in place of engagement, but it was much stronger; it entailed all the commitments of marriage with none of the benefits, and it lasted a whole year. So, she’s legally bound to Joseph, but they’re still living apart, probably with family making sure they don’t sneak off and do anything inappropriate. There’s absolutely no way she can be pregnant. But she’s going to be.

The physical impossibility, though, is secondary; it’s only to underscore the spiritual impossibility: this baby born to a virgin girl would be God. The angel doesn’t really push Mary to understand this fully, and she probably didn’t until much later; it was far too great an impossibility for anyone to comprehend at that point, and Mary was overwhelmed enough as it was. It’s all there, though.

In particular, note verse 35: the child will be called holy and the Son of God—why? Because he will be conceived, not by normal human action, but by a direct miraculous work of the Spirit of God. He will be fully human, but he will be more than merely human, right from the absolute beginning. He will be God become one fragile human being; the creator of the universe, the Word by whom the world was made, will take up nine months’ residence in a woman’s womb.

It’s a wonder, this; it’s a wonder we keep collapsing into sentiment and trite moral lessons because even now, even as many millions of times as the story has been told, it’s still too big for us to really grasp. The maker of all that is, the one who holds our incomprehensibly vast universe in the palm of his hand, as an unborn baby doing backflips and kicking his mother in the bladder; Almighty God with messy diapers and a rash. As the British poet John Betjeman asked in wonder,

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, incomprehensibly, gloriously true: the infinite, all-powerful, all-glorious Son of God, the source of all life through whom all things were made, reduced himself to a zygote in the womb of a humble girl in a backwater village on the edge of civilization, to be born among the animals and laid in a feed trough by parents who were soon to be fugitives, to live as a homeless wanderer, to be falsely convicted and wrongly executed, to rise again from the dead—and he did it all for you, that you might know him, and know he loves you.

Bearing Witness

2011-11-27T10:30:00.005-05:00

(Malachi 2:17-3:4, 4:5-6; Luke 1:1-25)

There aren’t all that many hymns for Advent. We have a lot of hymns for Christmas, of course, and a lot for Easter, and there are quite a number that work well for Lent, focusing on the sacrifice of Christ; but for Advent, not so many, and very few at all that are widely sung. Really, the only ones you can count on finding in the hymnal are “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” Which, for a season of the church year that lasts four Sundays, is just a little bit short.

I was lamenting this the other week as I was starting to plan the service for this Sunday and next, and I got this comment from my wife: “Our culture is actually anti-waiting, anti- letting things take time and not be instantly resolved . . . I think it might be the same reason that the church is so bad at grieving.” The point about grieving was one that hadn’t occurred to me, but she’s right about our culture. We live in a society that wants to get it decided, get it done, and move on. We have our instant oatmeal, microwave popcorn, and fast food; we have drive-through pharmacies so we don’t have to wait ten minutes while our prescriptions are filled—we can drive off and come back later. Our communications are supposed to be instantaneous—many people derisively refer to physical letters as “snail mail,” because having to wait a day or two is such a burden.

Of course, our ability to do things quickly has its advantages; but to the extent that we’ve taught ourselves to expect quick, easy answers to our needs and our problems, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Some things just take time; some plants bear fruit slowly, or not at all. Our wounds often take longer to heal than we wish, or realize, and trying to rush the healing process only does more hurt. And all of us, in various ways, at various times, will find ourselves hung betwixt and between—unable to stay where we are, but with no apparent way forward. Even the most fortunate among us have nights of anguish, not knowing, hoping against hope that the worst hasn’t really happened; even the most blessed have times of longing for good news that does not come.

And the fact is, it’s into just such cruxes in our lives that the gospel speaks; they are entry points for the Holy Spirit in our hearts because they are points at which our sense of self-sufficiency breaks down, and we are driven beyond our wants and desires to the true deep need of our souls. Waiting, even when it’s painful, is not an interruption of God’s plan, or something we have to explain away; it’s part of his plan, part of the way he works in us to accomplish his purposes.

In light of that, it’s interesting that we see this theme working at a couple different levels in our passage from Luke this morning. At the big-picture level, of course, Israel had been waiting long for God’s promised Messiah. If you were here this spring, you remember Malachi’s ringing words, proclaiming the coming Day of the Lord . . . but those words had fallen into silence. Where God had so often spoken to his people through his prophets, after Malachi there were no more. “Behold,” God declared, “I am sending my messenger, who will prepare the way before me” . . . and then nothing, for over four centuries. After the Persians came the Greeks, then a brief period of independence, then the Romans, and through it all no sign of God’s messenger.

That’s the big story here, but it’s not the only story Luke is concerned about; indeed, it’s not the story with which he begins. Instead, he begins at the human level. Zechariah was a priest, married to a woman who was a descendant of Aaron, the first of all the priests; they were a devout couple who faithfully obeyed God and sought to please him. No doubt Zechariah prayed for and earnestly desired the coming of the Messiah—but there was something else that weighed more heavily on his heart, for he and Elizabeth had no children. They had prayed and prayed for a child, but it seemed God had ignored their prayers; they had waited so long for a baby, they’d given up, for they were now both too old for such things.

And then came the high point of Zechariah’s priestly career: he was chosen by lot to go into the Holy Place in the heart of the temple during the sacrifice—apparently during the evening sacrifice, because there was a large crowd gathered to pray; since there were some 18,000 priests, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And as he stands there, burning incense before the altar of God, carrying the prayers of the people to heaven with the smoke, an angel appears to him and says, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. God did hear your prayers for a child; Elizabeth will have a son, and you will call him John. He will be the messenger God promised, the one who will go forth in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare the way for the Lord.”

God could have chosen any couple he liked to bring John the Baptizer into the world; but as he brought his people’s long wait for their Redeemer to an end, he chose to bring this couple’s long wait to an end as well. To a Jew in those days, being childless was one of the bitterest of sorrows, and usually taken as a sign of God’s judgment. Zechariah and Elizabeth had served God faithfully all their lives, and so her inability to conceive must have been agonizing and perplexing. Had they somehow displeased God? Had God failed them? From everything they understood about God, it didn’t make sense; and yet they remained steadfast in their faith, serving him devotedly even when he had withheld from them the one gift they most desired.

You have to feel for Zechariah here. He’d probably given up any hope of a child long since, and now an angel appears to him and announces that God is going to give him and his wife a son, and it’s all just far too much to process. It’s hard to blame him for asking, “How can I be sure you’re telling me the truth?” The poor man was simply overwhelmed. And yet even so, the angel gives him a sign, but the sign is a punishment for his unbelief—his ability to speak is taken away until the child is born.

It’s hard to blame him, because Zechariah knows that what is happening to him is impossible—and worse, it’s implausible. It’s the stuff delusions are made of. He has a firm grip on how the world works, just as most of us do, and this simply doesn’t fit. He’s a man of faith, but within the bounds of the rational and the limits of what is reasonably possible; he knows the stories of what God has done in the past, but they’re stories, not a part of his present. As such, he can’t quite believe that God could actually do such a thing now; his faith struggles to outgrow the box of his assumptions. And so Gabriel rebukes him, for part of God’s purpose is to teach him, and others, that God is not limited by what we think he can do, or will do.

In conceiving and ultimately giving birth to John, Elizabeth isn’t just giving birth to the one who will bear witness to the Son of God; she is herself bearing witness to the truth that God is capable of doing far more than what we think is possible, and of blessing us far beyond what we can dare to hope. She is bearing witness to the truth that God can turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy—that he can take our defeats and our losses and use them to bless us in ways we never could have dreamed. She is bearing witness to the truth that just because God makes us wait doesn’t mean he isn’t coming, and just because he doesn’t act on our schedule doesn’t mean he’s too late. He is faithful, ever faithful, and he never fails to act in his good time.

That We May Know

2011-11-20T10:30:00.003-05:00

(Numbers 15:27-31; 1 John 5:13-21)

John is a big one for knowledge. “I write these things to you who believe in the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life,” he says. This is closely akin to his purpose statement near the end of his gospel, in John 20:31: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” That we may know who Jesus is, that we may act on that knowledge by putting our trust in him, that we may know that in him we have eternal life—that’s what John is driving at here; and in this conclusion of his letter, he backs that up with statement after statement about what we as Christians know about who God is and who we are in him. Not merely what we think, not just what we want to believe, but what we know—what is bedrock, what is absolutely certain; what we can stake our lives on.

And as part of that, he calls us to stake our lives on what we know. These days, we tend to think of knowledge the way we do in school, as a collection of facts that we have to be able to remember to answer the questions correctly and pass the test. You tell me stuff, I tell it back to you to prove that I was listening and remember what you said. It’s rather like mama bird feeding little baby birds—eat worm, regurgitate worm, repeat.

That’s not the biblical definition of knowledge, and it’s not what John is on about. Biblically, true knowledge, knowledge of the truth, produces true action; it shapes and forms the way we live. Thus John says here, “I write these things to you so that you may know that you have eternal life,” but back in 2:1, he wrote, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” To us, these sound like different things, but to John, they aren’t. Knowing we have eternal life in Christ—and Christ alone—affects how we live; it draws us away from sin and toward God. We don’t learn not to sin by force of will or fear of punishment or some form of manipulation, we learn not to sin by coming to know God and his blessings, and so to love him, and value them, more than the pleasures and promised rewards of sin.

That truth underlies the points John is making in this final section of his letter. “This is the confidence we have in God’s presence,” he tells us, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” “Hearing” in this context doesn’t just mean that God knows we said something, but that he responds positively to our request, and thus that we can know that we will receive what we ask. If we ask according to his will. In which case, isn’t our prayer redundant?

No, it isn’t. You see, God can bless us whether we ask him to or not; but he can’t bless us as an answer to our prayers unless we pray. And more than that, God doesn’t do things capriciously or without reason; why should we assume that his will doesn’t take our prayers into account? Our prayers don’t force God to do anything, but does that mean he doesn’t will to do things in part because we ask him to? I think one reason we have trouble thinking about prayer is that we implicitly have a transactional model of prayer, as if we were asking the bank for a loan, or the library for a book. We say prayer is about our relationship with God, but we don’t really think through what that means. Prayer is how God involves us in what he’s doing; we give him what’s on our mind and heart, and he takes that into his counsel, and he helps us to understand his will and what he intends to do. We learn to see our lives in that light, and to want what he wills.

This begins, though, with knowing—not just in our heads, but in our hearts and in our bones—that in Jesus, we have a different kind of life from the world at large, something more than the world has to offer. Prayer according to God’s will begins with the trust that God’s will really is better—and better for us specifically—than our own ideas and plans. Sin, by contrast, is the practical expression of the belief that we cannot trust God. They’re polar opposites of each other.

That may be why John commands us in verse 16, if we see a fellow believer sin, to pray for them: the first response we should have to the public sin of another is not condemnation, or lecturing, which are applications of our own power to punish, but prayer, which is an appeal to the power of God to heal and restore. Yes, public discipline is sometimes necessary as well, but that isn’t where we should start—and even discipline must be combined with prayer, because nothing we can do can bring people to repentance; only God can do that. Only he can give life.

Now, John distinguishes between “the sin that does not lead to death” and “the sin that leads to death”; people have come up with various random suggestions for what “the sin that leads to death” might be, but I don’t think John’s making a random reference here. Remember the context; remember the false teachers against whom he’s writing, who have deliberately turned away from Christ, choosing darkness over light. That deliberate rejection of our only hope of salvation is the sin that leads to death, because it is the sin of choosing death over life; we call it apostasy, and John says, “I don’t command you to pray for such people.” You can, but he isn’t going to force the issue, because that will break your heart. It’s not a bad thing, that what breaks the heart of God should break our hearts as well; but it isn’t easy to bear.

The danger in talking about this is that in bringing eternal punishment into the conversation, it can inspire fear; I remember a couple conversations in high school with classmates who were afraid they had committed the unforgivable sin. Thus John follows up with strong words of reassurance, reminding us what we know, why we need not fear or lose heart. None of this is new, he’s said it all over the course of the letter, but he wants to make sure it sticks. “We know that anyone born of God does not keep on sinning”—yes, we do sin, but we repent, we ask forgiveness, and we give it to Jesus, who took it all on the cross. Jesus protects us, and he keeps the evil one from leading us into the sin that leads to death. The system of this world is under the control of the evil one, but we know we’re free of that, because we are of God—we belong to him alone.

“And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ, who is the true God and eternal life. Therefore, little children, keep yourselves from idols.” “Therefore” isn’t in the text, but I think it’s implied. John’s closing thought is at once a profound statement of praise and a call to action—a call to live lives in accordance with that praise.

We’re tempted to go after idols—to put our trust and our faith and our love in people or things ahead of God; but how foolish is that, really? In God, we have nothing to fear, and there is nothing better we could desire—the Son of God has come, and through him we are able to know the one who is true, the God of all creation, the source of all light and goodness and grace. More, we are in God, we live in him and he lives in us, because we are in Jesus Christ, who is God, who is eternal life. We have been united with Christ by his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, who lives in us by the will of God the Father; he is the source of truth and grace and love, hope and joy and peace and all good things.

Don’t settle for idols; accept no substitutes. Jesus came that we may know God—not just know about him, or worship him, or know his commandments, but know him, as we know our closest friends and family. He came to be the way for us to God, and there is no better way. Indeed, there is no other way, never has been and never will be; and John writes so that we may know this beyond all doubt, and be moved to praise, and to trust—and to follow.

A Different Kind of Life

2011-11-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

(Deuteronomy 30:11-14; 1 John 5:1-12)

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves everyone who has been born of God.” With that line, John begins his final turn, into the conclusion of his letter. The people of God are those who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God born as an ordinary human baby to live and die and rise from the dead on our behalf, so that we might be ransomed from death and given new life, and that true life is found in Jesus Christ alone and no other. Those who believe in him do not merely have someone else to follow or someone else to worship, we have been reborn, spiritually, by the will of God the Father and the power of his Holy Spirit; he is alive in us, his Spirit fills us, and we have been given his love. By his love, we love each other—everyone else who believes in Jesus is family, and we love them even when we don’t like them very much.

And then John throws us a bit of a curve. He’s been saying that the sign that we love God is that we love our brothers and sisters, which we see in verse 1 as well, but now he flips that; in fact, he closes the circle by saying, “This is how we know that we love God’s children, when we love God and obey his commandments, because obeying God’s commandments is how we live out his love.” We know we love God because we love each other, we know we love each other because we love God—if one is there, the other is, they can’t exist without each other, because love for God necessarily produces love for his people. And the sign of that, the practical heart of that, is obedience to God.

Which is interesting, because we aren’t accustomed to thinking of love in that way. We tend to define it subjectively, in terms of whether the other person feels loved. Understandable, certainly, and if nobody feels we love them, that should probably tip us off that something’s wrong; but those perceptions are not always accurate. People aren’t always going to receive loving statements and actions as loving, because as we’ve said, loving each other well has to involve challenging each other at times and calling one another to repentance. The final measure of whether we’re loving God and each other is whether we’re doing what he told us to do.

Now, against that, we have a lot of voices in the church insisting that following the commands of Scripture is burdensome, and that whatever commands they consider burdensome must not really be God’s commands anymore, because his commands aren’t supposed to be burdensome. If the Bible tells me I can’t have sex with that person I want to have sex with, or that I’m supposed to give generously to the church and to the poor and vulnerable, or that I have to love and serve that person over there who hurt me deeply, well, that’s burdensome, and so God can’t really mean that. Which makes a lot of sense, from a human perspective, and so a lot of people happily buy in to that approach, and happily follow teachers who present this as God’s word. John wants to change our perspective on what “burdensome” is, by changing our idea of what life is.

To give you an idea, one of the joys of being a Seattle Seahawks fan back in the days when there were any was the play of our great left tackle, Walter Jones. Normally, watching a left tackle isn’t what you’d call “fun,” but Big Walt was an exception. He’d drive defensive linemen back ten yards before they knew what had happened; on pass plays he’d stretch out one arm, grab a pass rusher, and put him flat on his back. He was as big and strong as a truck—and he got that way by pushing them around. Literally. Part of his workout every offseason was pushing a three-ton Escalade around a big parking lot near his house. You’d see pictures, and from his face the man was in pain. That hurt to do. But was it burdensome? No, it wasn’t. He did it gladly, even joyfully.

Why? Because that’s part of what it took for him to be what he wanted to be—a dominant, Hall-of-Fame force at one of the game’s key positions. That struggle wasn’t a burden, it was a blessing, because through it, he grew, he got better, and the physical gifts God gave him were realized in his performance on the football field. Walter Jones could easily have avoided all that pain and turned aside from all that struggle; but his life would not have been better for it, as he would have been far less than he had the ability to be.

We tend to go to God and say, “I want the world.” Maybe not all of it, but at least this part of it. When we don’t get the world, we complain and say bad things about God. When the Bible tells us we can’t have that particular part of the world we want, we try to explain it away or get rid of it; when other people call us on it, we say they’re unloving. But the fact is, God doesn’t promise us the world; in fact, he doesn’t even offer us the world. God offers us something completely different in Jesus Christ: a whole new kind of life, and a victory that overcomes the world.

I was thinking about this the last few days, not in quite these terms but in terms of our freedom in Christ; John doesn’t use that language here, that’s Paul in Galatians, but it connects. You know, the freedom I want in Christ—the freedom I believe we’re promised—is freedom from myself. Hear me carefully on this, I don’t mean freedom to be somebody different, I’m not talking about different talents or abandoning my commitments or anything like that; I mean at a deeper level.

I want freedom from the fears that cripple and paralyze me—I know God’s love has not been perfected in me yet, because there’s a lot there still to drive out. I want freedom from the desires that drive me—and I don’t just mean the sinful ones; I don’t want to be controlled any longer even by those that are perfectly appropriate. I want to be free from my bad habits, and more, I want to be free from my idols. I want to be able to stop putting myself first in my life, and thus to be free to love. I want to be unchained from my ego, and my need to make everything happen by my own power, so that the power of God may flow freely in me and through me. I want to stop flapping my puny little wings and just soar on the winds of God’s joy and grace and love. I’m not there yet, but before God, that’s the freedom I want. That’s the life I want.

And my hope—even as it’s also my frustration at how often I submarine myself—my hope is that that’s the life I’ve been given. It’s the life we’ve all been given, by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Our faith is the victory that has overcome the world—including the influence of the world in our hearts—not because there’s anything special about our faith, but because it is through our faith that we confess Jesus as the Christ and have been born again, from above, of God. It is by faith that we have turned from the world to the life of God in Christ, whose life has overcome the world, and is overcoming it, and will overcome it.

God Is Love

2011-11-06T10:30:00.002-05:00

(Leviticus 19:17-18, Deuteronomy 6:4-5; 1 John 4:7-21)

God has a strange sense of humor. Mind you, I can’t complain, because I have a strange sense of humor, too, but sometimes God’s is differently strange. This week was a good example of that, to find myself preparing this passage as we had two meetings with the Presbytery of Wabash Valley regarding our departure from the PC(USA); they didn’t use 1 John, but they did try to argue that it was a betrayal of Christian love for us to end our affiliation with them, and especially to do so in the way we did. It was another reminder of how easily the language of love can be used for the reality of manipulation.

That’s what happens if we define love in human terms; not only is that even true for Christians, I’d argue it’s especially true for Christians. If we affirm that God is love but don’t allow that truth to challenge and change our understanding of what love is, we end up by defining God in human terms—which is to say, we end up worshiping a god made in our own image; we end up worshiping an idol. We end up twisting Jesus, by one means or another, until we have a pretty picture of a Jesus who would never lead us anywhere we don’t want to go, or push us in any way we don’t want to be pushed. I don’t know if that’s what happened to the people against whom John is writing, I don’t know if that’s why they left the church—though I wonder; but I think it’s exactly what led astray the false teachers who are currently running the mainline Presbyterian church, and what has seduced them away from the true gospel to a lie.

This is why John has taken great pains to say two things. One, we know what love is by the example of Jesus, and especially his death on the cross for us; we learn what love is and what it looks like by looking to Jesus. This is essential, but it isn’t sufficient for identifying false teaching, because we can be deceived; thus John also says, two, that anyone who speaks by the Spirit of God is oriented completely toward Jesus Christ, and is primarily concerned that people put him first in their lives, love him above all others, and seek to please him in everything they do. The love of God never aims us at pleasing ourselves or fulfilling our own agenda, though that may happen along the way, nor at satisfying the desires and agendas of others, though that too may happen; rather, the love of God in us makes us concerned first and foremost with loving and serving him and doing what he wants us to do, whether it’s what anyone else wants us to do or not.

The place where we’re so prone to go wrong, the mistake that so often wrong-foots us, is our assumption that the love of God, because it is unequivocally for us, is therefore about us. Nothing could be further from the truth. The love of God is above all else about God. We talked about this last year when we talked about the Trinity and what it means to say that God is love—not that he is loving, but that he is love. The key to understanding this is the truth that God is three in one—a reality which we see at work in verses 13-16, as the Father sends the Son, who pointed us to the Father, and he sends the Spirit by whom we are able to acknowledge the Son, and by whom God lives in us.

When we begin honestly to understand God in that way—which is beyond us to grasp fully, but when we begin to think that way—we can start to understand what John is saying here. We can say that God is love because in his very nature, they exist in love between himselves. The love of God is the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for each other. We were created that we might be drawn into that circle to share it, but the circle doesn’t break because we enter it. Love is still fundamentally something which comes only from God and which is directed ultimately toward God; we share in his love, we are included, it has become for us as well, but it isn’t for us first. Which means that we don’t get to define it, or control it, or try to dictate terms to God, because his love doesn’t depend on us; if we reject him and reject his love, it grieves him, but it does not diminish him or his love in any way, only us.

Now, does this mean that God doesn’t love me best? Yeah, it does. Is that reason to feel bad? No, it isn’t. The love of God is infinite, and his love for each of us is infinite, and how much headway are we going to make comparing infinities anyway? If Jesus already loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend, what does it matter to us that he loves the Father and the Spirit even more? Where exactly do we lose in that? What matters is that he created us to love us, he redeemed us because he loves us, and he is leading us home to live in his kingdom for eternity because he loves us—and that by his love, he is teaching us to love him and to love each other as he loves us.

This creates a cycle here, one which is implicit in this passage though John doesn’t spell it out. Why do we love? Because God first loved us. How do we know? Because he sent Jesus his Son to offer himself as a sacrifice on our behalf, that our sin might be taken away and replaced with his righteousness. How do we know this, and how do we know what his love looks like? Because he has given us his Holy Spirit, who shows us Jesus.

And how does the Holy Spirit show us Jesus? In his word, the Bible—and in his body, the church. In the only body Jesus currently has in the world—us—his people, filled by his Spirit with his love that we might be like him. We learn to know his love, and we learn to love, in part because the Spirit of God loves us through the people of God; by so doing, he makes us part of his people and fills us with his love so that we might love others and they might learn his love through us.

This is what God is doing with us, and what he is doing in us, and through us; more than that—God is love—this is who he is, this is his nature, and this is what it means that he lives in us. This is what it looks like for Jesus to be the Savior of the world, because this is what his salvation means. It isn’t merely that we have sinned, that we are incapable in ourselves of getting free of our sin or making it all right, and that we need Jesus to cleanse us and set us free from our sin; that’s all true and absolutely essential, but it doesn’t stop there. He sets us free from our sin into his love—and in so doing, he radically transforms us, from the root up.

We can see this in John’s statement that perfect love drives out fear. From the context, part of the point is that the love of God removes our fear of being sent to Hell when we die; but God’s salvation is much bigger than just that assurance, because it isn’t merely a transaction, it’s not just about giving us a “Get out of Hell free” card, it’s a transformation. Our confidence, our assurance of salvation, is rooted in the fact that the love of God is at work in us, changing us from the inside out, to such a point that John could say with a straight face that we are in the world now in the same way as Jesus was then. His Spirit is in us, his love is in us, he is at work in us, and while a lot of other things are also in us and get in the way, they are dying; they are passing away as we become by the power of the Holy Spirit the people we already are in Christ.

Thus we can see that God’s perfect love drives out any reason for us to be afraid of God, because God no longer stands in relation to us as the one who will punish us; which, by the way, shows the essential falsity of those who would seek to scare people into Heaven by terrifying them with Hell. God isn’t in this to punish us because he has given us his love, and his love is purifying us and setting us free from all that. We love him because he loves us, and instead of being judged and punished, we are renewed and remade as the people of his love.

And in so doing, God’s perfect love doesn’t only remove our fear of him, it removes our fear of the world, because the world no longer has the ability to punish us. We fear rejection—that people will punish us for not being who they want us to be. We fear failure—that society will punish us for not being good enough. We fear loss—that the world will punish us for caring, for hoping, for dreaming. We fear many things, because we look to the world to meet our needs and give our lives meaning and significance. The less we look to the world and the more we look to God, the more we depend on him to provide all our needs and the more we trust him to do so, the less we need the world and the less power it has to hurt us; and so our fear of the world leaves our hearts, driven out by the perfect love of God, which is ours in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the grace of Jesus Christ the Son of God, by the will of God the Father, who is now and forever to be praised.

Our Spiritual Compass

2011-10-30T10:30:00.004-04:00

(Deuteronomy 13:1-5; 1 John 3:23-4:6)

Unlike certain earlier parts of this letter, John’s argument here is very simple, and very clear. It’s also critically important. As we’ve seen, the purpose of his letter is to keep his audience from being led astray by false teachers who have left the church to preach a false version of Christianity; he has drawn a sharp line between those who walk in the light of God and those who don’t, and made it clear that those who walk in the light are those who are filled with the love of God, and those who don’t, aren’t. In our passage last week—of which we’ve included the last couple verses again this morning, as John once again links his argument very closely—he gave us the standard for what the love of God looks like: Jesus Christ, and most particularly his death on the cross for us. Love is not just anything that calls itself love, it’s something that looks like Jesus.

And here, he gathers that point up, binds it together with his earlier observation that the false teachers are false because their teaching denies Christ, sharpens it all into a spike, and drives it home. You want to know who to follow and who not to follow? One simple rule: anyone who is all about Jesus Christ, first, last, and always, is from God. Anyone who isn’t, even if they use the name of Jesus Christ, is not from God. Period.

It doesn’t matter if you were born in the church and your name was on the membership rolls three weeks before you drew breath; it doesn’t matter if you have a perfect-attendance badge in Sunday school going all the way back to your days in the nursery. It doesn’t matter if you’re an elder, a deacon, a pastor, a professor; it doesn’t matter if you work in a building that calls itself a church and holds services every Sunday morning. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a denomination that’s been calling itself a church for 500 years, or 2000 years. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written books for Christian publishers, articles for Christian magazines, songs for Christian record companies, or greeting cards for Christian bookstores, or showed up on Christian TV programs to talk about any or all of them. If your primary purpose isn’t to point people to Jesus Christ, to encourage them to put their faith in Jesus alone to follow Christ alone, then you do not acknowledge him, you’re only trying to make use of him for your own purposes; and if that’s the case, then you are not from God, and you are not speaking by the Spirit of God.

Now, again, John isn’t expecting perfection here, and none of us do this perfectly; we all have ulterior motives that creep in at various places. We need to keep after them, cutting them back and digging them up, but they do not disqualify us. The key is, what are we trying to do first and foremost—what is our goal? What are we really on about, and what is essential about what we do and why?

You know, I certainly hope that y’all will invite people to come, and they’ll keep coming and invite others, and that some who are outside the church will come, and hear the gospel, and bow before Jesus as Savior and Lord, and in their turn invite others, and so on and so forth; I certainly hope that this church will grow, and it would be nice if it grew enough that the giving was high enough to support all the ministries we do, so that we didn’t have to keep selling off assets to pay the bills. That would be nice, and there’s nothing wrong in hoping for it. But if I start to make that the purpose of my preaching, if I start to make that the focus of the ministry God has given me here, then I would be out of step with the Holy Spirit, and I would become a false teacher. I want the church to grow—but if God should call me to preach a sermon that would somehow drive half the church away, my responsibility to him would be to stand up and faithfully preach that sermon, whatever the consequences. I don’t see that happening, of course—it’s a pretty extreme thought experiment—but that’s where my calling would be.

Similarly, when teachers come along insisting that we need to change our understanding of God or of the Scriptures, and their arguments are all about what people in our culture believe or want or think they know, when they contend that we must fit the biblical definition of the love of God to what the majority in our society wants to believe is loving, we need to stand against that. The fact that the world listens to them, and does so with approval, is not evidence they’re right, it’s a sign that they are from the world, not from God. If the world seeks to marginalize and silence us, it’s not a sign that we’re wrong, out of date, or regressive; rather, it’s evidence that we are standing in the way of Jesus, who spoke the truth of God so clearly to the world that they butchered him for it.

Now, we need to be clear about something here: “the world” doesn’t just mean “not the church,” and it doesn’t just mean “liberal.” There’s plenty of the world in the church, too, unfortunately, and plenty of people who are conservative because the part of the world they want to please happens to be made up of conservative churchgoers. It’s all too easy, as Jesus notes in Matthew 7, to see the speck in our brother’s eye, and not notice the log in our own; the teachings of Christ, properly understood, will convict us and make us uncomfortable just as much as they will encourage and support us, and just as much as they will convict and disrupt “those” people “out there” who we know are wrong about this, that and the other thing. Indeed, if we are truly conscious of our own sinfulness and need for grace, we should expect the Spirit of Christ to convict us even more than others, for we should be able to say with Paul, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

That said, though we must be humble before all people, even the false teachers and false prophets of our age, our humility is because we are sinful and imperfect, and our understanding of God’s truth is thus incomplete and flawed. God is perfect, and his truth and love are utterly without flaw, and so we must hold fast to him and his truth with no hesitation, no apology, and no compromise. We don’t understand everything yet, and so we continually need correction and refocusing as we abide in Christ and grow in him; but by his Spirit we have all truth, and we can trust him to help us understand it more and more as we need to, in his own good time. We always need to recognize and admit our limits, but we never need to back down, no matter what anyone might say or do.

And you know, as we hold fast to Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we should do so joyfully, even when doing so brings us trials and tribulations. James doesn’t say, “Complain, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that society should appreciate you properly and do what you want”; no, he says, “Rejoice when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” When the high priest had the apostles flogged, they didn’t grumble that this was supposed to be a godly nation—they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ. And John doesn’t say, “Little children, expect the world to like you and approve of you for being like Jesus”; rather, he says, “The world just didn't get Jesus, and it’s not going to get you either if you look like Jesus, so don’t be surprised when the world hates you.”

If we are truly agents of the gospel of Jesus Christ working to carry out the ministry of Jesus Christ in the face of the hatred of the Father of Lies, then the more effectively we point people to Jesus, the more the Enemy is going to attack us, using every weapon he can conjure up—and he is the Father of Lies, so that gives him plenty of opportunity for conjuring—and the more unexpected, undeserved, and painful the attack, the better. When we respond with complaint, with bitterness, with anger and resentment, when we fight back, we play right into the Enemy’s hands and give him what he wants. It’s far better for us to respond to those attacks by looking to Jesus.

Just as an example, when Dr. Kavanaugh’s ministry comes under attack in one way or another, if you hear him talk about it at all, you’ll always hear him say, “Well, praise God.” There are times I think he’s maybe a little ironic about that, but I have the sense—and correct me if I’m wrong, Doc—I have the sense that he’s trained himself to that discipline to keep pointing himself back to the truth that such things really are reasons to praise God.

When you are attacked for preaching the gospel instead of telling people what they want to hear, for pointing them to Jesus Christ instead of what they want to see, don’t complain, but rejoice that you are sharing in the sufferings of his ministry, and that his Spirit is using those sufferings for your growth; and don’t fight back, don’t let yourself be drawn away from the truth, but go on preaching the gospel. Go on pointing people to Jesus Christ. Go on trusting him to be faithful and true even when that’s hard to see, and in your own trust, show others how to do the same. And those who don’t listen, leave them to God—they’re not your worry, they’re his. You, look to Jesus, follow those who help you see him, and show him to others in your turn. That is enough.

Live Love

2011-10-23T10:30:00.000-04:00

(Genesis 4:1-8; 1 John 3:11-24)

John concludes the previous section of this letter in verse 10 by saying, “This is how we know who are the children of God, and who are the children of the Devil: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God”—which restates what he’s already said in verses 7-8; but then he adds to it: “nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. For,” he continues, launching into this next part of his argument, “this is just what you’ve heard all the way along: we should love one another.” This is the standard by which our relationships with other people should be measured, this is what our lives should look like, this is the sign that the love of God is in us: do we live out his love to the people around us?

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t like math—you can’t measure it or plot it on a graph to prove that you love someone (or don’t, as the case may be). As we’ve talked about, we can’t just take people’s statements about love at face value—not even our own—because human beings use the word “love” in some pretty slippery ways. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do,” and the world “love” is all too easy to use for that purpose. We recognize that it has power, and so there’s a great temptation to seize that power to use against others for our own purposes, to get what we want. Biblically, though, that’s the exact opposite of love, which is not about getting, but giving; the demands of love are directed not at each other, but at ourselves.

Thus John gives us first the negative example of Cain—an extreme example, as one who literally physically murdered his brother, but one who in that very extremity offers a powerful illustration of the problem. Why did Cain kill his brother? We saw this last year when we worked through Genesis—Cain was all about Cain. He didn’t give God the best of his crops, just what he felt like giving; and when God favored his younger brother because Abel did give God his best, Cain grew angry and bitter. Instead of accepting God’s rebuke and admitting his sin, he blamed it all on his brother. He put himself ahead of his brother, which led him to see Abel as a rival and a threat; as a result, he came to hate him, and ultimately to kill him.

By contrast to Cain, we also have the positive example of Jesus—also an extreme example, as of course he was God and therefore perfect, which makes him the perfect illustration of love. How do we know what love is? Jesus died on the cross for us. What does it mean for us to love others? Go and do likewise.

Now, as John goes on to say, this doesn’t mean that we all need to lay down our lives for others in the exact same way as Jesus did; for one thing, we can’t because we’re not him, and for another, that’s not what people need from us. As James Denney put it in his book The Death of Christ, “If I were sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and some one came along and jumped into the water and got drowned ‘to prove his love for me,’ I should find it quite unintelligible.” I might need love, but such an act would do nothing for me. But, he continues, “if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning,” and someone jumped in and saved my life at the cost of their own—“then I should say, ‘Greater love hath no man than this,’” because then I would understand the sacrifice that was made for me. I. Howard Marshall sums it up this way: “Love means saying ‘No’ to one’s own life so that somebody else may live.”

Note this: what we see most clearly in Jesus’ way of dying is also his way of living, and the way in which he calls us to live. Living out his love means, day by day, saying “No” to ourselves and our desires so that we can say “Yes” to meeting the needs of others. If we see others in need and harden our hearts against them, lest pity move us to sacrifice some of our comfort to help them meet their needs, then the love of God is not in us. I don’t agree with the Occupy Wall Street movement as a matter of economic policy, but I do believe there’s a moral intuition here which we must take seriously: I think most people in this country perceive that the very rich don’t care tuppence about them, and I think for the most part, they’re pretty much right. As it happens, experience has taught me that the exact same thing is probably true of most of them, and if they were suddenly hugely rich they’d be no better, so I don’t think their high horse has any legs to stand on; but that doesn’t make their insight false, just truer than most of us would like to admit.

Does this mean that we must give to anyone who asks, or that we must give them whatever they want? No; again, we aren’t Jesus, we aren’t God, so we don’t have the ability to give so much to so many. It is not given to us to meet every need we see; we are far more limited than that, and we must begin by taking care of those closest to us before we seek to provide for people outside that circle. Then too, not everyone who claims to be in need is trustworthy, and I don’t see anything in the gospel that necessarily makes a virtue of being cheated. There are prudential decisions here, of whom we can truly help, and how, and how much. But it is to say this: love changes our priorities. Love isn’t about getting what we want, it’s about giving others what they need. Love seeks first to bless others, not to bless ourselves.

And you know, maybe we can’t apply that with mathematical precision, but this is a standard we can use to evaluate ourselves. When we look at how we spend our time and what we do with our money, what do we see? Do we only give when it doesn’t cost us anything, when we really don’t have to give anything up? If I go home, and I’m tired, and Sara’s tired, and the kids are squirrely, and I go off in a corner and do whatever I feel like while she’s trying to make dinner and manage four kids and keep herself together emotionally, do I love my wife? Not at that moment, I don’t. If I decide that I don’t want to give my tithe to the church this month, that I’m going to keep that money and buy a flatscreen TV, do I love the church? Not with my actions. If I see a friend in need—it doesn’t have to be financial; it could just as well be emotional or spiritual—if I see a friend in need and choose to look the other way because I want to keep my time, my energy, my money, for myself, do I really love them? Not in any way that matters.

And if I do these things, if I choose to spend my money, my time, and my energy on my own pleasure and my own satisfaction, can I say that the love of God is in me? No, I can’t. But if I live my life as an ongoing offering to God—recognizing that he has given me all the time I have, all the energy I have, all the money and possessions I have, and that he gave them to me so that I might use them to love and bless the people he has given to me, and those he sends across my path—if I desire to please him and to bless him by blessing other people, to respond to his love and live in his love by loving others and giving them what best I can, then I can say, yes, this is the love of God in me; this is what it looks like. I’m not all the way there yet, but by God’s grace, by his love, by the power of his Holy Spirit within me, I trust he’ll get me there. May it be so for all of us.

Children of God

2011-10-16T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Psalm 17:6-15; 1 John 2:28-3:10)

I hate to rag on the NIV too much, since a couple of my favorite profs were on the translation committee, but here in 1 John, the NIV puts us on the wrong track right from the start of this section. It’s not a huge misdirection, but it’s a real one, caused by the fact that the NIV likes to use different English words to vary the translation. Thus all over chapter 2, John uses the Greek word meno, which means “to abide” or “to remain,” and throughout the passage we looked at last week, the NIV translates it “remain”—you see it in verse 19, and a couple times each in 24 and 27. And then here in verse 28, all of a sudden, the NIV takes that same word and translates it “continue,” as if John has just moved on to something new—as if it’s just a transition, nothing more.

Which is too bad, because there is in fact a very close connection here—so close that scholars don’t actually agree whether verse 28 marks the beginning of a new section at all; some see 28 and 29 as part of the previous section, with the next part of the book beginning with 3:1. Truth is, I think, those two verses really belong to both sections; there really isn’t a break here at all, because John’s argument in our passage this morning is deeply rooted in what he’s just been saying in the passage we read last week. He’s been talking about abiding in Christ, and abiding in the Father, and abiding in the Holy Spirit—he doesn’t say it that way, but that’s what he means, as the Holy Spirit is the anointing we have received from Jesus—but it’s not just about abiding in God so that we know true things and aren’t deceived. This is much deeper, and so he drives deeper.

What he’s on about here is a very deep truth, and a very difficult doctrine—difficult because it’s something of a mystical reality, not something which we can easily rationally define: our union with Christ. Christ himself talks about this in John 15, where he says that he is the vine and we are the branches, and so we must abide in him and he in us if we are to bear fruit. Paul goes after it from a number of angles—he describes the church as the body of Christ, united in him who is our head; he also talks quite a bit about our having been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, crucified with him and raised to new life with him. Following Jesus, being a part of the church, isn’t just about doing certain things or not doing other things; it’s not just about working together, and it’s not even just about being in relationship with God and with each other as we usually understand that. It’s about being one with Christ in a very deep way that we can’t really fully explain, we just have to live into and experience.

That’s what John’s talking about, and it’s important we understand that, because if we don’t, we’re going to misunderstand everything else he’s saying. If you were here when we started this series, remember what John says in chapter 1: righteousness is a result of walking in the light—you walk the right way when you have the light to see where you’re going. Remember what Jesus said: the branches bear fruit because they are a part of the vine, and that’s just what healthy branches on a healthy vine do. Remember that he told his disciples, “You will know them by their fruit”—a tree doesn’t grow up, decide it wants to be an apple tree, and then start working as hard as it can to squeeze apples out of its limbs; if it’s an apple tree, apples are simply a natural part of its life, assuming it’s healthy, has enough water, and so on.

This is how it is with righteousness—it isn’t something we have to strain to make happen, it’s evidence of what has already happened and is happening. We have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, we have been crucified with him—our old life is dead, and we now live by his life in us—and as such we have become God’s children; all his love is ours, lavished on us, poured out with utter abandon and complete disregard for dignity. This is now the fundamental reality of our life; we just need to stop striving to live something else instead. It’s not even about trying to live this way, trying to abide in Christ—it’s about not trying not to. My kids don’t have to try to be my kids; they just are, they’re stuck with it. It’s not always the best bargain in the world by any means, but no matter what may happen, thus it will always be; and it’s how it’s supposed to be, which means that even though my kids no doubt wish sometimes that I did things differently—and sometimes no doubt are completely right—and even though I’m not the best father in the world, them being with me is what is best for them.

And so it is with us and God, except that he is the best Father in the world; all the more, then, is it for our best to abide in him as his children, to live in his love and humbly bow before his authority. Again, this means living differently from the rest of the world—because we are in the light instead of the darkness; because we are loved and we respond to his love. It means giving up our own plan and direction for our lives and accepting being remade like Christ—which, in truth, is being remade as ourselves, the falsehood stripped away, leaving us as we truly are, as God made us to be. This also means being purified, because drawing near to God has that effect; nothing impure can survive in his presence—including, ultimately, our impure desires. The closer we come to him, the more we want to please him, and the less we want anything that doesn’t.

This will set us against the world around us—not that we’ll always feel that strongly; sometimes it won’t be obvious at all. But that reality will always be there, and we should always expect it to be there. The world hated Jesus, after all, and the more we’re like him, the more it’s going to have a problem with us. And remember, it wasn’t the bad people in the world that hated him most, on the whole: it was the religious part of the world, the people who were good and godly and upstanding and righteous. Why? Because they were the folks who were most impressed with themselves, and so they were the ones least willing to hear the message that they were sinners, alienated from God and in desperate need of his grace. That’s the start, that’s where abiding in Christ begins: right there, in giving up the false hope that we can somehow be good enough to make it all right ourselves, in accepting his grace. Being really good at being really good doesn’t make you a Christian, it makes you a Pharisee.

Now, it might seem strange that I would say that when verses 4-10 are full of strong language against sin; but remember, in chapter 1 John has already said that no one can claim not to be a sinner, and anyone who does is a liar. Remember that he said that as he was talking about the importance of walking in the light—we walk in the light, we have fellowship with God, and yet we know that we do stumble and we do sin; the key is that when this happens, we are in Christ, who allowed himself to be crucified for us as the sacrifice to pay the price for our sin and purify us from our unrighteousness. He became sin for us so that he might be our righteousness—so that we might have his righteousness instead of our own, because our own wasn’t good enough.

And remember the context of this passage, why John is writing this letter: because there were those in the church who had left to follow their own preferred version of Jesus. This is the sin of rebellion—or lawlessness, as the NIV renders it in verse 4—of choosing to reject the will of God because his will isn’t what we want it to be. It’s the sin of choosing the darkness over the light. Do we sin? Yes, and then we repent, we ask forgiveness, we seek to make it right—and above all, we trust in Jesus and give thanks for his grace. We sin, but we don’t go on sinning; we give our sin to Jesus, who took it all on the cross, and we are cleansed. As Luther said, we are at one and the same time sinners and saints: we sin, but Jesus takes away our sin; there is darkness yet in us, but the light of Christ is in us, driving away the darkness. We sin in various ways, but by the power of Christ in us, by the work of his Spirit, we continue to choose him over sin But those who are committed to sin—those who, when it comes down to brass tacks, choose their sin over Christ—don’t abide in him, they abide in sin, and so their sin remains.

The bottom line is that this is about living as God’s beloved children. Be loved; live in his love; let him teach us what that means, rather than insisting on defining it for ourselves; trust him to know and do what’s best for us, obey his commandments, and follow where he leads; and when we don’t, repent of our disobedience and ask him to forgive us. He loves us; he has redeemed us; he will never let go of us. All we need is to abide in him, and all will be well.

Abide

2011-10-09T10:30:00.003-04:00

(Jeremiah 31:31-34, Daniel 12:1-4; 1 John 2:18-27)

If you were here last week, you may remember I asked you a profoundly important question: how many Methodists does it take to change a light bulb? I hope you remember the point, that there’s a real and dangerous temptation to try to blur the line between walking in the light and walking in the darkness. It’s a temptation we see quite clearly in the American church—not just among the Methodists by any means, far from it—but it’s not new to us, it’s not new to our age; indeed, it’s as old as sin, which is why John goes after it in this letter.

He hammers at the point: you can have God or you can have the world, but you can’t have both; and whatever the world may have that you want, what God has for you is far, far better. There is far greater joy, far greater blessing, far greater good in letting the world go to follow Jesus than in pursuing the world; it will send you running the opposite direction, and in the end, you’ll find it was just a will-o’the-wisp after all. There may be a pot at the end of the rainbow, but there’s nothing in it but fool’s gold and rust.

The thing is, true as that may be, truth doesn’t govern human belief. Rather, as Francis Bacon put it, people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true. We have an amazing appetite for the comfortable lie, and no matter how many times it gives us indigestion and how badly it sickens us, we still feel the temptation; without the intervention of the Holy Spirit and the work of grace, we just keep going back to it, time after time after time, hoping that this time the results will be different.

This is why Jesus says in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” because what drives our faith, what drives our decisions, isn’t our experience, but our thirst. Bad experiences in relationships do not by themselves drive people to pursue and build healthier relationships, and good experiences of God do not sustain faith. Experiences shape our understanding, but they’re in the past, and they fade with distance; what drives us, what moves us, is what we hunger and thirst for now, in this moment. That’s why the pleasures of the world never satisfy; if they did, we could move on to something better, but instead, they leave us wanting more, building the craving, strengthening the addiction. It’s also why the Holy Spirit does not work to sate our hunger and thirst for righteousness, for love, for joy, for God, but only to deepen and strengthen them. Which sounds just like the world, but there is this difference: with the world, the hunger and thirst are an agony; with God, they are in themselves a joy.

As dissimilar as they are, though, we still tend to want to satisfy both—to try to find hope in Christ and at the same time pursue the hope that this relationship will be the one that makes me happy, or this job will be the one that turns out well and makes me feel secure. As agonizing as hungering and thirsting for the world may be, we resist giving up that hunger and thirst—we resist admitting defeat, admitting that we are in fact hungry and thirsty for something that will never nourish us. But if we’re in the church, if we name the name of Jesus, then we don’t want to give that up either; and so one of three things happens. We may acknowledge the conflict and, by the Holy Spirit, make the painful choice to let him go to work on our soul, to wean us off the world; we may instead openly choose the world over Christ; or we may try to find a way to pretend that Jesus actually approves of our hunger and thirst for the things of the world.

This, I think, is what John was dealing with. We see the word “antichrist” and we think of a powerful figure of evil at the very end of time, but that’s not what John’s on about here; rather, that figure will have many, many precursors, all in the same spirit. What is antichrist? It is one who seeks to replace the true Christ with a false Christ—and who may even, and in the end certainly will, claim to be Christ himself, while leading people away from God.

Now, let’s be very clear here, this doesn’t just mean anybody who has some of their teaching about Jesus wrong—that’s all of us; this is talking about someone who systematically denies the heart of the gospel, that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, God become human, in whom alone is salvation through his atoning death and resurrection on our behalf and for our sake. Anyone who denies any of this denies Jesus, and anyone who denies Jesus denies the Father, because it is the Father who sent his Son and bears witness to his Son, and it is the Son who testifies to the Father and reveals him to us. Anyone who denies this is a liar, and a servant of the lie; anyone who does this serves the spirit of the antichrist. It doesn’t mean they’re evil, or beyond redemption, but it does mean their teaching is a lie and must be fought.

To understand why John’s opponents were doing this, look what he says: “They went out from us, but they were not of us.” Indeed, he actually says, “They went out from us so that it would be revealed that they were not of us.” They looked like Christians, considered themselves Christians, but they never really belonged to Christ; God allowed their outward departure from the church so as to reveal the fact that they were never truly part of it to begin with. John doesn’t tell us explicitly why they weren’t, but from the context, it seems they loved the world and were unwilling to give that up.

As a consequence, their governing theological principle became the insistence that God couldn’t actually be telling them they had to give it up—everything else had to bend to fit that, even including their understanding of Jesus, who he is and what he did. Like the Pharisees (though in a very different way), they would only accept Jesus as the Messiah on their terms, provided he would be the kind of Messiah to suit their preferences; they would not accept Jesus as the Messiah he was.

Now, we don’t want to make too much of this as a conservative vs. liberal issue, because this is no less a temptation for conservatives; we tend to be guilty of this more covertly, is all. But it is a governing principle of liberal theology—it has been ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher, who essentially founded modern liberal Protestantism with his work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers—that Jesus and his gospel can and should be trimmed to fit what the culture is already comfortable believing; when we see those who call themselves evangelical adopting this idea explicitly, as I believe we have seen and are seeing with Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and others in the emerging-church movement, this should be cause for great concern.

In that context, it’s interesting—one of the first complaints I ever heard against Bell, from another Grand Rapids-area pastor, is that he was telling his congregation that they needed him in order to understand the Scriptures. At the time, I just put it down to a little bit of ego, not really surprising in a megachurch pastor, but you know, that’s a very common approach among false teachers. You find it a lot in cult leaders, actually, as a means of keeping control of their followers. I think John was dealing with this as well on the part of those against whom he’s writing here, because he tells his hearers, “No, you don’t need anyone to teach you—you have been anointed by Jesus, you’ve been given his Holy Spirit, and you have all knowledge.” NIV follows a different reading in verse 20, but I think that’s the correct one—“you know all things”—because that’s really what his argument requires; you can see that he ends up with that point in verse 27.

This isn’t to say that good teachers aren’t valuable, nor is it a justification for spiritual pride, as we must always be humbly open to learning from each other. This is, rather, an attack on any claim of spiritual dependence, and on our tendency to vest authority in human figures rather than in God. God chooses to raise up men and women to preach and teach, and they bless us, but in the last analysis, none of us who do this are necessary, because God could perfectly well do without us if he chose. I’m grateful he doesn’t, but he could. And in that process, we aren’t the ones who really matter; God uses the work I do, the work Matt and Kathy do, the work Pam and her volunteers do, but we aren’t the ones who make anything happen; it’s the Holy Spirit working through us who teaches and strengthens and builds up the body of Christ.

The key here is that this all comes back to what I noted last week, that the only way to learn to live is by living; ultimately, the only way to know the truth is by abiding in the presence of the One who is Truth, by remaining in him and letting his truth fill us. We just need to keep coming back, again and again, to the heart of the gospel, to who Jesus is and what he has done for us—to keep coming back to that and letting that judge and correct everything we think and everything we want to do, letting ourselves be conformed to him rather than seeking to conform him to anything else. We need to keep coming back to God and opening our hearts and minds to him, through his word and through prayer, trusting that by his Holy Spirit he has given us all truth and will lead us into all truth—because he has, and he will. He desires to do that, because he wants us to know the truth, because he wants us to know him—that’s what he made us for. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—who hunger and thirst for God—why? Because they will be filled.

Passing Away

2011-10-02T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Deuteronomy 30:15-20; 1 John 2:12-17)

I have a great fondness for light bulb jokes, and especially ecclesiastical light bulb jokes. How many televangelists does it take to change a light bulb? (One—but for the light to continue, send in your donation today.) How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? (None—Presbyterians don’t change light bulbs. They simply read the instruction manual and pray the bulb is one that has been predestined to be changed.) And how many United Methodists does it take to change a light bulb? (This statement was issued: “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship with your light bulb (or light source, or non-dark resource), and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life, and tinted—all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.”)

That last one’s always told on the Methodists, but I don’t know that it’s really specific to them; there are a lot of folks in the Protestant mainline who really don’t want to insist that people need the light—who want to muddle the distinction between walking in the light and walking in the darkness. John, though, draws a sharp contrast: you’re either in one or the other, no middle ground. You can’t be partly following God and partly following the world; you can’t be most of the way with Jesus but keep part of yourself back to do something else. You can have Jesus, or you can have the world, you can have what you want, you can have your own way. You can’t have both.

Now, John’s laid this out pretty clearly in the first chapter and a half, which we’ve read these past two weeks, building toward the first command we see in this book: “Don’t love the world or the things of the world”; and what he’s said through verse 11 of chapter 2 is certainly enough to support it. “There’s light, there’s darkness, you have to choose, so choose God, not the world.” But interestingly, he doesn’t go right from that point in his argument to verse 15; instead, we get this strange little thing, verses 12-14, stuck in between them. This has always puzzled me, and I did a fair bit of reading on it before it started to make sense.

The key here is to remember that John addresses his readers all the way through the book as “little children,” so he’s not actually talking about three different groups. Rather, he’s addressing his readers in general, then breaking them up into two groups. He’s made it clear to them that the choice between God and the world is absolute, you can only love and serve one, and he’s going to command them to choose God; but first he takes a step back to tell them why. First off, all of you: for Jesus’ sake, your sins have been forgiven, and you know God the Father. You have been given an incredible gift—you’ve been set free from your sin, you’ve been set free from yourself, you’ve been brought into relationship with the Creator of all things; this is better than anything the world can give you and anything it can do for you.

Second, to the older people in the church, he says: “You know him who is from the beginning”—which is to say, Jesus. Why does he say this? I suspect it’s both a corrective and an affirmation. On the one hand, we learn how to live by living, and the longer we live and the more we face, the more we draw on our own experience and how we’ve dealt with things in the past to figure out how to deal with the challenges of the present. This is good, and how it must be, but it does have a downside. How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb? (Change?) It’s the famous seven last words of the church: we’ve never done it that way before. So John reminds us all that even our oldest traditions are but temporary and fleeting; only Jesus is from the beginning.

At the same time, the less important the new and different becomes to you for its own sake, the more clearly you can see the importance of that truth, that Jesus is the one who was from the beginning, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever—and the more clearly you can see how badly we need a God who does not change with every wind of fashion, but who remains the same and remains faithful no matter how the world might shift or what it might decide to do tomorrow. That’s the perspective which it seems every generation of new leaders in the church is in danger of losing—and which too many leaders in each generation do lose. Too many never get it back.

Which is all too predictable, for a number of reasons; the old are not always humble by any means, but the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to be humbled, and to learn that you don’t really know better after all. Increasingly, I think the most important part of learning is coming to appreciate the extent of our own ignorance. But there’s another part to this, too, and that’s fear. Some people know their own fears, while others repress them in some way, and everyone’s fears are different, but they all would drive us to the same basic thing: compromise with the world. Maybe we’re afraid of failure, maybe we’re afraid of rejection or of being thought a fool, but fear pushes us to make our separate peace with the world; and so John says, “No, you don’t have to do that. You are strong, because the word of God abides in you”—Jesus Christ is in you by the power of his Spirit, his teaching is in you—“and in him, you have already overcome the evil one. You don’t know that yet, you haven’t experienced that yet, but it’s true, because he has already won the victory; just trust him.”

Don’t love the world, John says, because the world is temporary, it is passing away; the world is dying, only God and those who walk in his light will live. Don’t choose that which had a beginning over the one who was there when it began. Don’t love the world, because you don’t have to give into it—it will not always be easy, but by the power of God you have the victory over it; in him, you need have no fear. Don’t love the world, because you don’t have to settle for it: God has given you something much, much better. Far beyond its temporary and distinctly mixed pleasures, he has given you the freedom of his forgiveness, and the blessing of eternal joy and love in his presence. Love that which is most lovely, and let the rest go.

Light Shines

2011-09-25T10:30:00.000-04:00

(Isaiah 6:8-13; 1 John 2:1-11)

I wanted to let you know that as you go out, you’ll find copies of another sermon preached from this passage. One of the good times in my association with the Presbytery of Wabash Valley came at the February 2008 assembly, when the Rev. Dr. Paul Detterman preached. Dr. Detterman is the Executive Director of Presbyterians for Renewal, a position which at that time he’d only just taken; I knew him primarily as a church musician and theologian of worship, and in particular for his work on the editorial staff of the quarterly Reformed Worship, and so I was delighted to meet him and thank him for his writing. I appreciated his sermon, too, which used 1 John as a lens with which to examine the state of the PC(USA) and the various ways in which its darkness has held us back from the gospel ministry to which Christ calls us. Circumstances have changed in the 43 months since, and not for the better, but his message that day still sounds clear.

In part that’s because Dr. Detterman chose his text well. It was a good time for me, but not for that denomination, and this is a passage which speaks particularly clearly in bad times. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to this past week, which wasn’t a good one for me. Partly, I just haven’t been well; I started feeling sick during the wedding rehearsal the other Friday, and I’ve been up and down since. I wasn’t completely out of it, but whatever it was really took the stuffing out of me. More than that, though, to be honest, I was angry a lot of this past week. Nothing you need to be worried about, I’m not unhappy with the church; y’all aren’t perfect, to be sure, but you do well and I’m proud of you. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on, and I came away angry.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because anger is not necessarily sinful; it may be selfish, to be sure, but it can also be perfectly righteous, coming in response to injustice and evil. What matters is why we’re angry and how we handle it—and in particular, that we do not allow anger to curdle into bitterness and hatred toward others. If we let it, as the Jedi Master Yoda always insisted, will pull us out of the light and into the darkness. I’m no great fan of the spirituality of Star Wars on the whole, but George Lucas had the right idea there; and he was right to note that people can draw great power from hatred and bitterness toward other people—but only power for destruction, not for good, not for truth.

It is right to be angry at evil and injustice; it is even right to hate evil and injustice—but not to hate the evil and the unjust, whom God loves even as he hates what they do. If we cross that line, we step out of his light and into the darkness, and we cease to be able to see truly. Hatred, bitterness, all such things cloud our minds and distort our perception: of others, of ourselves, and ultimately of God, because God is love.

Here we see the answer to the question we considered last week, “What does it mean to walk in the light?” It means that we love those around us. And how do we do that, and how do we know that we’re doing that? We follow Jesus, we live as he lived, we keep his commandments. This is the key: Jesus is our reference point, and our only reference point. It’s not enough to look holier than our neighbors, our friends, our family, our fellow churchgoers, because they aren’t the standard by which we’ll be measured: Jesus is. Nor is there any room for bending our understanding of God’s holiness to match what those around us, or the prevailing voices of our culture, value and believe to be right, because they aren’t the ones who determine what is right: Jesus is. Voices of compromise with the world come from the world—they are voices from the darkness asking us to turn down the light, or even turn it off altogether. Jesus calls us to walk in the light, whether anyone around us likes the light or not.

Of course, there are a lot of folks who try to argue in the name of Jesus that God really doesn’t want them to do what his word tells them to do, but to that, John’s response is pointed: anyone who claims to know Jesus but doesn’t keep his commandments is a liar, because their life doesn’t match their words. Biblically speaking, the fruit of knowledge is action; true knowledge is knowledge which is lived out. “Head knowledge” isn’t a biblical category—if you claim to know something but it has no effect on how you live, you might be able to repeat the words, but you don’t really know it.

The late physicist Richard Feynman caught this well in an account of his time lecturing in Brazil.

I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn’t answer it at all! . . .
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” was the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. . . .
So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all.

True knowledge changes how we act because it changes how we understand ourselves and the world around us. The light of God shines, and by that very fact it changes us. The light shines, and we see what we could not see before, and we understand what we did not understand before, and so we live differently—not out of a sense of duty, not because of what others will think of us, not in the hope of reward, but simply because you don’t walk into things when you can see to avoid them.

At least, you don’t if you’re paying attention. Sometimes we get distracted; sometimes we’re looking the wrong way, focusing on something other than where we’re going. Some of us are prone to woolgather; when my sister-in-law’s older brother was a student at Michigan State, he was walking along thinking about something, and looked up to realize he was out in the middle of one of the fountains on campus. He’d walked right into it without even noticing. (Being in his own way a very practical person, Jim just kept on walking until he’d walked out the other side.) And of course, some of us are just clumsy. Even when we can see where we’re going, none of us walks perfectly, and some of us less so than others.

This is why John gives us this assurance: “My little children, I am writing these things to you to light your way to guide you out of sin. But if anyone does sin”—and we all know John is being tactful here, because he’s already said that none of us can claim not to sin at all—“if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One. When he gave himself up as a sacrifice for sin, he solved the sin problem for good—not only ours, but the whole world’s.” The light of God shines, but though it’s the light of truth, it isn’t cold, hard, dispassionate, and pitiless, as we sometimes imagine truth to be; rather, it is the light of grace, because the one who is truth is the one who is love, and his truth is his love, and vice versa. The greatest truth in which we walk is the truth that God loved the world in this way, that we don’t have to be good enough because he is good enough for us; the light that shows us our path is the love of God in which we walk entirely by grace, knowing that it’s all by his power, not our own.

Out of the Darkness

2011-09-18T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Psalm 14:1-3, Micah 7:18-20; 1 John 1:1-2:2)

There’s a common assumption in Western culture that faith is blind—that it’s a matter of wilfully closing one’s eyes to the reality of the world and choosing to believe in something else. This is a charge hurled at Christians by atheists—thus, for instance, we’ve seen a number of prominent folks on the anti-Christian left dub themselves the “reality-based community,” in distinction to the “faith-based community.” That doesn’t bother me, but more worrisome is the fact that many who consider themselves believers have a similar view of faith; they seem to think that what matters is not what their faith is in but simply that they have faith. Power, for them, is in faith itself—which is to say, really, that it’s in them, and faith is just a means of unlocking it. Either way, both groups agree that Christian faith is not about understanding things as they really are.

John has no time for that nonsense. The point is Jesus Christ; and yes, we follow him by faith, but faith in Christ isn’t about closing our eyes to the world, it’s about seeing truly. It’s about coming out of the darkness of the world to walk in the light. It’s about exchanging deception for truth. It’s not about believing what we want to believe, it’s not about choosing to believe for the psychological or emotional or spiritual benefits, it’s not about religion as a coping mechanism or self-help strategy or organizing principle; he doesn’t offer any of these things as reasons to follow Jesus. Instead, he says, believe this because this is reality, because we know this is true, because we’ve seen it for ourselves.

Now, here as in most cases, we have to be careful of the equal and opposite error; there are certainly those who treat Christian faith as a matter of intellectual assent to ideas which can be proven by rational argument. That’s not the point here at all. But John does clearly assert that our faith is based on evidence, beginning with his own testimony and that of his fellow disciples. What he says here is much like the beginning of his gospel: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes”—in other words, no metaphor here, we literally physically saw this—“what our hands have touched—the word of life—was revealed, and we testify to you that we saw it, and so we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father”—he’s breathlessly piling up words here, trying to somehow capture a reality that’s almost beyond words: the eternal God, the source of all life, the one who is life, became a human being, he’s saying, and I saw him. I saw him, I touched him, I knew him, he was my friend; and I want you to understand this so that you can fully share in what I have.

Note that: “that you may have fellowship with us—a fellowship which we have with the Father, and with Jesus Christ his Son.” That’s the goal. And remember, we’ve talked about this, that this word is much stronger than “fellowship” makes it sound; it comes from the word “common” and means to have or to be in common—one commentator translates it “joint ownership.” This isn’t just getting together once in a while in a friendly way, it’s a matter of living life together with Christ, and thus all of us together in Christ, sharing each other’s lives, being in joint partnership in life with each other and the Lord. It’s a deep union, and a deep unity, that is supposed to be the fruit of our faith in Jesus. That’s why John is writing this letter, so that we will truly be captured by and filled with the life of Christ and so live together as his body in this way.

Now, if you know anything at all about 1 John, you probably know that it talks a lot about love; that theme is right here in sum in verse 3, and as we explore this book together in the next couple months, we’ll spend a lot of time unpacking it. But John doesn’t go there right away, because he has some other things he needs to say first; it’s not until chapter 4 that he makes the famous declaration, “God is love.” The reality is that it can be a dangerous thing to just tell people that without taking the time to tell them what it means. The word “love” might not be the most misused word in the English language—but it might be, as people keep twisting it and redefining it to try to push their own agendas. “God is love” does not mean that therefore I should be able to go out and sleep with anyone I want, or that God wants me to do whatever I think will make me happy, or that we have no right to tell anyone anything they don’t want to hear; but if that’s so, then what does it mean?

The answer to that question begins with John’s statement in verse 5: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. That might seem like an odd statement at first blush, but follow me on this. If God is love, then true love is an expression of the character of God. Our understanding of what love is must be defined by, and must arise out of, our understanding of who God is, because to act in love is to act in a way which is in accordance with the character of God. It’s not about what we find pleasurable, or what makes us happy, or what another person tells us we would do if we really loved them—it’s about what pleases God.

Of course, that raises the question: how do we go about living in a way that’s pleasing to God? Unfortunately, we tend to mentally frame that question purely in terms of morality, and thus to answer it moralistically, and so this part of 1 John gets read in that way, as a bunch of commands and threats; and that’s not quite right, because the focus is off. John isn’t commanding us to walk in the light, as if that’s purely a matter of our own effort; he is, rather, making a simple observation. There is light, and there is darkness. The light is from God alone; the darkness is not from him, and there is no darkness in him. You can walk in one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Which points us to a few key truths. First, consider the obvious: when there is light, we can see what is around us, where it is, what’s happening, where it’s safe to walk, where we can sit and rest. When there is no light, we can only guess and feel our way, and construct our own version of things in our heads. Do you ever get up in the middle of the night and move around with the lights off? It works fine as long as everything’s where you think it is; but if you don’t know the laundry basket is there—or if there are toys on the floor over here—then walking becomes a painful experience. Walking with God is about seeing things differently from the rest of the world, not because we close our eyes to how things are, but because God is light, and in his light we see truly.

Second, everything else flows from that. If our culture looks at our faith, if it looks at how the Scriptures say we are supposed to live, and objects, that isn’t a reason to change our faith or how we read the Scriptures—it’s just reality; those who do not walk in the light are not going to be able to see in this world’s darkness what we see by faith in Christ. No amount of argument on our part can change that; God may use our argument to bring others into his light, but it’s only as he gives light that anyone can see.

And it’s only as we begin to see differently, only as the truth of God lights up our lives, that our lives begin to change as he desires. We tend to focus on controlling our behavior—or the behavior of our children—at the output end: reminders, restrictions, laws, punishments, limiting options, keeping busy. Nothing wrong with any of those things, but they leave the root of the matter—the self which acts, the desires that drive us, the ways of thinking that frame and shape our decisions—untouched. God changes us by changing us right at that level, by shining his light right into the heart of that darkness. When you turn the light on in a dark room, it changes how you walk through it, and how you behave in it; when God turns his light on in a dark heart, it does much the same. That’s where true change of life comes from.

Of course, that doesn’t happen all at once; lasting change, whether in a person, a church, or a nation, is a process, which takes the time it needs to take. Part of the effect of walking in the light of Christ is to show us just how much darkness is in our hearts, and just how sinful we are; it’s a lot easier to imagine ourselves free of sin when we’re standing in the darkness, with no light to show us we’re wrong. It’s been my observation that the holiest people I know are the ones most humbly conscious of their own unholi-ness—not obsessed with it, trusting in God’s grace in Jesus Christ, but keenly aware of their absolute dependence on that grace. Indeed, more than that, rejoicing in that depen-dence, desiring nothing more than for the light of God to fill their hearts, driving out the darkness. May the same be said of us.

The Sign of Jonah

2011-09-11T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Jonah 1:17, 2:10-3:10, Nahum 1:1-8; Matthew 12:38-42)

The great British preacher G. Campbell Morgan—also a great figure in Winona Lake history, as the founder of the Winona Lake School of Theology; this is truly an odd little town—once observed that in the story of Jonah, most people have focused so much on the great fish that they miss the great God. He was right. It’s understandable, though, because Jonah shows us the great God at his most unsettling. Even the New Testament leaves it alone, except for these words from Jesus—and they’re hard to pin down.

What do we make of the sign of Jonah? It can’t be just his preaching—Jesus has already been preaching; the Pharisees want more. It can’t be just the three days in the fish, because Luke ignores that completely when he tells this story in chapter 11. But if we put them together and understand that Jonah himself was the sign to Nineveh—both his call to repentance and the story of his time in the belly of the great fish, a mighty sign of God’s power over life and death and all creation—it begins to make sense.

Consider: how did the Ninevites see Jonah? As a servant of God who arrived unexpectedly at an opportune time, preaching a message of judgment backed by displays of the power of God, giving them the opportunity to repent and seek mercy. That’s Jesus. He was God’s Redeemer sent at just the right time—and though he should have been expected, he wasn’t; the leaders of his people weren’t looking for him and didn’t want to. He preached a message from God of both warning and hope, explicitly promising mercy and grace to those who would turn away from their sin and follow him; and like Jonah, his message was authenticated by displays of power that could only come from God—including, ultimately, spending three days in the grave before rising again from the dead.

Of course, at the time of our passage in Matthew, that hadn’t happened yet; but there had still been plenty of signs of God’s power in Jesus’ ministry, including the stilling of the storm—another echo of Jonah—and the raising of the dead. The Jewish leaders just wouldn’t accept them. What they were really saying was something like this: “Look, Jesus, we don’t believe a word you say, and we’ve refused to accept all the miracles you’ve performed to help people as evidence in your favor. If you expect us to believe you, you’re going to need to produce a miracle on our terms, to our specifications.” They were setting themselves up to judge the Son of God. They would not believe him to be the Messiah unless he conformed himself to their predetermined ideas of what the Messiah would be and do and say. They would not submit themselves and their unbelief to him; instead, they were demanding that he honor their refusal to believe.

The summary lesson of Jesus’ words to the scribes and Pharisees is that God doesn’t play that game. They had already seen more than enough to convince them, if they had been willing to be convinced, but their hearts were hard; they would not humble themselves to accept that they might be wrong. They would not be taught—they refused, they were the teachers, they were the authorities, they knew best—and so the only sign they would get would be Jesus himself, culminating in his death and resurrection. The resurrection would be the greatest proof possible that Jesus was who he said he was, and yet even then, many of them would refuse to accept the sign; and in refusing to repent and bow before him as Lord, they would seal their own judgment.

This is why Jesus compares them—unfavorably—to the Ninevites; which had to sting, because the scribes and especially the Pharisees were the exact opposite of the Ninevites. The Ninevites were the ultimate pagan barbarians, completely without God’s Law, while the scribes and Pharisees were devoted to God’s Law. Except that really—this is the key—what they were devoted to was their own understanding of God’s Law; they wouldn’t let anyone, not even God himself, tell them they were wrong. Which meant that they were really worshiping themselves and their religion. It’s a very subtle sort of mistake, perhaps the Devil’s subtlest snare, and very potent in making us immune to repentance; it’s the reason the Jewish leaders would not repent and acknowledge the God they claimed to serve, when even the Ninevites would.

Now, as we see the Ninevites juxtaposed with the Pharisees—equal and opposite errors, sort of Newton’s Law of Spiritual Dynamics—a question lurks: what happens when you merge them, when the Ninevites are Pharisees? We stand here this morning in a very particular way worshiping into memory, lifting the banner of the gospel and the standard of the cross in defiant response to the evils of the world—which is a very Hebrew thing to do; one of the great holy days of the Jewish calendar is the Ninth of Av, a day of fasting and lament for the fall of Jerusalem. And as we remember 9/11 and respond with worship, bearing witness to our faith in God our Redeemer who has overcome the powers of death and Hell and is making all things new, we also remember our nation’s Ninevites, who killed thousands of people, and sought to cripple our economy and destroy our government, in the most horrifying way they could contrive—in the triumphant conviction that they were doing so according to the will and good pleasure of Almighty God, as an act of worship. How do we deal with that?

As we said two weeks ago, we need to remember how God deals with his enemies; which means three things. First, he loves them, and wants to reconcile them to himself. He sent Jonah to Nineveh, and he died on the cross for the Pharisees even as they jeered at him; and he has called us to join him in that ministry of love and reconciliation. Love your enemies, he tells us, and do good to those who hurt you—yes, even those who are truly evil, who would massacre the innocent and call it good. Jesus did; he died for those who did it to him. This is the scandal of the cross.

Second, remember Jonah has a sequel: it’s called the book of Nahum. Assyria repented in part, and mended its ways in part, but only in part; and in the end, the judgment of God fell on them, and they were destroyed. Their destruction was less cruel than that which they had visited on so many other nations, but it was no less absolute; judgment fell, and Assyria was no more. The Lord is slow to anger, yes, but let no one think him weak or uncertain because of this; he is great in power, and will by no means clear the guilty. He prefers to destroy his enemies by making them his friends, but those who reject him, he will destroy the hard way.

And third, we must also remember that we too were once God’s enemies. We do not, we cannot, ever, regard the judgment of others from a position of moral superiority, but in the deep humility of understanding that there but for the grace of God go we all. This, I think, is what brings these first two points together in our practical experience. Too often, we don’t know how to hold them together—we saw this when Osama bin Laden was killed by a squad from SEAL Team 6; on the one hand, you had people who responded with unholy glee to the news, and on the other, people who called the first group’s reaction immoral, inappropriate and disgusting, because God loves everyone.

Yes, God loves everyone. No, God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, as Ezekiel 33 tells us. But in his time, he will take their life all the same. Mercy triumphs over judgment, but only in those who surrender to mercy; judgment still trumps defiance. We should not rejoice in the death of the wicked any more than God does; it’s a regrettable necessity, part of the sad reality of our world. We should rather reflect and give thanks that by God’s grace we’ve been spared the same. But we should find comfort in it as well, because when the judgment of God falls on those who have set themselves against him, it is a good thing—it’s a small restoration of the order of his creation—and more than that, it’s a sign and a promise of what is coming.

The nations may rage, now, but they will not do so forever; those who stand against the Lord and against his chosen one will not succeed. They make their plans, and he laughs. They are temporary; God is eternal. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth shakes and its cities tremble, even though men should cause its towers to fall into the sea, for God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble, and in the end, his city shall stand secure and all his enemies will be shattered. Let’s change the order a little this morning—please stand with me and take out your insert and let’s declare that together, let’s affirm our faith in the reading of Psalm 46.

Descent

2011-08-28T10:30:00.001-04:00

(Jonah 1; Acts 9:1-9)

I was tempted to stand up here and say, “Now that we’ve spent the last four weeks going through Jonah, we’re going to do it all over again”; but no worries, we aren’t. Before we move on, however, there are a couple things I want to note. One of them is in the language of this chapter—and also in chapter 2—and it’s something you probably don’t see in your English translation. If you look at verse 3, Jonah runs away from the Lord; the text tells us, “He went down to Joppa,” where he found a ship headed for Tarshish. Then, the Hebrew says, “he paid the fare and went down into the ship.” Next, according to verse 5, he went down into the hold, and lay down to sleep. Notice a pattern here?

Once the ship puts to sea, God sends the storm, and from that point on, Jonah isn’t in control of the situation; but it ends with him being thrown down into the sea, and then being sucked down by the great fish. Then in 2:6, he sums up his situation by saying, “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever”—i.e., the land of the dead, the land of Sheol. It is only when he calls out to God that the direction begins to reverse, and he can say, “You brought my life up from the Pit, O Lord my God.”

The author is making a simple point here: when you run from the Lord, the only direction you can go is down. Your descent might be swift as Jonah’s, or it might be long and gradual; it might be drastic and unmistakable as the prophet’s, or it might be masked by worldly success; but regardless, it is as certain as sunrise and as inexorable as the grave. The Lord is the creator of all life, the source of all good things, the only Father of lights; to run from God is to turn away from light, air, warmth and goodness to run into the cold, suffocating dark. It is nothing less than to choose the drowning of the soul.

Which is bad enough if it’s just about you; but for all our age talks about “victimless crimes,” there’s really no such thing, because everything we do affects others. In Jonah’s case, imagine this whole scene from the sailors’ perspective. It was just an ordinary day for them—good load of cargo, even a paying passenger, long voyage ahead, and the weather looking fine—but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes the perfect storm. They throw the cargo overboard—that’s their income, they now have no way to make a living, but if they drown it won’t matter anyway—but nothing they can do is enough. Why? Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of Jonah. To quote Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood again, it’s “because of one man who ain’t where he’s supposed to be, and is where he ain’t got no business being!”

Or as another preacher, the English poet John Donne, put it: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.” He was focused in that sermon on the way in which others’ lives and deaths affect us, going on to say, “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde,” but it’s equally important for us to understand the way our lives (and deaths, when it comes to that) affect others. When you run from God, you don’t go down alone, you take others with you, because Dr. Donne was right: we are each a piece of something far greater than ourselves, and when we bring a storm down on our heads, those around us risk drowning, too. We’re never the only ones hurt by our sin; there is always collateral damage.

This isn’t just a concern on the individual level, either. The story of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire shows how the sin of a few can corrupt an entire society; the story of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh shows how repentance can spread in much the same way. You’ve probably heard of the idea, taken from chaos theory, of the butterfly effect—that a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can theoretically cause a hurricane in the Atlantic; the underlying point is that in complex, non-linear systems, small changes in conditions can produce drastic changes in results. As far as physics, weather, and the like, I can’t speak to that—there’s a reason I was a history major—but I know it’s true in human society. We’ve seen it most vividly this year, as the series of revolutions dubbed the “Arab Spring” were touched off by a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire after the police took his goods (again) and beat him. For another instance, African slavery arrived in the American South by accident. Little events, big results.

At the same time, though, Jonah’s story gives us a salutary reminder that God is bigger than all of it, and that he’s at work in and through all of it to accomplish his purposes; there is nothing he cannot use, and no problem he cannot solve. And perhaps most importantly, there is no one he cannot rescue—and no one he will refuse to rescue. There is no one who has gone beyond his mercy, and there is no one who has escaped his presence—just look at our call to worship this morning, taken from Psalm 139: “Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to the heights of heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths of Hell, you are there.” There is no one, as Jesus’ parable of the two lost sons makes clear, who has done so bad that God wouldn’t save them, and there is no one who has ever managed to get themselves into a situation in which he couldn’t save them. However improbable it may be, nothing is impossible for God.

Joe McKeever, who used to be the Director of Missions for the Baptists down New Orleans way, illustrates this powerfully with the story of one night when two men were walking around a county airport in rural Mississippi. One of them was the airport’s manager; the other was his pastor, Slim Cornett, who was getting the full cook’s tour of the facility. They were in the tower, and the manager pointed to a switch, said to Slim, “This switch lights up the runway,” and flipped it. “Then,” he said, pointing to another switch, “let’s say there is a plane in distress up there. I would throw this switch”—and he did so—“and turn on the searchlights.” The night sky lit up—and the Rev. Cornett and his friend were amazed to see a small plane come out of the blackness and land on the runway. Their amazement redoubled as Franklin Graham got out of the airplane.

This was when Franklin was in college; the pilot was flying him back to school in Texas from his home in North Carolina when something shut down the electrical system. That had left the airplane without lights, without its guidance systems—no way for the pilot to know where they were, which way they were going, what was below them, or how close it was—and with the radio dead, they had no way to call for help. Then, out of nowhere, the searchlight had come on to guide them to safety. Earlier that evening, before Franklin left home, his father had prayed that God would guide and protect the pilot and his son; when trouble struck, God answered.

What hits us about that story isn’t that it’s impossible; clearly, it isn’t. But it’s implausible. It’s the sort of wild coincidence you’d expect of a fifth-rate novelist who doesn’t care that things like that don’t happen in real life; it’s a billion-to-one shot, like winning the lottery with a ticket you found stuck to the bottom of your shoe. But you know, God doesn’t just do the impossible; he does the wildly implausible, in order to save us. There is no one he cannot reach, and no one he cannot redeem—just look at Saul; just look at the Ninevites—and he’s willing to go to ridiculous lengths to do it. No matter how fast or far we might run, God will never stop pursuing us, because he loves us; no matter how deep we may sink, his love can always lift us to safety.

Anger

2011-08-21T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Jonah 4; Matthew 18:21-35)

“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all he has made.” From David’s pen in Psalm 145, that’s praise. On Jonah’s lips, it’s an indictment.

Which is telling, and should be sobering for us. We’ve talked about why Jonah thinks and feels this way; Israel is God’s chosen people, Assyrians are his enemies, which means that the Israelites are the good guys and the Assyrians the bad guys, and therefore mercy is for Israel, while the Assyrians are for judgment. The command to go give Nineveh a chance to repent, and thus to avoid judgment, violated his understanding of how things ought to be.

We understand that. Whether it’s that car that just cut us off, the person who just hurt someone we love, or that group of people who are advocating for causes and laws we find repugnant, we have our own Ninevites. I remember hearing Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a black Baptist preacher who founded a megachurch in Brooklyn, talk about receiving invitations to preach to white congregations and wanting to refuse, “because white folk been mean. They’re Ninevites, and I don’t like preaching to Ninevites.” Our Ninevites are different, but we understand the desire that those who we believe have done evil to us and ours should suffer the full consequences.

What should give us pause, though, is to realize just how far that desire has driven Jonah. In his self-righteous insistence on his own idea of justice, he has gotten to the point of criticizing God for being merciful—even when he himself is only alive to complain because of that same mercy. You can just hear it, can’t you? “God, I told you this would happen! Isn’t this exactly what I said was going to happen? This is why I ran away to sea, to try to keep you from making this mistake!” And on and on, until finally he declaims, “And now, O Lord, please kill me, for after this I’m better off dead.”

To borrow a phrase from Mark Driscoll, what we see here is Jonah the emotional counter-punching drama queen; but beneath the melodramatics, we also see just how far his heart is from God, how he has let his idea of what God ought to be like blind him to who God is. His worship has been taken over by arrogance and self-righteousness, to the point where he believes he has the right to keep God’s mercy for himself; though he had been forgiven much, he refused to forgive others, and was even presumptuous enough to object to God doing so.

As Jesus’ parable makes clear, such an attitude offends God; Jonah is now, for the second time, in exactly the same position as the Assyrians he despises: in rebellion against God. His rebellion is less severe than theirs, but no less real; once again, you can make the case that Jonah deserves death for his defiance, and once again, he invites death rather than submit. If God isn’t going to do things his way, he wants out.

Instead, for the second time, God in his difficult mercy spares his life. Rather than killing him, God merely asks, “Do you really have the right to be angry?” Jonah doesn’t answer; instead, he goes out east of the city and sits down to wait, hoping God will see reason and obliterate it. He builds a little booth for himself, but it doesn’t provide much shelter; so God commands a plant to grow over Jonah’s head and give him shade, easing his discomfort. But that night, God sends a worm to kill the plant, and with the sunrise he sends a hot east wind, so that Jonah’s discomfort is far worse than before; and once again, he prays for death.

Look at God’s response. He asks Jonah, “Do you really have the right to be angry about the plant?” This time, Jonah snaps back, “Yes—angry enough to die!” This plays right into God’s hands, as the Lord turns Jonah’s anger against him. “You’re angry about the plant,” God says, “but you never took care of it—you didn’t make it grow; it was here one day and gone the next. If you’re concerned about that plant, why shouldn’t I be concerned about Nineveh? I made Nineveh, and everyone in it—more than 120,000 people, who have never had the chance to learn right from wrong. Yes, they do evil, but I love them in spite of their sin. But you, even if you can’t spare a thought for them, at least think of all the animals who would die if I destroyed the city.”

And there the book leaves us, with God’s appeal hanging in the air and Jonah still sitting in his selfish bitterness and tribal arrogance. The mere fact of the book’s existence may suggest that Jonah grew up and learned what God was trying to teach him, but we really have no way of knowing—which means that we can’t move on with the story and leave God’s appeal behind us; we’re left to answer the question, not for Jonah, but for ourselves. We don’t get to leave this safely in the past, where the Assyrian Empire has been dust for millennia; we have to face our own Nineveh, and our own Ninevites.

I don’t know where Nineveh is for you. It’s for you to consider whom you resent, who angers you, against whom you’re holding a grudge; I won’t name the person in your life who not only deserves to be judged, but whom you want to see judged—and quite frankly, I’m not going to tell you they don’t deserve it. But you know, even if they’re every bit as bad as you think, we still have God’s question ringing in our ears: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” And behind that question, we hear the voice of Jesus: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for”—catch this—“for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” In other words, “I made the Ninevites, too; I sent them the sun and the rain, and I sent my Son to die and rise again for them just as much as for you. Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?”

God doesn’t try to convince us that our enemies aren’t that bad; he doesn’t try to get us to understand them or sympathize with them; he doesn’t, in fact, do anything to minimize the scandal of what he asks of us. He simply says, “Love them. Bless them. Turn the other cheek, pray for them, and work for their well-being. Yes, they’re your enemies, yes, they hurt you; remember how I dealt with my enemies: I died for them. You were my enemy; I died for you. No, they don’t deserve it. Love them anyway.”

Repentance

2011-08-14T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Jonah 3; John 3:11-21)

So Jonah disobeyed God, got caught by a terrible storm, had the sailors throw him overboard, was swallowed by a big fish, repented, got spit back on the beach, and now he’s learned his lesson. Right? Well, maybe not exactly. Yes, he’s given up on defying God, and he goes to Nineveh—but he doesn’t do it on his own initiative. Sure, you can’t expect him to start walking as soon as he’s back on his feet—he would at least have wanted a bath and some clean clothes—but once he’s freshened up a bit, he doesn’t need new orders from God; he knows where he’s supposed to go. And yet, he doesn’t start moving until God tells him a second time: “Go to Nineveh.” Clearly, he still resents God’s command. He’s learned his lesson about fighting God, he’ll be a good little prophet and do what he’s told, but he refuses to really accept it.

Which fits with his prayer in chapter 2, because there’s a major omission there. If you go back and take a look at that, he thanks God for his deliverance and promises to obey in future—but isn’t something missing? Where’s the repentance? Nowhere in his prayer does he admit that he was cast into the deep because of his own sin; nowhere does he confess his rebellion or ask forgiveness for his defiance. He goes to Nineveh because he has to, because God makes him; but his heart has not been humbled.

Jonah gets to Nineveh, and the book gives us an interesting statement about the city in verse 3. Literally, the Hebrew reads, “Nineveh was a city great to God, a visit of three days.” For the first part, I think it means more than just “a really big city”—I think the point here is that this was an important city to God. The second part’s more difficult, because we don’t have this expression anywhere else in the Bible, and so we get a lot of different translations; most of them, like the NIV, end up exaggerating the city’s size. What I think is in view here is that because Nineveh was a royal city, where the king had a palace and held court, there was protocol involved in any visit. Small towns, you could just show up, conduct your business, and then leave, but in places like Nineveh, there were formalities that had to be observed on arrival and departure, requiring a visit of at least three days. Think of it like traveling abroad and going through customs; their customs weren’t the same as ours, but they still had them, and they took time.

The expectation, then, is that Jonah would arrive at the city, meet with the officials at the gate, and declare his business. He would spend the second day preaching around the city. The third day, he would conclude his preaching, perhaps have an audience with the king, and then go through the proper rituals of farewell. Except—it didn’t work that way, because the people of Nineveh disrupted the schedule. From the moment Jonah opened his mouth, his message carried such power that it spread across the city like wildfire; the king commanded his people to fast and put on sackcloth, but he was only confirming what they were already doing. The Ninevites took Jonah’s warning with deadly seriousness, crying out to God and begging him to forgive them.

Now, we shouldn’t overstate this; it doesn’t mean that the people of Nineveh abandoned the worship of their own gods. They should have, but they didn’t go that far; as long as Assyria was in existence, they continued to worship Ishtar and the rest, and they kept right on waging war and conquering other nations—including, eventually, Israel. But they did recognize the God of Israel as a god they needed to honor and appease, and if they didn’t completely change their ways, they did mend them. There was an abrupt change in Assyrian behavior, as their exaltation of cruelty came to a sudden end; going forward, they treated the countries they conquered far more humanely. Their repentance wasn’t total, but it was real; and God saw it and lifted their sentence.

The irony here is that Jonah’s story very likely played a part in this. Though not a seafaring people, the Assyrians recognized the fish god, the god of the sea, as one of the deities they acknowledged and respected. Here comes Jonah, telling the story of his God who had overcome the fish god—who had called up a great storm on a whim, then dismissed it in a moment, and who had used the fish god as a beast of burden to save Jonah from drowning and deliver him to shore; and it’s not just a crazy story, because his skin is bleached and damaged from the stomach acids of the fish, and maybe he even still smells funny. Any god powerful enough to do that could well be the god who had sent Assyria the famine, the eclipse, and the earthquake; if that god was now threatening to destroy Nineveh, then it was time to repent, to change their ways and beg his forgiveness. Jonah’s message probably had more credibility and effect because of his disobedience than it would have if he’d just gone straight to Nineveh.

Now, it’s safe to say that Jonah didn’t appreciate that irony, because he didn’t want Nineveh to repent; he wanted God to be just on his side, against his enemies. But God is never just on our side. He doesn’t offer salvation to one group and refuse it to another; his concern is for the whole world, not just those who worship him. It’s tempting to imagine that God favors us because we’re better than everyone else—as demonstrated by the fact that we don’t commit those sins, like those people over there (whatever those sins and those people may be)—but it isn’t true; the fact is, we too are saved only by God’s grace, in spite of what we deserve; we need God’s mercy as badly as anyone.

It is no stranger that God shows mercy to Nineveh than it is that he gives us his grace, for we haven’t earned it any more than they had; both come because he desires to show mercy. God is just and holy, and so he punishes those who do evil because he will not allow their evil to endure—but that isn’t his preferred method of defeating his enemies. Rather, as he declares in Ezekiel 33, he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but only when they repent and come to him and live. As such, God will show mercy even where we are scandalized by the injustice—and so remind us that the grace we have received from his hand is every bit as scandalous and undeserved.

And in truth, we should rejoice at that; for it’s when God shows love and grace beyond reason that he produces blessing beyond all expectation. Sometimes the greatest mercies he gives us are the mercies he shows our enemies, for it is by this that he defeats them and makes them his friends—and ours. We object when God forgives those whom we believe unforgiveable, because we tend to think of his mercy as a free pass, but it’s nothing of the sort; his grace costs nothing, but it isn’t cheap. It is free, in that we don’t have to do anything to earn it—but as we saw last week, that very fact means that we can’t control what it costs us, or what it requires of us. We do not accept God’s mercy on our own terms, but only on his; receiving his grace necessarily means admitting that we need his grace. We must allow ourselves to be convicted of sin, called to repent, challenged to grow and to change; to refuse to repent is to insist that we don’t need mercy, and thus to reject it. Grace costs us nothing to gain and everything to receive; it’s just the nature of grace. It’s why we find grace so hard to take.

Deliverance

2011-08-07T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Jonah 2; 2 Corinthians 1:3-11)

Jonah was in an awkward and unpleasant position: he’d tried to escape from God by killing himself, and God had blocked him. He’d tried to run from God, and now he couldn’t get away; he could try to ignore God, but he certainly couldn’t hide, and he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. And to crown everything, however unpleasant his situation, and however much it was not what he had wanted, he had to be grateful for it; whatever else he might say, being alive instead of dead was still a good thing.

And so he began to pray. This is a formal psalm, crafted to be useful to a wide audience, so while it could be taken to mean that Jonah repented and prayed for deliverance before God sent the fish, that’s not necessarily true; in fact, it probably isn’t. Still, despite his ambivalence toward God at this point, Jonah does at least praise God for saving his life. When he went overboard, Jonah believed he was cut off from God, and going down to the land of the dead where that separation would be permanent—and he had chosen that fate. God had mercy on him despite himself. It’s significant that Jonah praises God for that mercy which he had not wanted, and for which he had not asked.

Even more significant, Jonah rejects idolatry and recommits himself to keep his vows to the Lord. He confesses that only God can deliver anyone, that salvation belongs to him and him alone—which means that God is free to save whomever he chooses. He is free to save Jonah; he is also free to save the Assyrians, and Jonah has no right to complain one way or the other about either. It isn’t his place to decide who will be shown grace and mercy, and who won’t; his own undeserved salvation obliges him to offer the same to Nineveh, and he acknowledges that. What had he vowed to the Lord? As his prophet, to go where God sent him and speak what God told him to speak. Jonah bows his head and accepts the Lord’s will, and the fish spits him up on the shore.

Now, I have to ask you, how far would you trust Jonah at this point? Sure, he’s repented, to some extent, under extreme duress; but based on his record so far, how deep do you think that repentance is? You could hardly blame God if he wanted a few guarantees out of his recalcitrant prophet before putting him back on his feet. But then, if the Lord had been a prudent God—if he’d been the kind of God people tend to imagine when they hear the word “God”—he wouldn’t have bothered to save Jonah at all, he would have just let him drown, and call another prophet who’d do what he was told. After all, Jonah certainly had it coming, and it would have been an object lesson to everybody in what happens if you disobey. That would have saved time, saved effort, and provided a nice neat moral lesson to boot: do what God says or you’re fish food.

But that’s not how he works. Rather, he is a God of utterly imprudent mercy. He doesn’t ration out his mercy drop by drop, careful not to use too much, as if in fear of running out; he doesn’t hold back his grace from anyone who would take advantage of it, nor does he keep it for the most deserving or those of whom he might make the greatest use. Instead, he lavishes it on us, grace upon grace. We see that with Jonah; most fully, we see it in Jesus Christ, in whom his mercy would go to the uttermost limit, climbing up on a cross to die in order to bring all of us back from the shipwreck we had allowed sin to make of our lives. That was utterly imprudent, it is utterly God, and it is utterly glorious.

Of course, Jonah wasn’t looking for mercy; in fact, he was trying to reject salvation—but God saved him anyway, despite himself. In truth, in some sense he always does, because salvation is always God’s work, and his initiative; we never turn to look for him except he draws us. Still, most of the time it would seem that those whom God saves are at least cooperating with his work; but sometimes, as with Jonah, God saves us even though we don’t want to be saved. Why he lets some go and hauls others back, I don’t know; that’s something for him to know and me not to find out, I suspect. But he’s God, if he wants to he can save people even when they’re bound and determined not to let him—as Jonah was; and sometimes he does.

This story highlights a strange reality, that sometimes God’s mercy is harder than his justice. That might sound hard to believe, when his mercy means sparing us punishment, but it’s true. Punishment doesn’t really demand much of us, after all. When we’re punished, either we know we’ve earned it or we can tell ourselves we haven’t, but either way we’re still in control; we can choose to change in response, but we don’t have to if we don’t want to. All we have to do is endure it. Mercy, though—mercy unsettles us, because it reverses the field on us. It takes us out of control, because we can’t predict it, we can’t earn it, we can’t determine it in any way—God’s mercy is entirely his own doing, completely outside us, completely beyond us. And mercy has a power to compel which punishment lacks, because it challenges us to respond in kind; it challenges us to live up to it. In the very fact that it makes no demands of us, it requires us to change.

No author has ever captured this truth better than Victor Hugo in his great novel Les Misérables, in the relationship between the hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean, and the Bishop, whom Hugo refers to as “Monseigneur Bienvenu”—Bishop Welcome. Dirty, shivering and bedraggled, abused by free society, Valjean knocked at the bishop’s door, begging; the bishop invited him in, fed him, warmed him, and gave him a room and a bed for the night. And what did Valjean do? Having woken up in the middle of the night because the bed was too comfortable, he slipped out, stole the six silver place settings and the ladle, and fled.

Of course, the gendarmes catch him and drag him back to the bishop’s house. Expecting to be returned to prison, instead Valjean hears the bishop say this: “Ah! here you are! I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get 200 francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?” The bishop sends the gendarmes on their way, then turns to Valjean and says this: “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man. . . . Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

That is the imprudent, transforming, difficult mercy of God; Valjean, overwhelmed, accepted it and was transformed, becoming the good man the bishop saw he could be. This is the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace that overwhelms our pride and all our defenses. It isn’t easy, because we can’t control it and we can’t take it on our own terms; it isn’t always what we want, but it’s ever what we need.

Flight

2011-07-31T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Jonah 1; Luke 8:22-25)

Jonah may be the most mis-remembered story in the whole Bible. Anymore, you can’t assume that people really know anything much about the Bible at all, but even now, you mention Jonah, I think most folks will immediately come up with Jonah and the whale. And then, of course, you have the killjoys who get all bent out of shape because “it wasn’t a whale—the Bible says it was a big fish, and a whale isn’t a fish!” Which completely ignores the fact that three thousand years ago, they didn’t have our taxonomic classifications; they didn’t have the concept of “whale” as “not fish.” It lived in the water, no legs, it swam, it was a fish. Period. But while everyone’s distracted by that red herring, the real whale here—the meaning of the story—swims off unnoticed.

Which is too bad, because this is an amazing book, if a rather unsettling one when you really understand it. Nineveh, you see, was one of the great cities of Assyria, and one of the places where the king of Assyria had a palace—not his main residence, but one of the places where he and his court would reside during the year. Assyria at this point was the main foreign threat to the people of Israel and Judah—it was a growing empire, and highly aggressive—and it may well have been the most evil political entity in human history. They worshiped Ishtar, the goddess of war, who was an extraordinarily cruel deity, and their leaders were bloody conquerors who delighted in the carnage of battle; worse, the end of battle did not bring an end to their cruelty, for their treatment of captives could easily inspire a whole series of horror movies. Politically speaking, Assyria was less a government than a cancer.

And yet, at this time, things weren’t going well for them. They’d had a couple weak kings in a row, and they’d even suffered some defeats in battle—which, when your whole nation exists to win battles, you can imagine the crisis of confidence that caused. They’d had some famine and some other negative omens, and so there was noticeable popular unrest; clearly the gods weren’t happy with them, and they were trying to figure out why. It was a teachable moment for Assyria, a time when they were open to ideas they would otherwise have rejected out of hand.

And so God tells Jonah, “Go to Nineveh and tell them they have to repent”—and Jonah flips out. He hates Assyria, which is understandable; he doesn’t want to be the agent of their repentance, because he wants God to destroy them. And so he up and does a bunk; instead of heading east, he anticipates Horace Greeley by a couple thousand years and heads west, out to sea. We need not think that Jonah actually thought he could outrun God, or that God couldn’t send someone else to Nineveh; but presumably he figured that God at least would send someone else, and let him off the hook.

Now, sometimes God lets us run, and sometimes he doesn’t; here, of course, he doesn’t, and so the great storm comes on Jonah’s ship as he sleeps. The sailors immediately start trying to figure out who offended which god and how they can make amends, and the Lord points them straight to his runaway prophet. When Jonah’s lot comes up, they don’t immediately assume he’s to blame for the storm, but clearly he’s the one who can tell them who is, so they ask him a bunch of questions that all boil down to this: “Who is your god?” Which god is angry, and why, and what can we do to appease him?

Give Jonah this much credit, he gives it to them straight: “I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” He admits that he’s a prophet, that he’s running away from God, and that the storm has come upon them as a result of his defiance. The sailors are, quite understandably, terrified and infuriated—how could he do such a thing? And how could he mix them up in it, putting their lives at risk? Clearly, he deserved to be punished—but none of them knew what punishment his god would consider to be sufficient.

So, since he was the religious expert, they asked him: “What do we need to do to you for your god to calm the storm?” And here we see Jonah’s agenda, because all they need to do is turn around and take him back to port so he can go to Nineveh—but he doesn’t tell them that; he’d rather drown than do that. He’s willing to die so that the sailors might be spared, but not to keep living if it means that Nineveh might be spared.

The sailors don’t like his answer, though. Jonah is the outlaw prophet of a god they don’t know, they have no way to be sure he’s telling them the right thing to do, and they don’t really have any reason to trust him. Gods don’t like people messing with their prophets, and if his god holds them responsible for Jonah’s death, he might drown them all anyway. They try to row back to shore, but the storm keeps getting worse, until finally they give up and toss him overboard—begging the Lord not to be mad at them, because it isn’t their idea . . . and as soon as the prophet hits the water, the storm stops. As frightened as they were during the storm, they’re even more freaked out now, because any god who can do that is a god to be feared. I don’t know if they offered a sacrifice to God right there on the deck or if they waited until they got back to port, but that was absolutely the #1 thing on their agenda, because Jonah’s God had gotten their attention; he was clearly a god to be worshiped, and not one they could afford to ignore.

Now, there are a couple things that come through loud and clear in this chapter. One is that God desires to show mercy to Nineveh; we’ll come back to that later on in this series. The other, which I want you to focus on this morning, is a very high view and a very powerful picture of the sovereignty of God—the fact that God is in control. God rules everything—full stop, end of sentence, no exceptions. Every thing, every person, everywhere, at every point in time, it’s all and always God’s.

And God uses everything—our obedience, as with the sailors, but also our disobedience, as with Jonah. In fact, and we’ll talk about this in a couple weeks, there’s good reason to suspect that Jonah’s rebellion was part of God’s plan—that God chose Jonah not despite the fact that he would rebel, but in part because he would rebel. Every second, God is completely aware of, and in control of, every detail, everyone and everything everywhere in creation—and every second, he is at work in every bit of it to accomplish his purposes. He uses all of it, and wastes none of it, ever.

Now, maybe there’s a Jonah here this morning; maybe some of you see yourselves in the prophet who tried to derail God’s plan by defying his will. If so, let me tell you, it won’t work. If you aren’t where God wants you, he can always send a fish—and I don’t know about you, but I’d rather avoid that, because there’s no first-class service on a fish. But even if he lets you sail on west, it just means he has another way to do what he is absolutely going to do.

Or maybe you see yourself in the sailors—just trying to do your job, caught in the middle of somebody else’s storm. If that’s you, take heart, because the sailors weren’t accidental bystanders in Jonah’s story; God had them there for a reason, too. They were people who didn’t know him—but by the end of their encounter with Jonah, they did, and they were worshiping him. It was a scary blessing, not an easy one, but God used Jonah to bless them nonetheless, through the storm. We’ve talked about this before, how often God’s road to blessing leads through the storm, through difficulty and trial, not around it; but I can assure you, even in the storm—even when it’s not your fault, not of your own making, not anything that seems to have anything at all to do with you—God is in control, God is still God, and he is still at work to bless you. Indeed, he is using the storm to bless you, though you may not be able to see that now; he is still the God who can speak peace to the sea and calm the storm, as he did for the sailors, and for his disciples so long ago—and in his good time, he will do the same for you.

We Pray

2011-07-17T10:30:00.002-04:00

(1 Chronicles 29:10-19; Romans 8:12-27)

I upgraded my cell phone this week. There were a number of reasons for that, but the biggest one is that the phone I picked up two years ago recently started disappearing calls. I don’t mean just dropping calls, where at least the phone would have some awareness that it did something wrong; it was more that the phone, in mid-call, would suddenly revert to a completely inert state. I’d look at the thing and you could almost hear it saying, “What—was I supposed to be doing something?” So, I got a new phone, because when you have that happen four or five times in the course of a single conversation, it gets old pretty quickly, and there’s too much opportunity for information to be lost.

Not too many years ago, that last paragraph would have been completely unintelligible; but the cell phone has radically changed our culture’s experience of the world. Before Sara and I got married, we spent most of a year and a half apart; my last semester at Hope, she was in Europe. We talked once during that entire time, though we found other ways to communicate as well. By contrast, I remember the Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes telling a story maybe five years ago about his daughter, a student at Georgetown who spent a semester studying in Rome. That semester, a friend of hers did the same in Budapest; they both had cell phones, of course, so they could randomly call each other up and set up an impromptu date for lunch the next day in Vienna. Ten years before, even if I could have afforded to call Sara, I would have had no way to get hold of her; now, for the vast majority of Americans, “Of course you can reach me—I’ll have my cell.” Doesn’t matter where, when, why—we’re connected, we’re online, we’re accessible.

This is far from true everywhere in the world, of course; but where it is, it’s a staggering change in human society. And yet—classically human—many Americans al-ready take it for granted. People get bent out of shape because the camera on their phone isn’t good enough—really, how silly is that? The main point of the thing is to be able to talk to people, not to be able to ignore them while you amuse yourself. But when we have to struggle to communicate with others, when we have to work to hear their voice and be heard by them, to know and to be known, we value it more. The problem with cheap communication is it cheapens communication.

The same thing, I think, bedevils our prayer life. We’re accustomed to the idea that of course we can always pray—of course God is always online, though we might wonder sometimes if he’s wandered away from his phone; in our culture, even people who don’t have a relationship with God, don’t really want to, and in fact don’t even particularly believe in him still have the idea of prayer, and in fact may pray rather often in some vague way. We take it for granted, as if in fact it’s perfectly natural that we should be able to pray, and to do so whenever, wherever, and however we want.

Before Jesus sent us his Holy Spirit, that idea would have been completely unintelligible. It wouldn’t even have been nonsense, because you have to be able to grasp an idea before you can call it nonsense—it would have been unfathomable. You don’t just go up and talk to a god, even a minor one—you might get blasted. You certainly, from a Jewish point of view, didn’t do that to the Lord of creation. You had to make sacrifices to atone for your sin, you had to purify yourself, and then you had to approach God through the proper channels and in the proper forms. When the temple was destroyed and that was no longer possible, they adapted because they had to—but very carefully, and only with the greatest of respect.

What we too often fail to understand—and we talked about this some when we were going through Hebrews—is that we still need an intermediary when we pray, someone to approach God on our behalf; what has changed is that, by the work of Jesus Christ, God is now his own intermediary. It is Jesus who is our great high priest, who presents our prayers to the Father, and it is his Holy Spirit who brings them to Jesus. It is only in the Holy Spirit, and by his presence and work, that we pray at all.

Yes, whatever we say to anyone, God knows what we say before we say it; but it’s only by the Holy Spirit that our words, our thoughts, the movements of our hearts become prayers. If we address our words to him but our minds and hearts are full only of ourselves, then we aren’t praying, even if we call it prayer; and by the same token, God can choose to answer us even when we don’t think we’re speaking to him. It’s all in his hands.

The key here is, Christian prayer is a work of the Holy Spirit, first, last, and at every point in between. It’s not by our power, but his; it is by our will, but also fully by his; and it’s not by our wisdom, but by his leading. It is the Spirit of God who inspires us to pray, and who enables us to pray, and who teaches us to pray. This is important, because Christian prayer is not natural, and it isn’t easy; as we see in Romans 8, Christian prayer is rooted in surrender, in allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us and move through us—it is in fact an expression of the Spirit’s transforming work in our lives.

That’s a counterintuitive thing to say, because our natural understanding of prayer is that it’s all about getting what we want—asking for what we want, and sending thank-you notes when we get it. Sure, as Christians, we come to understand that prayer is a conversation, that it’s about talking with God—but talking about what? Most people, you follow that up, it eventually comes down to getting what we want.

Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with telling God what we want—that’s important—and being grateful when he blesses us is important as well; but that’s not what prayer is about. That’s part of why the Holy Spirit has to teach us, because we don’t know what we ought to be praying for, or why. Naturally, we’re motivated by delight in the pleasures of this world, and the desire to avoid its pains. That’s not unreasonable, but it shouldn’t be first. The Spirit teaches us first to delight in God, and to seek to please him, and focuses our minds and hearts on Jesus Christ; and in the process, he turns our hearts from wanting what we want for ourselves to wanting what God wants for us and the world.

The Holy Spirit gives us the desire for God, which motivates us to pray—not because we think we ought to, not because we want God to give us something or do something for us, but because we want God, and we want to please him. He teaches us to pray in the reality that we have been made children of God and heirs of his glory, and that the glory and freedom that are ours in Christ are worth far more than whatever suffering we endure along the way; and though it can be hard to live by faith and hope in what we don’t see, the Spirit teaches us to live in hope, and to pray in hope, trusting that our hope in Christ is firmer and more certain than anything we do see now, even though it requires patience.

We Are Built Up

2011-07-10T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Psalm 68:17-20, 32-35; 1 Corinthians 12:4-20, Ephesians 4:1-16)

I spent a little time last week talking about revival, which isn’t easy for me; it’s much easier to spend a lot of time on the subject, which is no doubt why I’ve been thinking about it all week. One thing that occurred to me is that if revival does come—and I pray for it—it won’t look like what we expect. It won’t just be a matter of people being more moral, and it won’t just be more people coming to church. Both of those things will happen, but that won’t be all; and our churches will not be the same except with more people. As Peter says, judgment begins with the household of God. Before God brings revival through us, he’s going to revive us; before he exalts us by working through us for the salvation of many, he’s going to humble us, so that we know that it’s all by his grace, not something we’ve earned by our own wonderfulness and good work.

Revival is a great rupture of the routine, because it is a great work of God. I do not say “the ordinary,” as if to imply that God doesn’t value ordinary people or times or things; but an ordinary faith isn’t necessarily—and shouldn’t be—a routine faith. We all have the tendency to slide into a routine faith, a faith of the routine, even a faith in the routine, when things are going well enough; we get into a mode where sure, we know we have some areas where we need to improve and some things we wish were different, but in general, we feel like we’re pretty good people, with a pretty good handle on life. When you can look around and figure—as the late Rich Mullins put it in one of his songs—that by the standards ’round here, we ain’t doin’ that awful, it’s easy to start to think that God doesn’t have anything big left to do with us—just routine maintenance to keep us running well, and the occasional upgrade to improve the experience.

As we said last week, though, that’s just not the case, because God is on about something much bigger than just approving the life we’re already living, or even giving us a better version of the life we have; he’s about transforming us, growing us out of this life and setting us free from ourselves, giving us new life, making us the people we were created to be. He’s doing more than just blessing us as individuals, or even transforming us as individuals—he’s saving us as a people, blessing each of us so that we can bless each other, building up each of us so that we build each other up, so that we are built up together into his body, his temple, the place where his Holy Spirit lives.

This is what Paul’s on about in these passages, and it’s why in Ephesians he does what he does with Psalm 68. We talked about this a while back, the oddity that Psalm 68:18 says that God received gifts, while the quotation of that verse in Ephesians 4:8 says he gave gifts; the key, as you may remember, is that this psalm celebrates God as warrior king, and in the ancient world, victorious kings would give away some of the spoils to their supporters. They plundered their enemies not simply to enrich themselves but to reward and strengthen their friends—something we see clearly in this psalm. In verse 12, the psalmist observes, “The women at home divide the spoil”; and in verse 35, God is praised because “he gives power and strength to his people.” Thus the gifts Christ gives his people are precisely those gifts he has taken from his enemies. The one who des-cended from heaven to the earth, Paul says, has now ascended back to heaven in victory, showering on his people the gifts he received.

And what were those gifts? Us. Ephesians doesn’t say, “Jesus gave special tal-ents to individuals”—rather, it says, “Jesus gave people, who have particular talents and skills, to his church.” The focus isn’t on individuals, but on his body. Christ came down to live among us, to die on the cross for our sins, to rise from the dead in victory over sin and death, and to ascend back to heaven in glory, where he now intercedes for us before the throne of grace; and in his victory he won us as the spoils, and from his place before the throne he now gives each of us as gifts to his people.

In laying this out, Paul specifically highlights those who have been given to the church in various leadership roles, but note the purpose he names for such people: “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Too often, churches are defined by their pastors, denominations by their leaders, and both by their structures; but Paul says no, the purpose of those leaders (and thus, logically, those structures) is to serve the people of God, such that his saints—that’s all of us—are well-trained and -equipped to do the work of the ministry of the church. He’s not exalting leaders here; he’s reminding us of our place.

Now, if Ephesians is clearly community-oriented in what it has to say about spiritual gifts, 1 Corinthians might seem to be more individualistic—the Holy Spirit gives some people the gift of prophecy, and some the gift of faith, and to some words of wisdom, and so on; but in truth, the same point is in view here: the Holy Spirit gives us various gifts for the building up of the body of Christ, so that we will be able by the Spirit of God to do the work he has given us to do and play the part he has called us to play in the greater work of the whole people of God.

In other words, the Spirit hasn’t given us gifts in order to enrich us and strengthen us as individuals, or because he wants us to have the life we want. His purposes aren’t focused on us, but through us, to build up the whole body of Christ. The work of the Holy Spirit in us is designed to enrich and strengthen the people of God to carry out the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ in our community and our world. Our gifts are not intended for us to use to serve ourselves, to bless ourselves, but to serve and bless others.

To say this cuts across the grain of our culture, which is narcissistic in its view of religion and faith as it is in everything else; the great idol of our culture, I think, is happiness, as it worships in many forms a god who aims to please and just wants us all to be happy. As such, it’s easy for us to see the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit as being primarily for us as individuals—to give me salvation, to boost my self-esteem, to make my life richer and more fulfilling—and it’s easy for churches to attract people by preaching that message; but that’s not the message Paul gives us here, because that’s not what God is on about in our lives. God is giving us something better.

Now, this is good news, but it’s not always the way we understand or present the good news. I appreciate the intent behind the old line “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” but that’s not exactly on point. Truer to say that God has a wonderful plan to redeem the world and reconcile it to himself, and because he loves you he has included you in his plan, which will not always feel wonderful to you personally. This is a challenge to our egos, because it requires us to take second place in our own lives, to accept that our lives are not first and foremost for us and our purposes. At the same time, though, there’s also comfort in this, in a couple ways.

First, when we come up against times when we feel inadequate, when we aren’t overcoming the challenges we face, when we’re confronted with the areas in our lives where we just aren’t good enough or strong enough, that doesn’t mean we’re disqualified or that God can’t use us. The truth is, none of us is intended to be enough on our own; we need each other, because God made us that way. Our weaknesses and un-gifted areas are as much a part of his design as our strengths and our gifts. Understand this, because this is important, and God did it deliberately: he took all the gifts and strengths that are necessary for us to grow to maturity in Christ, as individuals and as a people, and he mixed them up and gave some of them to each of us—and then he gave each of us as gifts, to the church and to each other. He designed us and prepared us to work together, to live together, to be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each of us has strong areas that stick out, and weak areas where we have holes; I am strong where you are weak, and you are strong where I am weak, and we fit together such that our strong areas fill in the weak areas of others, while others’ strengths fill in our weaknesses.

Second, we each have something important to contribute. The gifts we have, whether we or others consider them great or small, are the gifts God has given us by his Spirit to fit us for the work he has given us—and he’s given us that work because he values it, and because he values us. The world might not think that what we can do matters, but God does; the church might not honor our contribution, but God does.

We Are Being Transformed

2011-07-03T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Ezekiel 36:22-28; Romans 12:1-8, 1 Corinthians 12:1-13)

One of my interests in history—it’s not exactly my specialty, but it’s related—is the history of revival, and particularly in the Anglo-American context from the Reformation forward. The core of my interest is my desire to see revival on a grand scale happen here in America as we know it, and to be one of the people through whom the Holy Spirit works to bring it about, but I do have more purely historical interest in the subject as well. In particular, as one who has tended to focus on the history of ideas, and in particular how theology drives history and is affected by it in turn, it’s fascinating to study the interplay of revivals with the politics of their time.

The Reformation, of course, is an example of a revival that was thoroughly snarled in power politics right from the beginning, with considerable negative consequences; but even beyond the Reformation, the great periods of revival we see in the history of this country and of England have not been merely religious events—they have had significant effects on our political history.

If you look at the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s, you can see that it had a lot to do with creating and shaping the democratic, egalitarian ideas that would drive the American Revolution; it also did much to weave connections between the 13 colonies and inspire a sense of an American national identity. The Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s revitalized the new nation and immensely strengthened society on the frontier, which I think was critical in bringing the US through the war of 1812, as well as playing a significant role in the rise of the abolitionist movement. The “prayer meeting revival” that began in New York City in 1857 (in a time of financial crisis much like our own, actually) transformed America’s cities, especially in the North—just before the greatest political crisis in this nation’s history, the secession of the South.

Now, there are a lot of wrong ways to take this. I’m not saying that revivals are about political situations or exist for political purposes, and still less that the church should desire revival as a means to achieving a political agenda. But in our time when we’re debating nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan and seeing governments all across the Muslim world challenged and even toppled by popular protests, as well as ongoing struggles in pseudo-democracies like Zimbabwe and Honduras, I believe there’s a political lesson illustrated here that we need to bear firmly in mind: political renewal will not happen without spiritual revival. It just won’t—it never has. Except for the rise of Greek democracy and the Roman Republic, I honestly cannot think of a revolutionary political change for the better that has taken place apart from a Judeo-Christian revival; and given the importance of Greece and Rome for the growth of the early church, I think we may well see the work of the Holy Spirit there, too, preparing the ground.

You see, the critical reality is that politics won’t save us, because our problems cannot be controlled by human laws; they are too deep, too subtle, and too devious. Good works won’t save us, because our problems cannot be solved by human effort; I realize we talk about people picking themselves up by their own bootstraps, but have you ever tried it? Problems do not solve themselves, and we are the problem; as Walt Kelly had Pogo say, we have met the enemy, and he is us. We cannot fix ourselves, and in fact, we can’t be fixed at all. We need something more: we need to be transformed.

This is the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. We are in Christ, we have been made new; now he is at work in us making us new from the inside out, making us what we already are. We have been removed from the authority of this realm of sin and death and transferred into the realm of righteousness and life, the kingdom of God, under the lordship of Jesus Christ—if you were here a couple years ago when we explored Colossians, you remember Paul saying that there; but we are still in this world, and it still influences us, as do the habits and patterns we’ve learned from it. And so Paul says, “Don’t conform to this world”—J. B. Phillips famously rendered this, “Don’t let this world squeeze you into its mold,” but that doesn’t go far enough; the world pressures us, but we often go along with it. Don’t squeeze yourself into its mold, don’t let it file you down to fit, don’t give away those things for which it has no use. Don’t try to fit in with the world around you, and don’t let anyone else convince you that you should.

Instead, Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Not “transform yourself,” which would make easy sense even if a hard command; he commands us, “Be transformed.” This is obviously not something we can do; it is the Holy Spirit who renews our minds, who changes our perceptions and our understanding and our desires. It is the Spirit of God who teaches us to see the will of God, and to understand that his will is good and well-pleasing and perfect. In our sinful human minds, we don’t see his will as any of those things, much of the time; the Spirit shows us better, helping us to see that in truth it is God’s will that is good, God’s plans that are well-pleasing, God’s desires that are perfect, not our own. He teaches us to see the world and ourselves in the way that God sees things, and to want what God wants rather than what we naturally want; and this change in our understanding and desires changes our behavior, moving us to live our lives as an offering to God, to live as his worshipers in everything we do by seeking to honor him in everything we do.

So what does Paul mean in commanding us to be transformed? Well, it’s what we talked about a couple weeks ago, from another angle: we cannot and do not do the work of saving ourselves, nor of transforming ourselves, but we do have the work to do of letting go and letting the Holy Spirit renew our minds and transform our lives. Pride resists being told that we don’t know what’s best for us, it resists learning to want different things; we need to kill our pride, to accept that death. Letting go and letting God, letting the Spirit work, means letting ourselves be God’s, whatever he may do with us, wherever he may take us, whatever he may cause us to be and to do. It is the work of active surrender, of deliberately and intentionally giving ourselves over to God and his will.

We Hear God’s Word

2011-06-26T10:30:00.001-04:00

(Isaiah 55:6-13; 2 Timothy 3:10-4:5)

One of the most unfortunate theological terms out there is the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. “Perspicuity” basically means “clarity,” which is ironic, because that isn’t clear at all; the only advantage to the big word is that it makes you sound theological. The bad thing is, if you use big words like that without being careful, it’s easy to get snagged on the big word and lose track of the details; and here, that’s a real problem.

You see, the first people who unloaded this one on me were arguing that this doctrine means that everything in Scripture is clear, that all you have to do is just read it and it’s obvious what it says. And you know, that just put my back up, because it’s so clearly not true. I’ve been studying the Bible a while now, I’ve learned from some brilliant men and women, and there are things that I just don’t know what they mean and I don’t think anyone else really does either. Even granting human sinfulness, if everything in the Bible were perfectly clear all on its own, we’d have a lot fewer arguments in the church.

What I discovered later is that the classic doctrine of the clarity of Scripture—let’s just call it that, shall we?—is much more intelligent than that, and it has two parts. First, for example, take the Westminster Confession, one of the founding doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian tradition, which basically says this: not all Scriptures are equally obvious, nor does everyone understand them equally well, but those things which are essential for our salvation are so clearly stated and explained in Scripture that anyone who’s willing to read carefully and thoughtfully can understand them. God created everything and everyone, he is Lord over everything, and he doesn’t share his authority. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and there is no way to be saved apart from him. On such matters, Scripture speaks far too clearly to be accidentally misunderstood; only willful misreading can confuse the issues.

But again, granting human sinfulness, that’s not enough; and granting the power and character of God, it doesn’t need to be. The Scriptures are not simply a book written by a bunch of really wise folk—wise for their time anyway, who need to be corrected at points where we just know better; the Scriptures are the word of God, inspired (which is to say, breathed into people) by the Spirit of God to accomplish the purposes of God. It is the Holy Spirit who instigated and shaped and perfected the books of the Bible—not dictating them to their human authors, but working through their personalities and characters to express the universal truth of God—and this is why we affirm them as the word of God, not just for us but for everyone. And it is the Holy Spirit who continues to speak through these words today, which is why we affirm their enduring power for salvation.

This is important to understand, and it’s a little tricky. When we declare the authority of Scripture, we aren’t just talking about words on a page—or on a screen, or carved in stone, or whatever. I’ve had a lot of folks ask me lately, “How can anyone who calls themselves a Christian believe something so obviously contradictory to Scripture?” The answer, I think, is that they mostly regard it as words on a page, as arbitrary squiggles of black ink—and words on a page, be they yesterday’s newspaper or the U. S. Constitution, are to some extent under your control. You can ignore them, you can argue with them, you can make up your mind for yourself what they mean, because they have no independent existence. They can’t argue back unless you let them. You are the authority; they are for your use as you see fit.

Scripture, however, is different. Scripture is inspired by God—not just was, is: he spoke it, and he continues to speak it. The authority of Scripture is not rooted in tradition or in who believes it or in the power of any human being to compel anyone to do anything, it is the authority of God whose voice speaks endlessly through it. To affirm the authority of Scripture truly is not to say, this is a book that we value, that has good rules for living, even that contains great truth; rather, to affirm the authority of Scripture is to acknowledge and bow before the authority of God in Scripture. It is to affirm that these are the words he has spoken to his people for all ages, through which he continues to speak in perfect truth, and thus that they are the necessary measure of everything else.

Now, as we say that, we need to say a few other things. First, this is not to say that the Holy Spirit only speaks through Scripture; Psalm 19 reminds us that he speaks through his creation as well, and as the Spirit fills each of us, he speaks truth through us to each other. If it were not so, I wouldn’t dare to be up here. But it is to say that the Spirit will never say anything which contradicts what he has already said, and the Scriptures are the only absolute word of God; anything else we may think is from God needs to be tested and corrected against their perfect witness, and anything which they contradict cannot be from God.

That said, second, the authority here is God, not us. The word of God is authoritative, but our own interpretations aren’t—they’re just our best efforts; sometimes, when we see a conflict, it may be that our understanding of Scripture is in error and needs to be corrected. In seeking to know and teach the truth of God, we must always proceed humbly, remembering that we are sinners like everyone else.

Third, this is why we can know God: because he has gone to considerable lengths to tell us and show us who he is and what he’s on about. It’s not about our smartness or anything else about us, it’s all his doing. If he hadn’t taken the initiative, it would be impossible for us to know anything at all about him with certainty; what we can know about him, we can know because he told us, and we can know him because he introduced himself to us. Our whole faith rests, as a practical matter, on this: that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to speak his truth and continues to use them to guide us into all truth today. Apart from him, we can do nothing.

Which means, it should be noted, that we must always remember that the purpose of the Scriptures is to point us to God; we may say we believe in them in that we believe that they are his word, his true and faithful witness to himself, but we don’t believe in the Bible in the same way that we believe in God—our faith is in him alone. It’s like my glasses. I’ve been trying to get back in the habit of wearing my contacts more, but these do fine: with them on, I can see you. If I take them off, I have some idea what I’m seeing, but none of it’s clear. Now, if I stand here and look at my glasses, I can study them—I can look at their design, how they’re put together, where the screws are, how they bend; I can see if the nosepads are loose, and that the lenses need cleaning again—but while that may give me interesting information about my glasses, it doesn’t help me see you. If I study my glasses, but I never put them on and look through them, they won’t do me any good at all.

In the same way, study of the Bible that’s all about the Bible and not about Jesus, faith that’s focused on the Bible and not on Christ, won’t do us any good at all—or anyone else, either. It is God who is their power, God who is their point, God who is their purpose: God the Father who spoke the word and created all things, Jesus Christ his Son, the Word made flesh, God with us—God for us—God one of us, and his Holy Spirit who inspired the written word by which we know all these things are true. The point of the Bible is that by the Holy Spirit, God is in every word in every line on every page. If we lose sight of that, we lose sight—period.

We Are One With Christ

2011-06-19T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:9-17, Galatians 2:17-21)

I said last week, briefly, that it’s only by the Holy Spirit that we see Jesus. The eyes of the world don’t see him, because we do not see everything obviously subject to him—we see a lot in this world that doesn’t look anything at all like Jesus, and a lot of people thumbing their noses at him; most of the time, he doesn’t make himself all that obvious. Most of the time, it takes the eyes of faith, seeing with the vision of the Spirit of God, to see Jesus present and at work in this world. That’s one reason why we understand that our salvation comes to us wholly by God’s work as his free gift, that even our faith is a gift from God through Jesus Christ, because it takes the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives to make that faith possible.

The Spirit’s work doesn’t stop there, however; nor is it just about miracles and speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit isn’t just for Pentecostals and charismatics; we reserved, decently-and-in-order Presbyterians live by the Spirit, and need to live by the Spirit, just as much as our chandelier-swinging brethren, whether we speak in tongues or not. I will admit, I think a few words of prophecy and the like would do most Presbyterian churches a world of good, but that’s not really the point here; the point is that living by the Spirit is the fundamental reality of our life as Christians. That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks talking about the Holy Spirit and his work, because it’s only by the Spirit of God that we are able to follow Christ at all. Without him, we’re nothing more than a pile of dry white bones in a dead brown land.

You see, while we tend to think of being Christian as a matter of living up to certain standards of behavior, doing good things and not sinning, that isn’t the heart of the matter. Indeed, matters of the heart are the heart of the matter—God cares about our behavior, but he cares more about the heart attitudes and thoughts that drive our behavior. We do not have a faith that can be defined on a checklist of “do this” and “don’t do that”; that’s religion, but it’s not the gospel—and it’s not enough for God, because that sort of religion leaves the heart untouched, and the sins hidden there to fester.

What God offers us, then, is not a set of rules or principles to follow, but a person to follow—Jesus Christ; and rather than leaving us to follow in our own strength, he gives us his strength. Indeed, he goes farther than that: he gives us his life. We have been united with Christ in his death, and in his resurrection—in his crucifixion, the people we used to be were crucified; in his resurrection, we were raised again to new life, in the life of Christ. Christ is in us, and we are in Christ; this is how we live, this is why we live. This is our salvation, and it’s how our salvation becomes real in our everyday lives, as we are transformed from the inside out. This is, incidentally, why we affirm that salvation is not a thing that we can lose; yes, we can resist this ongoing work of divine transformation in our lives, but it’s beyond our power to undo.

Now, obviously, to say that Christ is in you is not to say that if we were to cut you open, there would be a little Jesus in there somewhere. A number of folks in this congregation have had open-heart surgery since I got here, and the doctors haven’t found Jesus in any of them. Similarly, to say that we are in Christ is not to make a physical statement, since he’s in heaven and we’re here. This is a spiritual reality, the Holy Spirit’s work in us. It doesn’t mean that our individuality vanishes, that who we are disappears into Jesus like a drop of water into the ocean; but it means that our identity changes, and the source of our identity. We don’t define ourselves, and we don’t determine who we are; our identity, our whole being, comes from Jesus through his Spirit, who moves through us like our blood, bringing us life and carrying away the works of sin and death.

When I say that this is our salvation—that this is the Spirit’s saving work in us—I’m not exaggerating; the importance of understanding this cannot be overstated. The Christian counselor and writer Dr. David Powlison put it best, I think, when he wrote,

The Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside ourselves.

God accepts us in Christ, he accepts us as Christ is, and his Spirit bonds us to Christ and begins the work of setting us free from our false selves to be who we already are in Christ, and who Christ is in us. He sets us free from the desperate hunger and thirst that sin can never satisfy; in their place, he gives us the living water and the bread of life. He sets us free from our slavery to our desires, from the need to satisfy the demands of pride and wrath and lust that drives us to cling desperately to things and desires that can’t give us life, that only exhaust our energy and hollow out our souls; he gives us the ability to open our hands and stop striving, to stop hanging on and let ourselves fall into his care. We don’t have to make it all happen, we don’t have to make it all good enough, we don’t have to make it all work; he’s done that all for us. We don’t have to earn anything, because we’ve already been given everything.

Does this mean, then, that there’s no work for us to do? No; but it means that the work before us is different than we usually imagine. As emotionally and spiritually exhausting as our striving can be, it’s our default mode, and turning away from it is harder than it sounds. Our egos want to define salvation on our own terms and earn it by our own efforts, because then we can take credit and demand applause from God and others; giving that up is no easy task. As my friend Jared Wilson says,

it takes conscious effort to orient our stubborn selves around the gospel. Our flesh yearns for works, for the merits of self-righteousness, so it’s hard work to make ourselves rest in the finished work of Christ. It is a daily work, the labor of crucifying the flesh, taking up the cross, and faithfully following he who has finished the labor.

Our task is that of accepting and trusting that the life Christ has for us is truly ours by his Holy Spirit in us, and is truly better than anything we can come up with for ourselves, and thus to let go of anything in our lives that interferes with that—remembering that we aren’t the judge of that, he is—and let him clear it away.

The Promise

2011-06-05T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Isaiah 44:1-8; Luke 24:36-49)

The longer I do this, the more people I talk to, the more I believe that the biggest thing driving people in this world is fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of abandonment, fear of being helpless . . . the list goes on and on; everyone has their own particular fears, since we’re different people with different experiences, but we all have them, and some go very deep. Some people are ruled by them, and we see them as fearful; some overreact against them and take foolish risks, living on the edge to try to prove they aren’t afraid. Many turn their fears into anger; sometimes that’s directed outwards—maybe they even become violent—while others turn their anger in on themselves, resulting in depression. It looks different in everyone, but fear is always at work. It comes inevitably from living in a world that’s under sentence of death.

But 1 John, through which I plan to preach this fall, declares, “Perfect love casts out fear.” Why? Because the perfect love of God has removed that death sentence. This is Easter: God set aside all the praise of heaven to be born as a baby to a working-class family in the redneck part of an occupied country; he spoke the truth, not what the powerful people wanted to hear; he was guilty of nothing at all, but they rigged a trial to convict him anyway, and then they executed him in the most painful and shameful way anyone had ever come up with to that point. He let them, so he could take that death sentence all on himself, so he could take everything bad and wrong and poisoned and polluted about us and our world and pay the penalty for all of it; but then he turned it all on its head, beating death at its own game, breaking its power and overcoming it with his life.

And then, having come back to life again, he went on ahead of us back to heaven, to get our place ready and to open the way for us to follow him. He made a way for us to get free from fear—not a way to avoid death, but a way through it. In fact, he became the way: he is the way. We don’t get to heaven by living a good life or being nice to people; we can’t be good enough, and we don’t have to be. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done right in the past, and it doesn’t matter what we’ve done wrong; we have no reason for pride, and he offers us freedom from all guilt and shame and regret. All we have to do is believe that when he said he is the way, he meant it—and follow as he goes. That’s the promise—for you, for me, for each of us, for always.

The Mission

2011-05-29T10:30:00.001-04:00

(Daniel 7:9-14; Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 1:1-11)

The message of Christmas is that God was born as an ordinary baby—that there was at one time on this planet a man, perfectly normal to look at, with a normal set of experiences and challenges, who was—while still being fully and completely human—fully and completely God. No, we don’t understand how that could be, but it’s apparently one of those things God can do even if it doesn’t make sense to us.

The message of Easter is that God didn’t come down just to enjoy the sights. This man who was God, who was completely innocent of any wrongdoing—not just any crime, but even any inappropriate thought—allowed himself to be wrongly convicted and brutally butchered, to take on himself all the evil and all the pain and all the brokenness of the world and to pay the penalty that justice demanded for all of it; and then he made himself the victor over death by rising from the dead. Through this, he saved us from sin and death—he put sin to death in us and replaced it with his life, which has overcome death and Hell. His life is at work in us by the power of his Holy Spirit, swallowing up what is dead; his light is shining, burning away the darkness in our hearts.

Because of this, we have hope; and we need hope. Few can drive themselves to live without it, and no one can do so in any kind of healthy and fruitful way. But there is nothing in this world in which we can put our hope that will not ultimately fail us; every one and every thing will ultimately die and be lost to us, subject to the fatal finality of this world order, and the remorseless passage of time will grind it to powder to be blown away on the wind of forgetfulness. Where there is death, there is no hope; to have enduring hope, we must have an enduring resurrection. And in Jesus Christ, we do.

But the reality of our fallen time is that there are many who don’t know this, and many more who have turned their backs on this hope for one reason or another. Some know, more or less, what they’re rejecting, and refuse the hope because they will not accept the surrender to God that goes with it; but there are many more who have rejected a false version of Christianity, not knowing that it isn’t the true gospel.

Because of this, the hope we have been given brings with it a mission: to share it with those who don’t have it. That mission isn’t the sole reason we exist, for our most important purpose is to worship God; as John Piper says, “Mission exists because worship does not.” But because there are many who worship false gods instead of the one true God, or who worship a false understanding of God, one of the ways in which we worship our Lord and Savior is by carrying out the mission he has given us.

As we talked about a few Wednesdays ago in our afternoon Bible study, we see that mission—we see Jesus commissioning the church—in these passages from Matthew and Acts; and it has three parts. First, go into the world, as individuals and together; if all we do is sit here and try to get people to come to us, that’s not enough. For some people, that means packing up and moving across the world; for more of us, it means sending and supporting those people, while at the same time remembering that we too are missionaries when we go to Owen’s to buy milk.

Wherever God leads us, whether northern India or northern Indiana, that’s our mission field; wherever we are, we’re his missionaries. The structure of the church exists to enable and empower that, which is why my other denomination, the RCA, defines its mission this way: “Our shared task is to equip congregations for ministry—a thousand churches in a million ways doing one thing—following Christ in mission, in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” I love that, because that’s who we’re called to be as the church: a community of people, a community of communities, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Go,” and that’s the job he’s given us to do.

Next, he says, “Be.” Jesus doesn’t say “You will do witnessing”; this isn’t about just an activity that we go and do for a set period of time every so often. Rather, as we’ve been talking about, he says, “You will be my witnesses.” What we think of as formal evangelism can definitely be a part of that, but there’s a lot more to it; this has to involve our whole lives. Chuck Knox, the old football coach, used to tell people, “Your actions speak so loudly, I can’t hear a word you say”; if our words say we believe in Jesus but our actions tell a different story, our words will fall on disbelieving ears.

We certainly need to be able to tell people the truth about who God is, who Jesus is, and who we are in him, but that’s the sermon minor; it’s there to support and explain the sermon major, which we preach by the decisions we make, the values we show, and the way we treat those around us. Both are necessary, but it’s the sermon people see in us, not the one they hear, that carries the greatest weight. To be witnesses, to bear witness to Jesus with our lives, means that at every point, our lives are to reflect the love and testify to the truth of Jesus Christ.

Which is impossible, for us; but what is impossible for us is possible with God. That’s why Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” and then says, “and you will be my witnesses.” Unfortunately, though, when the Holy Spirit fills us with the love and the grace and the power of God, we don’t stay filled; as the great evangelist D. L. Moody put it, we leak, and so we need to be constantly filled and refilled by the Spirit. That’s part of the connection between witness and worship, because when we worship God together, we open ourselves up to the work of his Holy Spirit, purifying us, preparing us, teaching us, and empowering us for the work to which he calls us, so that more and more we will be the people, and the church, he calls us to be.

So, Jesus says, “Go”; he says, “Be”; and he says, “Do.” Specifically, he calls us to do his work: as his disciples, to make more disciples. Our mission as the church is to go out into the world, not to hide behind our four walls—to live, in full view of the world, lives powered and guided and changed and being changed by the Spirit of God—so that people will be attracted by our example and thus be drawn to follow Christ as we follow him. We are God’s light in the window, calling home those who have wandered far from him, giving direction to people lost in the darkness; but when people come, it isn’t enough just to get them in the door. It’s our call at that point to nurture them as we nurture ourselves, to give them a place by the fire and feed them, body and soul, to share our life with them, and to disciple them so that they, too, can take up the call in their turn.

Which means that if we’re serious about evangelism, we have to be willing to be disconcerted and discomfited. As the British Columbia pastor Mark Buchanan put it, drawing on the story of the paralytic whose friends tore open the roof to lower him to Jesus, if we’re truly focused on drawing people into our community to make disciples of Jesus, there will be roof tiles broken. Some people will take advantage of us; others will, with good intentions, completely disrupt our comfort zones (this is especially true of children); there will be damage done by people who just don’t know any better yet; and some of the risks we take will fall flat, leaving us looking and feeling a little foolish.

We need to face up to it, though: these are the things that come with following Jesus, with seeking to serve Christ faithfully in our community. We cannot avoid them without amputating our witness and turning aside from our mission. Ultimately, we have to decide what’s more important: keeping all the roof tiles in place, or making disciples for Jesus Christ. If we’re going to be faithful to him, our commitment has to be that broken people matter more than broken tiles.

By His Spirit

2011-05-22T10:30:00.003-04:00

(Genesis 2:4-7; John 20:19-23)

We’ve talked before about the fact that the work of Christ, accomplished in his death and resurrection, didn’t end there. After he rose from the dead, he spent time teaching his disciples, helping them understand what had happened and preparing them for what was coming; then he ascended to heaven, returning to the Father’s side, to be the way for us into the presence of God, and sent us his Holy Spirit. It’s through the work of the Spirit that Jesus is alive in us; it’s through the work of the Spirit that the redemption Jesus purchased on the cross is our redemption. It’s by the power of the Holy Spirit in us that we are crucified with Christ, and given his resurrection life.

And it’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit that following Jesus makes any sense at all. It’s all very well to ask, “What would Jesus do?” but on our own, that doesn’t do us much good. We aren’t smart enough to know what Jesus would do, for one thing; sure, there are a lot of issues where the Bible makes it quite clear what we’re supposed to do (or not do), but there are also a great many times when figuring out how to do what Christ calls us to do requires more knowledge and understanding than we possess.

And then, of course, it’s all too often true that we don’t want to do what he tells us, and we’re tempted to disobey; sometimes we just give in to temptation, sometimes we resist it, and sometimes we look for excuses to pretend that God doesn’t actually mean what he flat-out said. We don’t have the strength to resist every time—and that’s not even the biggest danger. The biggest danger is Satan’s sleight of hand, getting us to focus on one temptation while he slips another in where we aren’t looking. One classic is to let us “beat” one in our own strength in order to make us proud, for spiritual pride is among the most insidious and deadly of all sins; but there are always openings, places where we’re vulnerable. We just can’t keep watch in every direction at once.

The blessing for us is that we don’t have to, because we haven’t been sent out to be Christians on our own, by our own strength. What does Jesus say? “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.” Obviously that means we are sent out to continue his mission, but there’s more to it than that. How was Jesus sent, and how did he go? In complete submission to the Father, and complete dependence on the Father, with whom he was united by his Spirit. He wasn’t on his own. And neither are we, because we too have been sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit of God, who unites us to Christ, and it is by that power and with his guidance that we live.

This is important to understand, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it means we aren’t called to convert people to a religion. Human religions are about how we work our way to whatever reward is promised by whatever god or gods we choose to believe in—and this is also true, by the way, for atheists and agnostics, whether they recognize their idols as gods or not; human religions are about how we earn the favor of that which we worship and become whatever it is we think we want to be or ought to be. They are rooted in human decision and begin with human effort; they are fundamentally about us, though directed toward something greater than us, and are centrally concerned with ourselves. As such, they operate from a human perspective, and rarely (if ever) think to challenge that in any significant way.

Christianity, by contrast, is something profoundly different. Though we may use the word “religion” to describe it for lack of a better one—and because it does have certain things in common with the religions of the world—if by “religion” we mean “something like all those other religions,” then it isn’t. The gospel is not about us, it’s not about our work, it’s not about us being good enough to please God, and it’s not something we initiate or control. The gospel is about the reality that we can’t be good enough to please God, not with all our wisdom and all our best effort, because our sin is a separation between us and him that is far beyond our power to overcome—and about God’s response, that in Jesus Christ he overcame it from his side, through his death and resurrection, because he loves us.

As such, rather than being about what we do, our faith is all about what God has done, and is doing, and has promised to do. Other religions say, “You must be good enough”; Christianity says, “God is good enough.” Others say, “You must be strong enough”; we say, “God is strong enough.” Obedience isn’t something we must do or else, it’s an opportunity we’re given to give back to Jesus, to sacrifice something of our own will to him in gratitude for his sacrifice of everything for us.

Second, we aren’t called to convert anyone to anything. Conversion is the Holy Spirit’s work. We’re just called to bear witness to Jesus Christ—to tell others what we’ve seen and heard, and to live in such a way that what we tell them has credibility. We need to live what we say, not just mouth the words; but what people do with the message we bring is not our responsibility, it’s between them and the Spirit of God. It’s simply ours to live for Jesus, and to talk about him as we would talk about anyone else we love and admire greatly, and leave the rest to God. The weight of the souls of others does not rest on our shoulders, but his.

And third, we’re sent out to talk about what the Holy Spirit wants to talk about, not necessarily what we want to talk about, and to accomplish what Jesus wants to accomplish, not necessarily what we want to accomplish. This is not about church growth; Jesus didn’t grow a big church in his lifetime, he had a small band of followers. This is not about any of the cultural stuff we get hung up on, who has the best music or the nicest building or the most inspiring preacher. This is not about being successful by any worldly definition; from the world’s point of view, Jesus was anything but. There is nothing here to support doing things the way we’ve always done them, nor is there anything to support doing them the way the big church down the road does them; but there’s a clear indication that if we let either of those approaches drive our thinking, we’ve badly missed the point.

We are sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to Jesus Christ; that is our sole purpose, and everything else we might do or care about should be secondary to that, because nothing else matters more to the Spirit of God who lives in us.

“They Have Taken My Lord”

2011-05-15T10:30:00.004-04:00

(Jeremiah 31:15-17; John 20:11-18)

In one of his sermons, the Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner observed,

When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

It’s a trenchant observation; but it occurred to me this week, as I was meditating on our passage from John, that Buechner actually doesn’t go far enough. He’s right that we tend to hear what we expect to hear, that which is safe and predictable, but there’s more to it than that. We also tend to see what we expect to see, for the same reason; and it’s not just the Bible we neutralize in this way, but God. We don’t see what he’s really doing, and we don’t hear what he’s really saying, because we already think we know what’s going on and what God has to say about it; and those who don’t think about God much or who don’t want to believe he exists just filter him out altogether, most of the time. Either way, we see and hear only what we’ve already decided we can see and hear, confirming our expectations by never looking beyond them or letting them be challenged.

That’s understandable, because it’s safer that way, and often more comfortable. That way, we don’t see a God who challenges our settled assumptions about how the world works, and how it ought to work; we don’t hear a God who challenges our ideas about what can reasonably expected of us, or who calls us to face things we’d rather not face and make changes we really don’t want to make. And if we don’t see the dead raised, the lame walk, the blind receive sight, and the slaves set free, since we don’t really expect to see such things—well, at least we don’t get our hopes up, either, and risk having them dashed by reality.

Faith, I think, is God taking the blinders off our eyes and the plugs out of our ears, removing the filters of what we expect to see and hear, unfixing our fixed ideas of what’s possible and impossible, and stripping away the defenses we erect against him; it’s the gift of eyes and ears that are open to him, so that we can see his hand and hear his voice, so that we can know him and recognize him at work. Without that gift, our perception will never go beyond what the world has taught us to understand.

That, I think, is what’s up with Mary Magdalene in our passage from John. I’d never really registered the first part of this passage before, but it’s remarkable. Mary’s crying, and she looks into the tomb—I don’t know why, since she’s already discovered that it’s empty; maybe she didn’t know why either, but she does—and when she does, she sees two angels sitting in there. But she doesn’t see two angels. In fact, she doesn’t seem to see anything odd about them at all. There’s no reason for two people to be sitting in there—that’s pretty strange; their clothes are bright white, which was very unusual in that age before washing machines; and presumably there hadn’t been two people sitting there just a few minutes before, when Peter and John looked into the tomb, so that’s suspicious; and yet, none of this registers with her. They ask her, “Why are you weeping?” and she says, “They’ve taken my Lord,” and pulls back out of the tomb. She doesn’t even ask them if they know anything about it.

And when she turns around, she sees Jesus—but she doesn’t see Jesus; she thinks he’s the groundskeeper. Strange man standing outside the tomb on the first day of the week? There must be a logical explanation; it must be the guy who comes by to mow the grass and water the flowers. He, too, asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”—and she asks him, “Are you the one who took Jesus’ body? If so, please tell me where you put him.” It’s hard to blame her for not making the immediate leap from “empty tomb” to “resurrection”—I don’t think any of us would have done differently—but the evidence is piling up that something strange is going on here, and she just can’t see any of it. It’s impossible, therefore it can’t have happened, therefore none of it can be there.

But with God, all things are possible, and so the unthinkable has been thought, and in fact has happened; those really are angels in the tomb, and this isn’t the groundskeeper. And when Jesus says, “Mary”—when she hears his voice speak her name—then she knows him, and then she can see. She can’t figure it out for herself, even with the evidence right in front of her—she needs to hear it from Jesus; she needs him to call her name, and by doing so to open her eyes.

And when he does, when her eyes are opened, she runs to him and embraces him in love and joy and wonder; but Jesus doesn’t just let her bask in that, because she has a mission to fulfill. He tells her, “Don’t cling to me—I’m not leaving yet; but I will be returning soon to my Father, who is now also your Father, so run to the disciples and let them know.” Her eyes have been opened, she knows that Jesus is alive again, but that knowledge isn’t just for her to enjoy—it gives her the responsibility to share it. Just as she needed her eyes opened, so do the rest of the disciples; she can give them that gift by telling them that she has seen Jesus, and what he said to her.

And so it has continued, on down through history, as the faith has spread and the church has grown as people bear witness to what they have seen and heard; thus, just a few years later, the Apostle Paul would write, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Mary saw Jesus and told the disciples, and they in turn saw Jesus and told others, and those others told others; the Holy Spirit inspired the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, and we have continued to pass the word along, telling others what we have been told and what we have seen for ourselves, what Christ has done in our lives and in the lives of those around us. And as we bear witness, the Holy Spirit works through us to give faith to others, to open their eyes and ears so that they too may see and hear what we have seen and heard.

It’s important to note, it’s not on us to open anyone’s eyes; it’s not our job to make people come to faith. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job. There’s value in training in evangelism, but it’s not about sales technique or learning how to talk people into things; it’s simply to help us express our faith more clearly and confidently. It’s rather like a witness in court preparing to testify—the idea isn’t supposed to be to manipulate the jury or the judge, but simply to speak the truth more plainly and effectively so that those in the court understand what really happened. Once that’s done, the work is in the hands of others; and so it is with us. Bringing people to faith is God’s work; our part is simply to do the same thing Mary Magdalene did: to go tell people we care about, “I’ve seen Jesus—he died for me, and he’s alive again. Come and see.”

Seeking the Living Among the Dead

2011-05-01T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Isaiah 53:10-12; Luke 24:1-12)

As I was preparing to preach last Sunday, I came across an excellent piece by the Lutheran pastor and writer Russell Saltzman on the importance of preaching Jesus dead before we preach Jesus risen. It was good enough that I posted the link on Facebook; in response, I got a complaint from my brother. It was interesting, because he wasn’t complaining about me, which is the more usual form; actually, he didn’t have any problem with the essay, either, but it sparked him to note an issue he has with most Easter services. Specifically, he wrote, “One of these years I’d like to hear a sermon that spends time talking about what everyone must have been feeling on that Saturday. We’ve all had to live through the morning after something terrible: waking up and hoping it was all a dream, realizing that it wasn’t, just going through the motions while we start trying to put our lives back together. What must it have been like for Mary, the disciples, etc. on that long day when they thought it was all over?”

It’s a good point, because while we celebrate Good Friday, we don’t emerge from that service into the world as the disciples knew it. That next day must have been the hardest day of their lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, things were back to normal after all the commotion; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in; life had a giant hole right through it that nothing could possibly fill or close or heal, and all they could do was try to figure out how to cope, how to go on, when their greatest hope had just been brutally extinguished.

That was, I am sure, a grey, empty, echoing day, with nothing for it but to keep taking one breath after another, putting one foot in front of the other, putting on the outward show of life and hoping somehow to find something to fill it with meaning; and as my brother says, we need to pay attention to that, because most people have been there at one time or another, and there are a lot of people in this country for whom that’s simply the world as they know it. Why else is the average age of onset for depression now just 14? Why else is suicide the tenth-leading cause of death in this country—and the third-leading cause among adolescents?

I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but 37 years have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . . There are a great many people in this world this morning, some in this community, who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath it.

This is the world in which the Resurrection happened; this is the dirty grey hopelessness into which the light of Easter erupted; and this is the world as it still prevails wherever that light is obscured or changed or hidden from view. The light of the Resurrection should blaze forth from every church and every chapel into every community, but too often it doesn’t; whether because we’re comfortable and distracted and never quite talk about it, or because we think it’s not the most effective way to grow our churches and build our reputations, or because we don’t really realize that we have something important to say, or even just because we’re not sure how—it all comes down to fear in one form or another, I think, regardless—we hold back, and we don’t let the light shine.

And that’s sad, because our world needs the light—even here, where you can hardly throw a stone for fear of breaking a stained-glass window. People need to hear the angel’s resounding question: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” For the women, that’s literally what they were doing, though they didn’t know it; but spiritually, isn’t that what we all tend to do? Our world is dominated by death; Benjamin Franklin said there are only two certainties in life, but given that our current administration seems to be making exceptions on taxes, death may be the only certainty left. And as we talked about when we looked at Genesis 3, the Devil brought Eve down in part by putting the fear of death at the center of her agenda—and that’s where it’s stayed ever since.

One of the lessons of history, I think, is that the fear of death is one of the main drivers of cultures and societies. For ancient times, you can look at the pyramids—all that work to build a tomb—or at the Chinese emperor Qin Xi Huang Di, buried with an army of terra cotta soldiers. Our culture makes a fetish of youth—dressing young, looking young, talking young, face creams and wigs and plastic surgery. Some seek to master their fear by attempting to master death itself, either by investing huge amounts of money in medical care to stave it off, or by asserting control over it through suicide. There are other ways, but in the end they’re all idols to which people turn because they’re afraid of death and of dying; they’re looking for life, they’re looking for the source of life, but instead of turning to the Living One, they are seeking for life in the jaws of death.

The only answer to that is to be interrupted in the search and told, “He isn’t here: he is risen.” The only freedom from that fear is to understand that God became one of us, God suffered, God died, and then God didn’t stay dead—he came alive again, and everything sad started coming untrue, as Tolkien had Sam Gamgee put it. When the church decides to accommodate itself to what people can believe and reduces this to a “spiritual resurrection,” that’s not enough; or when we reduce heaven to just a spiritual life, that’s not enough either—as you can see from all the questions people ask about whether we’ll have dogs in heaven, or this or that or the other thing. A purely spiritual afterlife is some comfort, but if it leaves the brute fact of death untouched—if death gets to keep its winnings—then it’s only a partial victory, and we need more.

And the gospel gives us more, because the gospel tells us that death itself has been defeated, and indeed, everything sad will come untrue, and nothing that is good will be lost, because Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead in a new and perfect body—and because he did, so in him we will do the same. We do not need to fear death, though we suffer it now, because Christ has defeated it, and he’s still here, and in the end we’ll still be here, and it won’t. This is the word of the gospel, and it’s a word that a lot of people need to hear; it’s a wonderful, amazing, powerful word, a word of joy and hope and peace, and it’s been given to us to speak—we need to go out and proclaim it, shouting it at the top of our lungs: “Death is dead!” This is our story as the children of God, and we need to tell it to everyone who will listen.

The Only Answer

2011-04-24T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Habakkuk 1:2-4, 1:12-2:4; Matthew 28:1-10)

Talking with Aaron last week down at 1000 Park, I commented on the price of coffee; in response, he noted that it’s expensive right now in part because of natural disasters in coffee-growing areas. Most recently, there was the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Java last October and November, combined with an earthquake off Sumatra that spawned a tsunami. Between the two events, hundreds of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated; the coffee crop was far from the greatest loss. It only makes things worse that this was just the latest in five-plus years of disasters for Indonesia, beginning with the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in 2004. That one is estimated to have been the third-largest earthquake, and the fifth-deadliest, in recorded history.

It’s not just Indonesia, though; doesn’t it seem like we’ve had an awful lot of major natural disasters in recent years? We no doubt tend to overestimate our own experience, but there’s some reason to think so; of the 25 earthquakes I know of that are believed to have been of magnitude 8.5 or greater, five have struck since Christmas, 2004. Add in the Haitian earthquake of January, 2010—which was “only” magnitude 7.0 but one of the deadliest in history—the upsurge in hurricanes that has given us storms like Katrina, and volcanoes like Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and it’s been a rough time for our poor planet. What’s more, human action often makes these things worse, as we saw with Katrina, and most recently in Japan, where the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami set off a very human disaster in the nuclear power plants in Fukushima Prefecture.

Equally part of the pattern is the human impulse to turn someone else’s disaster to our own advantage; it’s Rahm Emanuel’s advice: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Mostly that seems to be political in nature; but when there was no obvious political gain to be had, with the Boxing Day tsunami, the responses were theological. This was especially true from atheists such as Britain’s Martin Kettle, who wrote a column titled “God and the Tsunami” which concluded with the question, “Are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?” Later, novelist James Wood wrote, “If there is a God with whom we can communicate, who (sometimes) hears our prayers, why does He not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it? Theology has no answer, and never has had.”

It’s exasperating; as my colleague and friend Jim Berkley noted at the time, it seemed that the secular press had all of a sudden discovered the problem of evil—and assumed that the discovery was equally sudden for the church. Actually, they were the ones who were late to the discussion, and asking the wrong question. They wanted an explanation for the disaster—as, I admit, a great many Christians did as well; as a result, they fell into the trap identified decades ago by H. L. Mencken when he wrote, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.”

The truth is, we can’t find a satisfactory explanation for such things as the Boxing Day tsunami, or the abuse of a child, or the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or any of the other myriad ways in which human and natural evil devastate lives—there just isn’t one out there; and that should lead us to ask whether an explanation is really what we want. After all, let’s suppose that someone came along and offered an explanation of evil which really was sufficient, which really did explain everything in a satisfactory way, with no holes in it. What would be the cost of such an explanation? What would that mean? It would mean that evil is explainable, and thus that evil makes sense.

And for that to be the case, evil would have to belong in this world—there would have to be a proper place for it. For us to be able to explain why evil happens, evil would have to fit in with the way things are supposed to work; it would have to be somehow necessary to the proper order of things, which would mean that God deliberately created this world flawed from the beginning. If that were so, we would never be able to get away from evil; evil would be as eternal as good, because good would not be able to exist without it. That would be far too high a price to pay for any mere explanation.

Truth is, we could either have a world in which we can find a rational answer to the problem of evil, or a world in which the final defeat and total destruction of evil is a possibility; and it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that the latter is the world we have. Scripture doesn’t explain evil, because it offers no compromise with evil at all, only unrelenting denunciation of evil in all its forms. Trying to make sense of evil is futile, because evil doesn’t make sense. It can’t be rationally explained, because it doesn’t belong to the world God made; it’s fundamentally alien to the way things are supposed to be, and so it’s fundamentally inexplicable.

Does this mean that our faith has no answer to the problem of evil? Does this mean that God has no answer? No; he offers us the only answer possible: he offers us himself. Thus when Habakkuk complains about the evil God allows, what is God’s response? “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. . . . The righteous live by their faith.” The apostle Paul picks this up in Romans 1:17, applying it to the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus, by faith in Jesus, that the righteous live by faith. It’s faith in a God who doesn’t fob us off with explanations, as if such thin soup would really make our lives any easier or any better, but instead comes down to bear evil with us, and ultimately to defeat it by his death and resurrection.

This is what Easter is about; this is God’s answer to evil. He doesn’t explain it, for to explain it would be to dignify it, to give a reason for it, and ultimately to excuse it, when evil is utterly inexcusable. Instead, he says, “I have overcome it.” He takes it on himself, paying the price for all of it and thus taking away the claim of evil on our lives; and then, when evil has done its worst, he undoes all of it, exposing its ultimate futility by rising again from the dead, unbeaten, unbroken, uncorrupted, undiminished. Evil takes its best shot, it does the most and the worst it can possibly do, and accomplishes . . . nothing. Indeed, it accomplishes worse than nothing, because it undoes itself; as John Piper put it, “God did not just overcome evil at the cross. He made evil serve the overcoming of evil. He made evil commit suicide.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, life has defeated death, and love has broken the power of sin, once and for all. Yes, there are still times when the pain of this world drives us to cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”; at times we wonder why God is waiting so long to raise the curtain. But we know that at the cross, he turned evil against itself, and on that first Easter, he broke it; and when the time is right, he will complete the victory he won that day. Evil will be banished, and all things will be made new; God will live among us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, for death itself shall die, and grief and sorrow and pain will be no more. This is the promise, and the one who makes it is the beginning and the end, and all that he says is trustworthy and true. This is the meaning of Easter; this is why we celebrate this day; for the day of resurrection is the victory that has secured the promise.

Simon the Disciple

2011-04-22T19:00:00.004-04:00

God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots, to show that this all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. At all times and in every way, we are hard-pressed, but not crushed; at a loss, but not lost; hounded by enemies, but not deserted by God; thrown down, but not shattered. We are always carrying around in our bodies the killing of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us, but life in you.

—2 Corinthians 4:6-12

Thus writes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, sounding one of his central themes: we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, which means that when we suffer—not for sin, but for other reasons—we are somehow suffering with Christ; and more, that suffering with Christ is part of the way God works in us and uses us.

We have been given an incalculable treasure; we have been given new light by which to live, the light which is the knowledge of who God is and what he is like, which has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. But receiving that treasure hasn’t immediately made us perfect and perfectly beautiful; the light is brilliant and glorious, but we’re still just drab, workaday clay pots, cheap, easily broken, not worth repairing, common as the day is long. Sometimes, that’s intensely frustrating, and sometimes it seems to make no sense; but when we start to imagine ourselves more than that, we start to think that the beauty is really ours, not God’s, and we start to take the credit for it ourselves—and we don’t let his light shine through. Put a light in a whole, unbroken pot and put the lid on, and no light escapes; but if the pot is cracked, then the light can shine through.

And we are cracked, and life keeps cracking us. None of us here, I think, can come close to the catalogue of Paul’s trials, but we all suffer; and while some of it we know comes to us as the consequences of our own sin, there is much that we do not deserve. We suffer because we aren’t properly appreciated, because we don’t get the credit for what we do, because we make a convenient scapegoat, because things simply go wrong and we lack the money or the influence to fix them; we suffer because we’re too honest to pass the blame when the fault is ours, or because we take the blame in order to protect someone else, or because we keep our commitments when everything is going wrong or when others have broken faith with us, rather than seeking a loophole and getting out. We all know times when we are hard-pressed, when we are at a loss; some of us at least have known what it is to be persecuted by another, and most of us have felt the pain of being thoroughly defeated. We are cracked pots, and no mistake.

And through those cracks, the light of God shines, and within us, his power holds us together; and so though life presses us hard indeed, he bears us up under the pressure, and he makes a way out in his time. Though we are all too often bewildered, unsure, at a loss, we are never truly lost; we may not know where the next step is, but God does, and he’ll guide us, one step at a time. We may indeed find enemies hounding us, for who knows what reason, but even then, God is with us—we are not left alone; and though we are sometimes thrown down, we don’t shatter on the ground, because God keeps us in one piece, and so we bounce back.

And in that, we come to understand a little more, from the inside, what Jesus suffered for us—and as others see God bring us through the suffering that comes in this life, they come to understand that a little more, too, and they see his light shining in us. As people see the dying of Christ reflected in us, they can also see the life which overcomes and has overcome death, his resurrection life. We bear witness that we can in fact gain life by giving it away, that we can receive life by letting go of it, that we can find joy and peace even in the midst of pain and hardship, and that we have in truth been given a life which overcomes even death itself; and in so doing, we point people to Jesus, in whom they too can find life, eternal and overflowing.

In a sense, wherever else we might find ourselves in the story of the crucifixion, we are all Simon of Cyrene: called to carry his cross, and to find in that our witness to Jesus and our ministry to this world.

Only the Dead Rise

2011-04-17T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Isaiah 52:13-15; John 12:20-32)

If you look up the page in John at the first part of this chapter, you’ll see Jesus enter Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, what’s commonly called his triumphal entry. It is, it seems safe to say, the high point of his fame in his earthly ministry. He rides into the capital city on a donkey, like the king prophesied in Zechariah 9; the crowds are shouting phrases from Psalm 118, which is a triumph psalm, celebrating the return of the king of Israel to Jerusalem after a glorious battle. It is of course a psalm of praise to God for giving his people victory, but there is great honor in that for the king through whom God worked to bring it about; thus the king’s procession through the streets is a triumph, accompanied with the waving of palm branches, which were a symbol of victory. The crowds that day were welcoming Jesus as a conquering hero, as the heir of David reclaiming his throne to restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. The Pharisees were in despair at the popular reaction, declaiming theatrically, “This is getting us nowhere. Look, the whole world has gone after him!”

Now, from their point of view, that was hyperbole; their concern isn’t for the whole world, but only for a few thousand Jews. But John knows very differently, and so he skips over the cleansing of the temple—he’s already mentioned the first time anyway, back in chapter 2; instead, immediately following the Pharisees’ melodramatic lament, we get this: “There were some Greeks who were there to worship God, to celebrate the Passover, and they kept asking to see Jesus.” The Pharisees don’t really care about the world beyond Israel except as it affects the Jews, but Jesus is different, and here we actually have the world, non-Jews (though clearly non-Jews who worshiped God) coming to Jesus. Somehow or other they get connected to Philip; Philip, predictably uncertain, grabs Andrew for advice, and Andrew, equally predictably, goes to tell Jesus.

Now, I imagine these Greeks trailing along behind Philip and Andrew—that’s how these things usually work, after all—but John doesn’t say; and indeed, the Greeks are never mentioned again, as Jesus doesn’t directly address them or even refer to them. Instead, he takes their arrival as a sign: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Which sounds completely, ludicrously obvious. Jesus has just been glorified—the donkey, the palm branches, the crowds yelling “Hosanna! Blessed is the coming king! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”—it’s already happening. I’m sure the disciples’ split-second reaction was simple agreement.

And then, as he so often does, Jesus turns everything inside out. He says “glorified,” and they’re thinking, glorified—power, success, honor, fame, the priests and Pharisees worshiping Jesus, the Romans out—maybe even a place to live, no more of all that walking around; but what does he mean by “glorified”? Try this: “I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” I’m telling you, hold your ear close to the page and you can practically hear the disciples’ jaws hit the ground and bounce. Glory equals death? Where did that come from? Sure, many cultures have believed firmly in the possibility of earning glory through death in battle, but that’s clearly not at all what Jesus is talking about; his idea of glory is a long way outside the norm.

Which is precisely why this little parable is so important. This world ties glory to self-assertion, to conquest, to pride, to being better than others, and so the gods we make in our own image do just the same; our view of who we are and of what we should pursue frames and shapes our understanding of who God is and what he wants from us. Jesus shows us that God isn’t like that—that in fact, God is on about something profoundly different. Life as we know it isn’t as we know it; there’s something much bigger going on, calling us to a very different way of living.

In particular, human religion has a “do this, not that” model of the human relationship with the divine. Different religions do it very, very differently, but the basic idea is the same: god tells us to do certain things and not do other things and to behave in particular ways so that he’ll be pleased with us, while we ask god to do certain things and not do other things so that we’ll be happy with him. What the reasons are for what god says, what the justifications are for what we can ask and when, and the balance between them are different with every religion, but in the end, that dance of mutual obligation is the structure of every human religion.

That is not the gospel, and it’s not what Jesus is on about. His purpose is to give us true life, and he doesn’t seek to do that by giving us a list of dos and don’ts; instead, he declares that he will do it by direct donation. He will die, he will let go of his life, so that he can give it to us. Thus his death will be his glory, for it will be through his death that he will win his victory: the defeat of death itself.

And in so doing, in giving us his life, he shows us what it means to live his life, and he gives us the example to follow; this is not simply the way he wins the victory, but it’s also the way we win the victory in his name. Thus Jesus declares, “Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” As you may remember, we’ve talked before about the way the Bible uses love/hate language to express absolute contrasts; Jesus isn’t advocating suicide, he’s talking about what is and should be our first love. He wants us to love him so much that if following him means giving up our own life—whether symbolically, letting go of the things we enjoy most in this world, or literally dying in his service—that we’ll do so, and gladly. To love Jesus in that way is to find eternal life. To love our own lives more than Jesus is to miss his life, and ultimately to lose everything that matters most.

The fact of the matter is, if we love our own lives most, we end up living to avoid death; we end up, indeed, very like this grain of wheat I hold in my hand. We clutch everything tightly to ourselves, and in the process make ourselves small, and hard, and narrow, with all our potential for life locked tightly inside for fear of losing it. If we will not give up our lives, time will yet take them by force in the end, crushing us into powder and leaving nothing that abides. But if we follow Jesus who did not clutch hard to his status and prerogatives as God, but who let everything go and accepted death in order that he might give us his life—if we let go of our lives and follow wherever he may lead, even if that means accepting death as he did—then we sow them into the ground where God can use them to bring forth much fruit.

And in so doing, we prepare ourselves to receive his greatest gift. God promises that we will experience his life in this world, but only in part; his greatest promise is that if we die with Jesus, we will also be raised from the dead with him, resurrected to eternal life in Christ. Those who love life above all, those who would avoid death, end by likewise avoiding resurrection, because resurrection is only possible through death. Letting go makes the promise possible, our surrender opens the door to victory, for as sure as the sunrise can only come after the night, this is true: it is only the dead who can ever rise.

Ready for the Sun

2011-04-10T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Malachi 3:13-4:6; Luke 1:57-80)

These last sections of Malachi—the last block of God’s argument with his people, and then a few verses of epilogue—tie the book and its themes together, but they work a bit differently than we’ve seen in Malachi to this point. To understand what’s going on here, we need to take a look back. If you were here when we started this, you probably remember that the book begins with God declaring his love for his people in the face of their skepticism. He reasserts that he has chosen Israel, the descendants of Jacob; but they’re doubtful, and we see the expression and results of their doubt all through Malachi. We see their stinginess with God, both in their inadequate sacrifices and in their failure to tithe; we see as well their unwillingness to commit to following him faithfully, which is revealed and reflected in their faithlessness in marriage.

And perhaps most of all, we see their complaints that God is not demonstrating his love for them the way they think he should. A couple weeks ago, we saw the accusation that the God of justice was absent, or had maybe even converted to injustice and decided to favor those who do evil. Here we see the logical conclusion to that: “Why should we serve God? What’s the point? We don’t get anything out of it—he doesn’t give us what we want.” Some of the doubters probably want to believe, but they’re struggling; others are most likely ready to give up; and you can be sure that some aren’t the least bit sincere, just cynically looking for any excuse to ignore God. Whatever their motives, though, this is where they land.

There are a few things to note about this. First off, you can see their focus: “what is the profit?” They’re measuring the faithfulness of God purely in material terms, when (as we’ve seen) that’s not necessarily the main way he blesses us; in a sense, they’re trying to dictate terms to God, which is nothing God’s going to accept. Second, in that respect, there’s an irony here in verse 15; God has just said, “Test my faithfulness, and watch me bless you,” and they say in response, “Blessed are the faithless, blessed are the evildoers, because they test God’s patience and get away with it.” Their sense of their relationship to God is more than a little askew here.

Third, consider the first question in verse 14: “What is the profit of keeping his requirements?” How would they know? They haven’t tried. They haven’t been keeping his requirements in worship, in their giving, in marriage—what exactly do they imagine they’ve done to deserve blessing? If you connect this with the next clause—which asks, what is the profit in going around as mourners, probably referring to formal rituals of penitence and expressions of grief for sin—it seems to me they want to get credit for just doing the stuff. They’re offering sacrifices, they’re giving something, they’re going around in sackcloth and ashes or whatever, and they want that to be good enough to satisfy God, and they’re mad that God isn’t going along with it. The reality is, God is only going to bless us on his own terms, as he sees fit, not on the basis of how we think things ought to go or what we think we deserve.

Interestingly, though, this time God doesn’t argue with his people. Instead, we get something very different in verse 16: we get a response to the prophet’s message. “Those who feared the Lord talked with each other,” and though we’re not told anything more than that, the Lord’s response is telling: “a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and honored his name.” Clearly, these are people who have truly heard what God is saying through his prophet, and they’ve been moved to recognize and repent of their sin; Malachi’s message has gotten through to them, and they’ve been inspired to a proper fear of the Lord.

This is something worth stopping to consider for a minute, because we don’t tend to talk about the fear of the Lord much, and yet it’s one of the key things that’s supposed to mark and define his people; and quite frankly, it’s an entirely appropriate response to some of the things Malachi has said. This is not an unhealthy fear, as if we were afraid God wanted to hurt us or might fail us; fear that God will not be as good as he has always been is not what we’re talking about. This is, rather, the same sort of healthy fear that you might feel standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: this is something great and glorious and beautiful and far, far bigger than you, and while it bears you no ill will, if you treat it with disrespect, you will probably die.

In the same way, God is so good and holy and beautiful that we in our sin cannot bear the sight of him; nothing unholy and no impurity can survive in his presence—it burns like a moth in a flame. To come into the presence of God is, of necessity, judgment, as everything flammable burns away, and everything impure is refined and purified by fire. We cannot evade our unrighteousness when we look at God, and we can’t control him—not at all. We can’t make him do what we want, or keep him from doing what we do not want, and we cannot ensure that he will only ask us to do what we want to do and feel comfortable doing. As Mr. Beaver says of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, God is good, but he isn’t safe—he isn’t tame, and cannot be tamed. He is wild, unpredictable, utterly beyond us, and completely unrestricted by our sense of the possible; and while he has promised to provide all our needs, that doesn’t mean he’ll give us everything we think we need, nor does it mean he’ll let us keep those things we’re sure we can’t live without. As such, whoever commits to serve the Lord without being afraid of what they’re getting into clearly has no idea what they’re getting into.

And yet, those who fear the Lord are those who, in the end, have nothing to fear. Earlier, Malachi asked, “Who can endure the day of the Lord’s coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Here, he answers that question: those who fear the Lord and serve him, whom the Lord allows to stand. For them, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings—for in truth, the refining fire of God, our God who is a consuming fire, is his healing work in our lives; it’s painful, yes, but that pain is sin leaving the body. When at last he has fully purified us, when the light of his righteousness has fully risen upon us, we will finally be free from the blighting power of sin and death, and we will be released in his joy and his peace.

The Circle of Blessing

2011-04-03T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Malachi 3:6-12; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15)

I spent some time last week talking about our need for mercy, and I know that puzzled a couple people, since there’s nothing at all about mercy in last week’s passage from Malachi; but it seems to me that while that passage, which is the pivot point of this book and the central element in the prophet’s message, does indeed deal with the justice of God and his judgment on sin, it isn’t merely about justice.

As we saw, the initial complaint God raises in the end of chapter 2 is against those who are accusing him of being unjust for not judging their enemies, failing to recognize that by that same standard he’s also unjust for not judging them. I talked about this in terms of mercy, but the biblical language is more often of the patience or forbearance of God—his withholding his anger and his judgment on sin in order to give sinners opportunity to repent. Before we complain about this, we should remember that we, too, are its beneficiaries.

That’s underscored in verse 6, which is something of a transitional verse from the previous round of argument into this one; and what’s particularly interesting is that this verse links the patience of God with his people to his faithfulness, his unchanging nature and commitment to his word. “You, O children of Jacob”—righteous and unrighteous alike—“are not destroyed”: why? Because “I the LORD do not change.” Because when God says a thing, he will do it, when he makes a commitment, he holds to it, when he gives a promise, he keeps it—and when he chooses a person or a people, he does not let go, and he does not go back on his choice. He declares to Israel, in effect, that the only reason they still exist is because he is trustworthy—and the same is true for us. If we couldn’t trust God, we wouldn’t be here. Some of us wouldn’t be anywhere at all.

And yet, though we can trust him with our very lives, and with every part of our lives, we don’t, not consistently; sometimes we do better, but distrust keeps creeping in, and the desire to put our trust in ourselves. This is the crux of God’s charge against his people here in Malachi: they’re robbing him because they don’t trust him. They are literally faithless—lacking in the necessary faith to obey God fully. Obedience is an expression of trust; they do not trust, and so they do not obey.

We talked about this earlier this year with respect to money, considering our tendency to put our trust in our money (and our ability to earn more of it) rather than in God; and we’ve talked about it more generally as well, looking at the various ways that we draw back from obeying our Lord and heeding his call in our lives because we don’t quite believe that what he commands us to do is really best—we think we have a better idea. What I think we really need to hear is God’s response to this, which we see clear as crystal in the prophet, because it isn’t the demand for obedience that we tend to imagine.

Consider: the people of Israel are struggling to survive, and so they’re holding back on their giving to God—as they were cheating him with their sacrifices, as we saw a few weeks ago—because they don’t think they can afford to give the full tithe, the full 10%. In response, God says, “Robbing me with your giving isn’t the solution to your financial problems—it’s the cause of your problems. You’re struggling because I’m not blessing you, because you’re not being faithful to me in your giving.”

And then we get this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house”—why? “Or else I’ll continue to curse you?” “Because it’s your duty?” “Because I said so?” No; instead, God says this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, and thereby put me to the test. See if I won’t throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there won’t be room to store it.” In a nutshell, God says, “Just trust me. Just trust me enough to obey me, that I will take care of you better than you can.”

Now, as we’ve noted before, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who gives faithfully will end up materially wealthy; God’s blessings go beyond just numbers in the bank account. But it is a promise that those who are faithful will be blessed in many ways, and that if the nation as a whole will give God what he requires, he will bless the nation and everybody will have enough, without having to fight so hard to survive. We will not have all we want, but he will never fail to give us all we need.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul takes this and develops it in a more individual direction. “You know how it works,” he says: “you reap what you sow. If you only sow a little seed, you only get a small harvest, but if you sow a great deal of seed, you reap a huge harvest.” This, Paul says, is how our giving works, too. We need to remember, first, that God owns everything, including all that is ours to use, and thus that he is ultimately the one who gives us success in our labors, not we ourselves; and second, that not only is he able to bless us with all good things, he wants to do so.

Thus Paul says in verse 8, “God is able to provide you with every kind of blessing in abundance, so that in every circumstance you may always have everything you need and still have ample resources for every kind of good work.” The word “blessing” here is the word kharis, the word “grace,” which underscores the point that the blessings in view here are spiritual, not just material; at the same time, the promise is clear that we don’t have to worry about money. If we give freely, generously and gladly to God, we will always have enough to live as he has given us to live, and to do what he has called us to do.

Note that “freely, generously and gladly” really does matter—how much we give matters, but so do why and how we give. Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, “If you really don’t want to give, or if you’re only giving under pressure or because you’re worried what others will think, then don’t; for it’s the cheerful and open-hearted giver that God loves.” The call is to give generously and gladly back to God from what he has given us, in gratitude for all the ways in which he has blessed us, believing that if we do so, he will continue to bless us and provide for all our needs. Again, the point is trust: are we willing to stake our lives on trust in God rather than trust in our own sweat and our own wits? That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is what God wants from us.

The fact that Paul describes the blessing of God in terms of grain, seed and bread, is telling, I think; because with grain, what you eat and what you sow are the same thing. As such, there’s always the tension—especially in poor areas—between how much of the crop you eat now and how much you sow back into the ground for next year. You can’t sow it all, obviously, or you’ll have nothing to eat this year; but if you eat too much of the harvest, then your harvest next year is guaranteed to be poor, because you can’t reap the benefits of seed you didn’t sow. That’s how it is with the blessings of God, because God hasn’t just blessed us for our own benefit: he’s blessed us so that we have things with which to bless others, and opportunities to do so. Like the grain, God’s gifts are partly for us to keep for ourselves and partly for us to sow in his service.

As such, there’s a feedback loop here; there’s a cycle, the circle of blessing. God provides for us, and out of his providence we give back to him, and that then becomes the basis for more of his blessings to us. This is how it works, how it’s designed to work; this is the nature of the blessings of God. It is God who gives the harvest, it isn’t our own doing, but he gives it out of what we have given back to him as our expression of humble faith in his provision; and then we give back to him again, and he returns again the harvest, and so it goes. Faith in action.

Justice like Fire

2011-03-27T10:30:00.006-04:00

(Malachi 2:17-3:5; 1 Peter 4:12-19)

Some years ago I got an interesting comment on a blog post from a guy with whom I’d exchanged the odd e-mail; he was a prosecutor down Dallas way, and he noted that he’d spent a while in the traffic division, prosecuting tickets and the like. He wrote of his experience there that “when defendants would say in court that they were there seeking justice, one of the judges before whom I would appear would ask them if they wanted justice or mercy. Amazingly, most of them got the answer wrong.”

Tell truth, though, it’s really not all that amazing—especially if you have kids. Taking justice and fairness as roughly equivalent for our purposes here, one of the things I’ve learned in raising mine is that kids have a clear and strong innate concept of fairness: “fair” means “I get whatever I think I deserve.” Some are more strongly that way than others, of course, and growing up usually broadens our perspective, but that’s about where we all start—and many people never develop the humility or self-awareness to move past that way of thinking. After all, none of us has ever been inside another person’s head, or spent any time looking through anyone’s eyes but our own; we each have our own little peephole into the rest of the universe, and it’s the only one we ever get. Learning to think beyond that one point of reference to try to understand where other people are coming from is really not all that easy, either intellectually or emotionally.

In fact, let’s go a step further here and recognize that even those of us who try to do that only ever succeed in part. Inevitably, we must always begin from our own position and our own perspective, and seek to broaden our understanding out from there; equally inevitably, in any disagreement, we always start off on our own side. This is why, I think, though “judgment” is often received as a bad word—we don’t want to be judged, and we don’t like people who are judgmental—“justice” for most people is a good word, because we think of the justice we deserve as a good thing, as justice being done on our behalf against those who have done us wrong. After all, most of us don’t really think of ourselves as bad people—sure, we’re not perfect, but we aren’t the ones doing injustice; it’s those people out there. If there were any justice, they would learn their lesson and everyone would see that we were right all along.

Except, says Malachi—not so fast. This is an interesting passage, because while the prophet certainly promises judgment against the really bad people in Israel, as we see in verse 5, he’s not primarily talking to them. Rather, the people he’s addressing first and foremost are the righteous in Israel, the good people, who are frustrated that God’s not doing his job—which is to say, that he isn’t responding to things the way they in their infinite wisdom are sure he ought to respond to them. They know who the bad people are—and have probably been spending a lot of time in prayer giving God this information in considerable detail—but God hasn’t blasted them yet. In fact, looking around, the wicked in Israel seem to be doing just fine; and as for the other nations, well, Israel was still under foreign rule, so God obviously hadn’t judged them yet either. Hence their complaints that the God of justice seemed to have taken a holiday—or, worse, had thrown in his lot with the evildoers and decided to reward them instead.

Now, these sorts of comments, whether meant seriously or intended to be unfair, have two real problems. The first is that some folks are going to hear them, take them seriously, and act accordingly; such comments incite people to do what they please without regard to the will of God. They encourage people not to take God seriously, which is a very bad thing. And more than that, to accuse God of being unjust or of failing to do what is right is to slander him, and he will not tolerate that.

His response is eloquent, and sharply ironic. “You want the God of justice?” he says. “Fine, but understand this: you won’t be as pleased about it as you think.” Those who complained about the absence of divine judgment failed to realize their own unrighteousness; they complained that God was showing mercy to others, not recognizing their own need for mercy, and thus not understanding that the patience of God was for them, too, not just for everyone else. They assumed that God’s judgment would only fall on their enemies, but God says no: it will start with you. As Peter says, judgment begins with the household of God.

Of course, the judgment of God serves a different purpose with those who follow him than with those who do not. Malachi says the Lord is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap, and you may remember we talked about this during Advent: it isn’t that God arbitrarily decides to destroy certain things, it’s that he cannot endure sin, and that which is sinful cannot endure in his presence. His justice and his holiness are a consuming fire that burns away everything that is impure and unjust; only that which is pleasing to God remains. For those who do not fear the Lord, there is nothing that can survive that fire; for those who reject salvation, there will in the end be nothing beyond judgment. For those who follow him and seek to be faithful to him, on the other hand, God’s judgment is painful, but ultimately a blessing; thus Peter says, “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good,” knowing that the fire of the trial is an instrument of God’s good and purifying purpose in our lives.

Even so, we do well to be humble when we consider the justice of God, and still more when we ask for justice; this is not a prayer we should ever offer lightly, or with any sense that we ourselves are somehow above judgment. We cannot rightly call anyone to repent of their sin if we are not ourselves repentant of our own; we must humble ourselves before others if we would have any right to ask them to humble themselves; and we should not ask God to judge others if we do not also ask him to judge us, to purify our hearts and refine our lives.

Now, if we cannot talk about justice without also talking about humility and our need for mercy, this may remind you (as it reminded Sara this week) of Micah 6:8, where the prophet declares: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you?” Three things Micah names. One, to do justly, to treat others rightly in accordance with God’s will. Two, to love mercy; mercy here is hesed, the covenant love and faithfulness of God. Note the way this is put together. Micah doesn’t tell us to be lovers of justice; that’s an attitude which, all too often, makes people stern and merciless advocates of an increasingly narrow idea of justice. Rather, he tells us to put our hope and trust in the faithful love and grace of God, accepting God’s goodness not as our right but as his free gift; justice should be not what we demand from others but what we seek to do for others. And three, tying it all together, we are called to walk humbly with God—not asserting our independence, insisting on our own rights or demanding our own way, but accepting that we need his grace, and that we need to follow his way.

I didn’t think of this until later—which is too bad, it would have made a great sermon illustration—but behold the lover of justice in all his glory:

Faithless

2011-03-20T10:30:00.002-04:00

(Malachi 2:10-16; Mark 10:2-12)

This is one of those moments when any preacher with an ounce of wit stands in the pulpit with a sense of trepidation, because there are just so many ways to go wrong. On the one hand, it’s perilously easy to slide into judgment here, and wind up hurting and discouraging a lot of people. On the other, it’s equally easy—and at least as perilous—to let the desire to avoid doing so move us to misuse the word of God and misrepresent his will and his holiness. As Mark Driscoll put it last Sunday, this is one to thread the needle on; it’s critically important to say the right thing the right way with the right heart.

As such, there are a few things we need to say right off the bat. First, our passage in Malachi deals with divorce, but it isn’t actually about divorce—God has a broader concern here, which we will most definitely talk about. Second, neither Malachi nor Jesus are issuing blanket condemnations of everyone who has ever been divorced, nor does this mean that anyone who has ever been divorced is permanently unfit or disqualified or second-class. It’s important to remember here that Jesus is in the redemption business; the fact that we sin doesn’t disqualify us from being redeemed, it’s the reason we need to be redeemed in the first place—all of us. It’s also important to remember that all divorces, and all divorced people are not the same.

This is a particularly important point because it helps us focus on the central concern of the Scriptures here. I know there are those in the church who will always tell people never to get divorced, no matter what, but that’s not really the message here. On the other hand, when pastors and teachers talk about Scriptural justifications for divorce, there’s something wrong with that. I think they’ve rightly identified the sins which can truly destroy marriage—the four As, if you will, adultery, addiction, abuse, and abandonment, based either on the explicit teaching of Scripture or as logical extensions of that teaching—but when we start talking about justifications for divorce, we have the order all wrong. We justify what we have already decided to do: the desire comes first, the reasons afterward. That, too, is not what Scripture is on about.

Rather, if we look at the reasons that are adduced from Scripture for divorce, what is the common thread? They’re all about breaking faith. Marriage is a covenant, held by God; when you marry someone, you covenant with them that they will always come second in your life only to God, that you will love no one else more and have no other priorities ahead of them. None of us ever perfectly keeps that covenant—this is why grace and forgiveness are necessary—but we must hold to it in the essentials; any ongoing betrayal of the core of that covenant, such as adultery or abuse, destroys the covenant relationship. Divorce is merely a recognition and formalization of the covenant death which has already happened.

The key aspect here, the fundamental sin, is faithlessness—the willful failure to keep the faith one has promised. It is this that Malachi attacks, and on which his judgment falls; and it’s this that is the common thread between verses 13-16 and verses 11-12. In 11-12 the complaint is not divorce, but that Israelites are marrying people who worship false gods. It’s not a matter of ethnic purity here, but of purity of worship: their marriages are pulling them away from God and toward the gods of the nations. They may well be keeping faith in marriage, but they aren’t keeping faith with God in choosing to marry someone who does not worship him; they are choosing to honor their own desires rather than their commitment to God.
In doing this, they aren’t just affecting themselves, either. That may sound strange to some in our culture, which has an increasingly individualistic view of marriage—I marry the person who fulfills me, who meets my needs and satisfies my desires and makes me happy, and never mind what anyone else says about it—but the fact is, marriage is a community act, and the decisions we make regarding marriage ripple through the communities to which we belong.

If we marry someone who pulls us away from God, or if we betray our spouse and destroy our marriage, we aren’t the only ones that hurts—it hurts our family, our church, and everyone we might have helped if we had chosen to honor Christ instead. Most of all, it hurts our children, and makes it less likely that they will grow up to love and follow Jesus—which in turn hurts the community of faith for the next generation. I said some time ago that when we live by faith in Christ, we never know how many people we may bless; in the same way, when we break faith with him and with each other, we never know how many people we may hurt.

God created marriage—and all of a piece with it, he created sex—as a very particular thing, for very particular purposes. He is forming us to be a faithful people—faithful to him, to each other, to our commitments—and faithfulness to his call and commands in marriage is an important part of that. If we let our desires drive us to break faith—to marry someone who will turn our heart away from God, to betray a loving and faithful spouse in pursuit of new pleasures—then we undermine the work of God in our own life and in the life of the church. However anyone may justify them, such acts are wrong; and whatever anyone might think in the heat of the moment, they are not the path to real blessing. The world might bless them—or maybe not—but God won’t.

So what do we say from this? Two things, I think. First, where does Malachi end? “Guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.” He’s talking to a people who have already done this stuff, but obviously you can’t undo the past, and there’s only so much you can do to make it right; judgment will come as the Lord wills—as for example the prayer of Malachi in verse 12 that whoever marries outside the people of God should die childless—but how do you go forward? Answer: you set right what you can set right, and when the temptation comes to break faith, you guard your heart and don’t give in. To take the obvious example, if you’re divorced and remarried, be faithful to the person you’re married to now. You can’t unscramble the egg, and you can’t unweave the past; but you can keep the faith in the present time, and that’s what God asks of you.

Second, we need to stand up and bear witness to the biblical vision of marriage—which is a lot more than just saying “divorce is bad.” For that matter, it’s a lot more than just saying “marriage is between a man and a woman,” which is one reason the Christian Left likes to beat on evangelicals with an old axe handle; the claim that evangelicals divorce more often than the general population is actually false once you take church attendance into account, but still, we could do a better job on this point.

If we only tell people “God says ‘no,’” they’ll tend to come away thinking of God as someone who just says “no” for the fun of it—which is the exact backwards of the truth; God says “no” to some things because he’s said “yes” to something much, much better, and we need to communicate that. Our culture has an increasingly impoverished view of marriage, as it has an increasingly impoverished view of faith, because of its increasingly shallow individualism; we have a much richer alternative to offer, a better understanding, a more excellent way, and we need to bear witness to it. We have good news—about life, ourselves, marriage, everything; we need to understand it as good news, and we need to tell it, every chance we get.

The Table of the Lord

2011-03-13T10:30:00.000-04:00

(Malachi 1:6-2:9; 1 Corinthians 10:14-22)

I think this is the first time I’ve ever introduced a sermon series with the second sermon; but while we started our journey through Malachi last week, the service last week was busy enough that there really wasn’t time for more than a homily, so the introductory stuff really had to wait. I didn’t want to just let it go, though, because Malachi’s a bit of a difficult book. On the surface, it looks like an angry book, full of judgment; it’s structured as a series of arguments, with the Lord making his case against Israel like a prosecutor, and crushing his people’s feeble attempts to justify their behavior. If you don’t read more closely, you could easily miss the fact that the core of the book is not God’s anger but his covenant faithfulness; his fundamental complaint is that his people have not been faithful to him because they don’t trust him to be faithful to them.

That’s where the first section, which we read last week, comes in, and that’s why it’s so important. God doesn’t begin with the indictment, he begins by telling his people that he loves them. Some of them, at least, doubt this—hence their response, “How have you loved us?”—and so he challenges their doubt. The most important thing for Israel to understand is that God does indeed love them, that his covenant love and faithfulness are unchanging and unchangeable, unmoving and unshakeable; everything else flows from that. In particular, everything else in this prophecy flows from that; the opening argument that we read last week is the context in which all the rest of the book must be read, and it is the answer to all the charges the Lord makes. Every word of judgment in Malachi must be understood as an expression of the frustrated love of God for a people who are unwilling to take him seriously enough to love him back.

At bottom, this is a problem of worship, and so as the Lord calls Israel to account, he begins with the priests. God has made it clear to his people what he requires from them—they aren’t supposed to sacrifice just any old animal; they are to give him their very best, the first and the fattest and the strongest of their herds. They’re supposed to give him their very best because in doing that, they are showing him true worship—putting him first in their lives, showing that they value him more than anyone or anything else, including their own comfort and the approval of their rulers. It’s the same thing we talked about a few weeks ago, that giving God our best before we give to anyone else reveals something profoundly important about our heart attitudes. In this case, however, the people of God aren’t doing that; in fact, they’re bringing him the least they possibly can, the blind, the lame and the sick. It’s the minimum necessary to be able to say they went to church, and the priests are letting them get away with it.

Now, to understand where the priests are coming from, you have to know that when sacrifices were offered, only a small part of the animal was actually burned on the altar; most of the meat went to the priests. Along with the tithe, this was how the Law provided for their support—which meant that they depended on the sacrifices to get enough to eat. If they figured that the blind, the lame and the sick were the best that they were likely to get, you can imagine them being afraid to challenge the people for fear of driving them to stop sacrificing altogether; better to let it go and have some food than to stand on principle and go without. But in letting that pass, they were forgetting that it wasn’t their table, but God’s—they ate there as his guests; they weren’t just making do with worse food for their own sake, they were compromising his holiness and allowing the people of Israel to lose respect for him. Who deserves more honor—the God of the universe, or the latest local politician? Israel was effectively saying, the local politician; the priests were letting them do it, and so making it worse. That had to change.

At this point, some might be wondering if this is really that big a deal; if we’re talking about the love of God, wouldn’t it be more loving for God to just let it slide? But the thing is, our worship is at the core of our being; if we worship him falsely and he were to just let it slide, that would let everything else in our lives slide along with it—into ruin, ultimately. For God to let that happen to his people would be an act not of love, but of indifference; as the Presbyterian scholar Elizabeth Achtemeier put it, “It is only when God leaves us alone that he no longer loves us.”

The fact of it is, God wants our worship—and wants us to live lives which are the fruit of true worship—not just because he likes it and fully deserves it (though he does), but because it’s what’s best for us. God has made his covenant with us so that he can give us his life and his peace, delivering us from the powers of strife and death that dominate this world; he has invited us to his table because he has a feast to offer us, and he wants us to share in it. When we don’t give him our best, when we shortchange God so that we can keep more of what we have for ourselves, we’re not really making him any poorer—who we’re really shortchanging is ourselves. This angers and grieves God, not because he’s losing out, but because we are.

Let us, then, this morning come to the table of the Lord to worship him with our whole heart and mind and soul and strength, because he is worthy of all honor and all praise; let us come to give him the best of what we have and are, because he has given us everything we are and everything we have. Let us come because he loves us, and deserves our love and gratitude in return; and let us come because it is the best thing we can possibly do. Let us come to the table of the Lord, for this is the table of life.

God's Choice

2011-03-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

(Genesis 25:19-26, Malachi 1:1-5; Romans 9:10-16)

The language in our passages this morning is jarring to our ears. What’s this talk about God hating? The Bible tells us that God is love; it tells us that his love for the world is so great that he came down in Jesus to die and rise again for us. So where does this statement come from, “Esau I have hated,” and how does that square?

This is one of those places where we run up against the fact that every age and culture uses words differently; this is actually treaty language. Back then, when kings made alliances with each other, they would declare, “I love you, and I hate your enemies.” It’s a statement of choice—I have chosen to be on your side, and to stand against those who attack you—but they wanted to make that statement as strong, as powerful, as permanent, and as absolute as possible; so they used the language of love and hate.

Here in Malachi, to be sure, there’s more going on; this goes all the way back to the birth of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25. If you remember the story, God had made a promise to Abraham that he would use Abraham’s family to redeem the world. Jacob and Esau were his twin grandsons; Esau was the older, but God chose the younger one to be the greater, from whose descendants would come the people of Israel, and ultimately the Son of God.

That by itself didn’t necessarily mean that God had rejected Esau; as far as we know, Esau didn’t know anything about this, and if he’d chosen to follow God, he could have been blessed as well. But he didn’t. Instead, he rejected God, and went his own way, ending up rather a brute and a bully. To be sure, Jacob was no prize either—he was a charmer, a con man, a liar and a swindler; but for everything he did wrong, he did continue to honor and worship the one true God as his God.

As you can imagine, the sibling rivalry between these two was epic. In fact, it may have been the worst in history, because it didn’t die with them; it didn’t even die with their children or grandchildren. Instead, it continued for centuries. Jacob’s descendants became the nation of Israel; for hundreds and hundreds of years, their very worst and most consistent enemy was the nation of Edom—the descendants of Esau. They had other enemies, but with those other enemies, there were periods of peace, and even alliances against greater threats—but never with Edom; Edom was always implacably dedicated to the destruction, the annihilation of the people of God.

And so God declares, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated,” expressing his absolute unswerving faithfulness to the people of Israel whom he had chosen—and this despite the fact that they had not been faithful to him. There had been times they were no better than Edom. They’d been so bad, God had allowed them to be conquered and dragged off into exile. He could have washed his hands of them, let Edom destroy them as the kings of Edom wanted so badly to do, and started over. But he didn’t—because God had chosen Jacob, he had chosen his people Israel, and he had promised that he would use them to bless the whole world; and so he remained faithful to them despite everything.

When all was said and done, it would be Edom that would come to an end, not Israel—and so it was—and it would be Israel through whom God would complete his plan of redemption—and so it was. Because it wasn’t about Israel being good enough, as it isn’t about us being good enough; because in the end, what it’s all about is the unending, unbreakable, unstoppable love and mercy of God, which we have seen most fully in Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord.

Profit Margins

2011-02-27T10:30:00.004-05:00

(Psalm 49:5-9; Mark 8:34-38)

As we’ve spent the last several weeks considering what Jesus has to say to us about money, we’ve talked about a number of things; among them are the effect of money on our worship, and the ease with which money can become an idol; the question of our priorities, and what our financial habits say about what really matters to us; whether our trust is in money or in God; and what it means that everything we have comes to us from God. This has not, I realize, been the most typical sermon series on stewardship; I haven’t gotten into any of the financial-planning-type stuff, or talked to you about the importance of tithing—or even made it clear that tithing means giving 10% of your income. (You may well have all known that, but I know there were folks in my last church who didn’t until I told them.)

As it happens, I think the question “Do Christians have to tithe?” is a dubious one; the attitude of the New Testament seems to be that we should be so inspired to generosity by the work of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit that we don’t need to be told to give only 10%. To ask, essentially, “Do we have to give that much?” isn’t the question of someone looking to honor God with their money—it’s the question of someone trying to justify giving as little as possible. Which, granted, is where we all are at least some of the time; but it’s not where Jesus wants us to be. Rather, he wants to pull us out of that mindset, to teach us to see our lives not from a worldly perspective, but from a heavenly perspective. As a writer, Isaac Asimov talked about the importance of “the backward look”—that you have to look at your story from the end to know how you’ll get there; we need to learn to look at our lives in much the same way.

That, I think, is the implicit question underlying our passage from Mark this morning, and the implicit challenge to us: what do you want out of life? What do you want to accomplish, what do you hope to gain? What’s worth living for—and what, if anything, do you believe is worth dying for? In financial terms, you take the money and time God has invested in you and invest them in turn in various ways; what profit do you hope to make off your investments? Logically, whatever goal you set determines the path you take to get there, and the choices you make along the way.

And here’s the kicker: when you get right down to it, we only have two choices. We can go all in on following Jesus, or not. This isn’t to say that anyone whose commitment to Christ ever falters or anyone who ever sins is therefore not saved—that would eliminate all of us, for none of us ever follows him perfectly for any great length of time. It is, however, to say that our fundamental commitment must be to following him and him alone, to taking his road and no other. Yes, we drive off onto the shoulder sometimes, and we often don’t do a good job of staying in the right lane, but those are all things which are correctable and recoverable. Trying to drive two different cars on two completely different roads going two very different places, isn’t. No one can do that; no one can serve two masters. You have to make a choice.

Now, some of you might be sitting there thinking I’m exaggerating; but just look at the text—Jesus puts this in even starker terms, almost paradoxical. He says that to follow him means, first, to deny yourself, to renounce yourself, to set aside your own claims and your own interest and your own agenda. It’s the state of mind Paul describes in Philippians 2 when he tells us that Jesus didn’t see equality with the Father as something to hang on to for dear life, but set it aside; he traded in the worship of angels who knew exactly who he was for the company of human beings who refused to recognize and acknowledge him, but instead treated him as a slave and a threat. To follow Jesus, we need to do as he did; rather than insisting on our rights, on our due, on our own way, on what we think we have coming to us—rather than designing our life to make things come out, as much as possible, the way we want them to be—we need to let go of all that and seek to serve others before ourselves.

More, we need to take up our cross. Our culture tends to use the phrase “cross to bear” to mean some irritation or annoyance, some unfair burden—but that’s not what Jesus means. This is the British judge pronouncing capital sentence: “that you are to be taken from the place where you now are to the prison whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.” The man carrying his cross was a dead man walking, disgraced and humiliated, shamed and debased, condemned not only to die but to supply his executioners with the very thing they would use to kill him. Jesus did it, surrendering his right to defend his life and voluntarily accepting death so that he might be faithful to serve God; and he calls us to do the same. If we want to follow him, that’s the road he walks, and that’s what following him looks like.

This, Jesus says, is the path to life—the only path to life. I should note, the NIV has a couple different words here, “life” and “soul,” but it’s all the same word in Greek—the word psuche; it’s most often translated “soul,” but what we usually mean by that is less than what the word really means. Jesus isn’t just talking about salvation in the sense of going to Heaven here, he’s talking about true life in every sense—the full and eternal life of God, which we have now in this world by his Holy Spirit, though we don’t experience it in the same way as we will when Christ returns. He’s talking about being fully who he made us to be. If our highest priority is preserving our own life—and along with it, our wealth, comfort, reputation, worldly success, and other things of that sort—then we may well have a longer and easier life in this world, but we will lose Jesus; and along with him, we’ll lose our true selves, and everything that makes life worth living.

And to that, Jesus asks, is it worth it? Some people think it is, and make their decisions accordingly; indeed, there are many who are perfectly happy to trade in the future to get what they want in the present. Like Wimpy, they would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today—and never mind what Tuesday will cost; like Esau, they will trade their birthright for a bowl of stew, because they’re hungry now, and what good is a birthright to satisfy their hunger? Without faith, if you don’t believe that birthright’s really worth anything, this makes perfect sense.

By faith, though, we know better—and because of faith, we have felt the blessings of God, and we have experienced his life. We haven’t fully received our reward in Christ, but we have tasted the firstfruits, and we have seen the faithfulness of God even in the midst of this lost and broken world. We’ve been given every reason to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And yet—it’s easy to love the world, and it’s easy to let it distract us; it’s easy to focus on what’s right before our eyes, and lose sight of the bigger picture.

And so the key to stewardship isn’t percentages and budgets and duty; the key to stewardship is, as they say, to keep the main thing the main thing. It’s to change the goal toward which we invest our time and money and abilities, the organizing principle that sorts out all our priorities; in the end, it’s a very simple and very profound change in the way we look at life. The essence of biblical stewardship is to say, “I see the world, and I see Jesus, and I want Jesus.” Nothing more; nothing less.

God's Investments

2011-02-20T10:30:00.001-05:00

(Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 12:42-48)

“To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, each according to his ability.” A talent was a unit of weight, perhaps 80 pounds or so; when used without reference to anything specific, it was understood to mean a talent of silver, worth about 6000 denarii. Since a denarius was the usual payment for a day’s labor, one talent would be nearly 20 years’ salary for your ordinary working-class bloke; if you want to put this in terms of the current minimum wage in this state, $7.25 an hour, 6000 8-hour workdays at that rate would add up to $348,000. In other words, the master in Matthew 25 hands his servants a huge amount of money and tells them to have at it; and when he comes back, he judges them based on what they’ve done with it. And this, says Jesus, is what the coming of the kingdom of heaven will be like.

What do we make of this? What do we make of this related parable in Luke 12, with its bleak depiction of the judgment of the faithless? What does this tell us about the kingdom of God? Certainly Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God and its blessings are not to be taken for granted, that we can’t simply do whatever we like and get away with it; he makes it indisputably clear that God expects certain things of us, and has the right to. Everything we have is God’s, entrusted to us until he comes to reclaim it and to see how we’ve used it; there is nothing that is really ours to do with as we please. Everything is God’s, and he’s given some of it to us to use according to his purposes. Part of that, yes, is for ourselves, as this is one of the ways he provides for our needs; but he isn’t going to come back and ask if we had fun with what he gave us. Instead, he’s going to ask us what sort of return he received on his investment.

And bear in mind here, we are his investments. It’s a striking story that Matthew gives us. The master is a very rich man, but in a time and place in which land was the primary form of wealth, he had a lot of money lying around—but he doesn’t stick around to manage it. Indeed, he doesn’t even leave specific instructions as to what is to be done with his money while he’s gone. Instead, he distributes it among his servants—and note this, he gives each a different amount according to what he knows they can handle—and leaves it to them to determine how best to use it. Those who take this as an opportunity go out and double his money, and are blessed for it; the one who responds with mistrust and fear—not trusting the master’s gift, fearing his judgment, not being willing to risk doing anything—buries the money and goes off to do his own thing, and is judged for it.

In the same way, God has given us everything we have: life, to begin with, and the gift of each new day; our material wealth—and we are rich indeed, as even the poorest person here is richer than over 95% of the people in this world; and all of our many talents (a word taken by the church from this parable in Matthew to describe all the abilities and skills God gives us), which we use to make our way in life. He has given us all these things, with no visible strings attached. And more than that, not long after Jesus told his disciples this parable in Matthew 25, he would give them the greatest gift of all—the gift of the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone through Christ alone—and leave them with it to use for his purposes.

He left them as his greatest investment in this world, as the beginning capital out of which his church would grow. He left them to use all the other gifts he had given them, of money and abilities and each new day as it came, in the service of that greatest gift of the gospel. To be sure, he didn’t leave them to do that work alone, but gave them his Holy Spirit to guide them and to give them power; nevertheless left the work in their hands, to be passed on from generation to generation, and now to us and through us to our children. We are God’s investment.

Think about that. Each one of us is a gift from God to the church, which in turn is his great gift to the world; each one of us is an investment by God in his great plan of redemption. We have each been given a particular set of gifts; we have been given the money and the abilities we have and placed in this particular time, given this day and each hour, in order to do the work he has given us to do that we may bear the fruit he intends for us to bear. We have not been given more than we can handle, or less than we need, but each according to our ability—and God knows our ability far better than we do; and we won’t be judged on the basis of another’s gifts, but only based on what we do with what God has entrusted to us.

We are God’s investments, fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us created and gifted in his infinite wisdom to be a very particular blessing to his people and to the world; he knows us for all of who we are, our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and he uses both in our lives and in the lives of others. We don’t need to be afraid that we aren’t good enough, because he has given us his Holy Spirit; we can’t serve him faithfully in our own strength, but by his Spirit he is able to do in and through us everything he gives us to do, and he doesn’t make any mistakes about that.

This means two things. In the first place, we have no reason to be afraid; we don’t need to follow the third servant, who buried the talent he was given out of fear that if he tried to do anything with it, he’d blow it. We can take all the talents we’ve been given and use them boldly in God’s service, giving away our money and our lives with faith-driven generosity, trusting that he will bless us and provide for us; we can take risks as we feel his leading, secure in the knowledge that God is at work and he is in control, and that even when we do blow it, he is capable of redeeming our mistakes.

Second, it means that giving is not an onerous duty but a life-giving opportunity. God has blessed us each with a part to play in his plan to redeem the world, he has invested us in his work here on Earth, and he has empowered us by his Spirit to save and to bless others. He has given us work and opportunities of eternal, life-changing significance. When we choose to use the time, talents and money he’s given us merely to please ourselves, we turn away from the great adventure of discipleship he’s offered us in favor of something smaller, perhaps more fun in the short term but far less satisfying in the long run. In giving our money and our time freely to his church in all its ministries—many of which, to be sure, are outside what we think of as “the church”—rather than keeping them for ourselves, in using our skills and abilities in his service rather than what we perceive to be our own, we aren’t really denying ourselves, though we may often think so. Rather, we are opening ourselves up to receive greater blessings than we could ever manufacture in our own strength. Giving is the path to blessing.

I encourage you, therefore, my brothers and sisters: whatever you’re giving to God, give more. Give lots more. Give until you don’t see how you could give any more—and then look for more opportunities yet. Invest your money wherever you see the gospel proclaimed and the ministry of Christ at work—and yes, if you participate in this congregation, I do think this is the proper place to start giving more, but don’t stop here; and where your money goes, let your time follow. Take the talents God has given you and use them to serve him, in your work—whatever it may be, whether it seems “Christian” to you or not, for you are his minister wherever you may go—and in the church as you see opportunity, and in all the other things you do. Live as God’s investment, so that you may fully experience his reward, for his reward never fails.

Commitment

2011-02-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

(Joshua 24:14-15, 1 Kings 18:20-21; Luke 16:9-17)

In the latter part of my time in Colorado, one snowy February, the summons went out for a special presbytery meeting. From the letter, it was clear that something significant had happened, something bad, and so I made it a point to get down across the mountain to be there. I was glad I did, because it truly was a major deal: the presbytery treasurer had embezzled a significant portion of the presbytery’s reserves, and so it was necessary to discuss the financial ramifications of his actions—particularly the effect on new church plants—as well as the legal situation.

The treasurer, it should be noted, didn’t take the money for himself, but for his company—he was an executive in a small Denver corporation; in fact, he always insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he had merely found the presbytery a better investment opportunity. It might have been a more convincing argument if he’d asked permission first instead of doing it underhandedly; but while I don’t know about interest, he did repay all the money in the end.

Still, what he did was wrong, because he lost track of whom he was supposed to be serving: he used his position with the presbytery not to serve the presbytery but to serve his company. He had been entrusted with money by the presbytery for a particular purpose, but chose not to be faithful to that purpose—instead, he took it on himself to use the money for a different purpose, to serve his own ends and his own plans with it instead of those of the presbytery. This is true even if he really did believe he could make the presbytery more money by going his own way, because that wasn’t properly his call to make—not on his own hook, anyway. It was not his place to make his own plans for how to use the presbytery’s money, regardless of what he thought he could do with it.

Understanding this is the key to understanding Jesus’ message in Luke 16:9-13—which is not, by the way, an explanation of the parable of the crooked steward in verses 1-8; actually, it points forward to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that concludes this chapter. We tend to think of money as something that’s ours, that we have the right to use as we see fit; but Jesus wants to bring a radical change in the way we think about money, and so he challenges that view in a couple different ways.

First, note that he talks about two kinds of wealth. The NIV reads “worldly wealth,” some of your translations have “unrighteous wealth,” and I recall seeing someone translate this “dirty money.” Literally, what it says here is “money of unrighteousness,” and I think the NIV’s on the right track in understanding this: it’s not that money is itself unrighteous, but that it’s so woven through all the evil things we do, and there are so many evils done for money, that it’s contaminated. Jesus sets this in contrast to “true riches,” and also to “the eternal dwellings”—there’s something better for us, and our purpose should be to use the wealth of unrighteousness, which will eventually fail, to gain that something better. We should seek to use the money we have not to bless ourselves or keep ourselves secure, but to bless and serve others, and to carry out God’s will and purposes, not our own.

Second, in conjunction with this, Jesus describes money as a test. On the grand scale of things, he suggests, money isn’t all that—it’s just a little thing, of no enduring importance; and if we can’t even be faithful with such a little thing, if we can’t be trusted to handle it with integrity and in a way that benefits others, then why would anyone give us anything better? Money is less important for what we can do with it—even for the good things we can do with it—than for what it reveals about us, about our character and the state of our hearts. God has far better things to give us than money, but as a rule, he won’t give us the greater blessings if we misuse the lesser ones, or turn them into idols.

We always need to test our hearts on this. I’ve wondered at times, as we’ve asked ourselves why this congregation isn’t growing the way we’d like it to, if perhaps God is waiting to pour out greater blessings on us because we can’t quite be trusted to be faithful with the ones we have. It’s as tempting for churches as for individuals, after all, to put our trust in money rather than in God; if increasing our numbers, both in terms of people and in terms of giving, would lead us to trust even more in money rather than to give God praise for his provision and trust him even more recklessly, then why would he give us more? One wonders if that was the problem with the Pharisees—if their rise in importance had gone to their heads, had turned them to love money more than God.

If we want God to bless us, we need to take our eyes off the blessing—whether the one we want, or the one we already have—and just focus on him; we need to trust him that all will be well whether he blesses us or not. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then—then when you’re not really worrying about all these things anymore—only then will all these things be added unto you, because then it won’t be the things that you’re after.” If we want God’s blessing, we need to want him more.

As we’ve talked about before, this matters a great deal because the core issue isn’t how we spend our money, but why—what matters most to us, what or who we love most; it’s about our worship. Jesus comes back to that point again here, asking us this time not where is our heart, but whom we will serve. We tend to think we have the choice to serve God, to serve someone else, or to serve ourselves, but Jesus says no: if you think you’re living to serve yourself, all that means is that you’re a slave and don’t even know it. If your life is directed toward money—making it, spending it, investing it—then it’s really money that’s calling the shots; it’s not serving you, you’re serving it.

And here’s the kicker: that’s absolutely incompatible with serving God and following Christ. You cannot serve two masters, because the time will come—probably quickly—when they’re pulling you in two different directions, and you’ll have to choose between them. You’ll have to decide which one you truly love, which one you actually trust to take care of you, and which one you’re really committed to following; and you’ll have to cast your lot, one way or the other. Following Christ will mean being called to do things that don’t serve your money, as it will mean giving up certain pleasures, as it will mean letting go of power and control—for the same reason that for Abraham, following God meant putting his son Isaac on an altar on Mount Moriah: to force us to choose, in the starkest possible terms, whom we will serve. It’s not that God doesn’t know what choice we’ll make—but we need to know, and we need to make that choice.

And the only way to make that choice is to come to it, to come to the point where God calls us to do something that doesn’t make good financial sense, and to love him and trust him enough to let go of the money and do it. That’s not an easy test, but Jesus doesn’t just give us the easy ones. He doesn’t say, “The good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is allowed to make up their own minds about it”—no, he says, “everyone is forcefully urged into it.” (I know the NIV reads “everyone is forcing his way in,” but I think that’s wrong.) There’s an urgency to God’s appeal here, because there’s only so much time left, and we don’t know how much; and so he gives us the hard challenges on the big issues. He doesn’t call us to live by just a little faith—he calls us to put everything in his hands, to go out on the tightrope, where either we let go of our idols, or we fall. He calls us to live by a simple commitment—“Heaven or Bust”—and to use our money accordingly.

Security in God

2011-02-06T10:30:00.015-05:00

(1 Kings 3:5-14; Luke 12:22-34)

If you were here for the first two weeks of this series, as we were looking at what Jesus had to say about money in the Sermon on the Mount, you probably recognize that this is mostly the same material. It’s arranged a little differently and worded a little differently, but most of it is essentially the same. Some scholars like to take that and argue about what is “original,” assuming that Matthew and Luke changed stuff to suit them; which is kind of stupid, because it assumes that Jesus only talked about all of this once. In an age before newspapers and magazines, to say nothing of videocameras, TV and the Internet, I’m sure Jesus gave his sermons many times apiece; indeed, even today, people on the speaker’s circuit do that all the time. How many times did the President use his Slurpee line last year? As such, contrary to some of my academic brethren, I figure what we have here in Luke is a different version of the same message, which makes it worth our time to take both the similarities and the differences seriously.

First, we see again the emphasis on not being anxious, on trading in worry about what we have and don’t have for trust that God will provide for us, as he does for the birds and the flowers; given that he’s the one who gave us life, and he’s the one who created out bodies, it’s absurd to think that he can’t provide all the lesser things we need as well. More, given his wisdom and goodness, it’s equally absurd to think he doesn’t know what we need, or that he won’t provide for us if we depend on him. Jesus here is giving us essentially the same challenge God gave his people through the prophet Malachi, in a passage we’ll be reading in a few weeks: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse . . . and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.” Just trust me, he’s saying; you’ll have everything you need, but without the worry.

Of course, if we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of our worry isn’t really about having what we need, is it? Most of us could do with less than what we have; it’s about what we want, the way we want to live our lives, what we’re not willing to do without. Most of us could live more simply than we do, and I certainly don’t exempt myself from that; and I’m sure we can all think of people we know who got themselves into financial trouble because they spent way more than they could afford on houses and cars and other things that were far more expensive than they needed, just because they wanted them. I’ve been thinking lately about the sister of one of my secretaries back in Colorado, who was overextended and in deep financial trouble even before the housing market started to crash; I wonder whatever happened to her and her husband and their two kids.

The truth of it is, as we talked about two weeks ago and see again here, the core issue in all this is idolatry: where is your heart? Who or what is really your first love? What are the priorities that determine everything else in your life? It’s not bad to have more than we need, but if love of money—or fear of not having enough—is calling the shots in our lives, then that’s our idol, that’s our treasure, and we need to cut it down. “Sell your possessions and give to the needy,” Jesus says, and immediately we start asking, “Sell how much? What do I get to keep?” We start defining the limits and trying to figure out what’s the least we can do to be good enough—it’s law-based thinking, and I caught myself doing it as I was writing this sermon; and it’s completely wrong way round. The real question is this: if we cared more about storing up treasure in heaven than in accumulating treasure on earth, if our hearts were really set on Jesus and he were truly our first love and our first priority, then how much would we want to keep, and how much would we gladly give away?

This has been a hard one for me in the last few years, because I never thought of myself as materialistic; indeed, I would have strongly resented the suggestion that I was. I could rationalize all the stuff I have—and pastors can be great rationalizers, as this cartoon shows; and it’s not like we’re particularly extravagant or buy things for which we have no real meaningful use. But as I was coming to realize the degree to which my life has been driven by fear and anxiety, I began to see that I did have a fear issue when it came, not to money, but to material things: fear that I would need something and not have it, and that if I didn’t have this particular thing, at some future point I would be inadequate, because I wouldn’t have the whatever-it-was that I needed. Trying to prepare for contingencies, to get a leg up on the future, by piling up stuff, rather than trusting God to take care of it—that, I think, is my main issue here. It’s stupid, and it’s twisted, and it’s not at all what Jesus wants from me; but it is, I think, all too sadly human.

And it all really flows, in the end, from us wanting what we want, rather than letting God teach us to want what he wants. We look for security in earthly things, even as untrustworthy as they are, because our hearts are set on an earthly security with earthly rewards. Why else would we use the word “securities” to mean stocks, bonds, and other investments? They’re not secure at all—just look at the New York Mets, who bought “securities” from Bernie Madoff; now they’ve been hit with a $1 billion IOU. Stocks, bonds, they go up, they go down—on the whole, they may do well by you, but you can never be sure about tomorrow. It’s all in God’s hands, none of our own. But we call them “securities” anyway because we want to believe that they can give us the security we want: enough money and things to kick back and live the good life, however we define that, without having to work any harder than we want to.

It’s a pleasant vision, but even if we get there, it could still all go splat at any time—financial crisis, medical crisis, family crisis, you can think of all the ways; and even if it doesn’t, is that really enough for us? In the end, human experience seems pretty clear: no, it isn’t. That desire for more, that we can be so prone to try to fill with ever more material things, is the surest sign that material things will never be enough. To find what we really need, we must look beyond the kingdoms of this world; and so we have this little verse, unique to Luke, that ties this whole passage together, verse 32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Note that. He doesn’t say, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to make you rich”; those sorts of financial blessings may come, or they may not. Instead, he tells us two things. One, if we seek his kingdom, we will receive it. There’s certainty there. If we seek for material wealth, we may find it or we may not—there are many who have gone broke trying to get rich—but if we seek the kingdom of God, we will get what we seek. And two, what we will get will be better than anything else we could ever find.

No, we may not have all the things we want—we probably won’t—but while God may not give us anything more than we need, he won’t give us anything less, either; and more than material things, he’ll give us his love, his peace, his joy, his hope, his power, his strength, and most of all, his life, and those will do more to bless us through the difficult times in this world than all the wealth of the Americas. And that’s just in this world, which will end, and maybe all too soon for some of us; when this world dies and is raised to new life as its maker died and was raised to new life, and all those things that were merely temporary markers of position have passed away, when all that remains is the kingdom of God—then that kingdom will be ours. Totally, without exception. Forever.

A Living Trust

2011-01-30T10:30:00.001-05:00

(Proverbs 6:6-8; Matthew 6:25-34)

Wired magazine published an interesting article this past summer on the effort, led by a biologist named Robert Sapolsky, to develop a vaccine against chronic stress. That might sound strange, but while stress doesn’t cause any diseases—we used to think it causes ulcers, but it’s turned out that’s not really true—it can have devastating effects on every major system in our bodies, making us far more vulnerable to disease, and making every disease we develop worse. As the article says,

The list of ailments connected to stress is staggeringly diverse and includes everything from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more . . . the effects of chronic stress directly counteract improvements in medical care and public health.

The article goes on to cite a public-health survey called the Whitehall study, which has been tracking tens of thousands of British civil servants for over 40 years; they’ve found that even after you control for all other known factors, people at the bottom of the hierarchy died twice as often between the ages of 40 and 64 as people at the top. Why? Primarily because those at the bottom have considerable stress from the demands of their jobs, but absolutely no control over those demands. They can’t choose what they’re going to do, they have no status to defend themselves from those above them—there’s nothing they can do but to endure, and it’s literally killing them.

In other words, Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said, “Which of you by being anxious can add even a single hour to his life?” Anxiety is corrosive, and erosive: it wears away our energy, our character, and ultimately our lives, and eats away our relationships, dissolving the bonds between us. Chronic stress makes us more susceptible to the effects of stress, making us more anxious and more likely to perceive things as threats; the more anxious we are, the more anxious we’re going to be, the more mistrustful we become, and the harder it is for us to relax and rest.

This is the story of our culture, because ours is an anxious time. Part of that, of course, is the down economy, but that’s not all, by any means. Part of it is the tenor of our politics, which are very much anxiety-driven; that’s not the fault of all those high-powered political consultants running around, but they’re still doing their best to make it worse. I remember being struck during the 2000 political campaign by polls showing that over a quarter of the electorate professed to be “terrified” at the prospect of Al Gore becoming president, with a similar percentage saying the same thing about George W. Bush; and then, just as that was all settling down, along came 9/11 to give us all something to be terrified about. It certainly wasn’t going to get any better from there.

In times like that, people tend to look for comfort in what we think we can control; which was probably one of the things driving the housing bubble. There were plenty of people around talking about the dream of home ownership, and real estate as the safest investment, tying in to the deep emotional association between home and security; to have that go bust for so many folks was like having their legs kicked out from under them, like being hit from behind. I would say that’s the sort of thing that sends anxiety through the roof, except the roof isn’t there anymore—that’s part of the problem.

The reality here is that this kind of thing inevitably happens when we’re trying to be the ones in control. That’s really the root of anxiety: we’re carrying the weight of our lives on our own shoulders—we’ve given ourselves the full responsibility for making our lives happen and making everything work. We put our trust in things because we think we understand them, we believe we can control them; we think we know what they’re worth, and we trust in our own understanding and our own abilities.

Ultimately, we see ourselves as our own providers; at the practical level, we make ourselves the little gods of our day-to-day lives. As long as circumstances are favorable, we can pull it off, and we feel pretty good about it; but when circumstances turn, as they always do, it all comes crashing down, and we become anxious—we worry—because our little gods have failed. That’s why the New Testament scholar Robert Mounce declared, “Worry is practical atheism and an affront to God,” and it’s why Jesus calls us to something better.

The opposite of worry is trust, and the opposite of anxiety is faith; it is to release our lives to God and leave them in his keeping. It’s the spirit captured in Psalm 46:10, which commands, “Cease striving, and know that I am God.” Of course, this doesn’t mean to stop working and just laze around; the wisdom of Proverbs 6 has not been repealed. We are responsible to use the gifts God has given us to do our part in taking care of his people, and that includes being prudent to work to meet our own needs as much as we are able; this is part of the way he provides for us, through the abilities and opportunities he gives us. The point is not to stop working, the point is to stop putting our trust in our own work; it’s to do what God gives us to do and leave the rest up to him.

Now, you might say this is harder in difficult economic times like these, but I’m not really sure that’s true; it’s just a different challenge, that’s all. Right now, we’re most of us anxious about having enough—about being able to pay the bills, keep the house, put food on the table—and we’re driven by fear of going without and losing what we have. When the economy is better, that’s not so much of a question; but when there are more jobs to choose from, we have more opportunity to choose based on what will make us the most money rather than on what is most pleasing to God. Whatever the circumstances, the Devil’s going to try to use them to get us to put our trust in money instead of God.

If we let him, it’s a tragedy, because it makes us less than God wants us to be; and more than that, it’s foolish. As Jesus says, we have every reason to trust God—just look at the way he takes care of the rest of his creation. We try to find security through planning our careers, saving our money, and making investments—all wise things, certainly, but not what we make them out to be; the birds don’t do any of that, but they still have enough to eat. And look at the flowers—they don’t work at all, but they’re still more beautiful than any human being. Why? Because blessing comes from God, and only from God. Our own labors are necessary because God asks them of us, because he gives us work to do as a part of our own growth—he gives us the dignity of responsibility in our own lives, which we need—but their results aren’t truly in our hands; they are in God’s, and God’s alone, as the one who created all things and holds all things together.

This means that all our anxiety is ultimately for nothing, because putting our trust in anything other than God is doomed to fail; whether we rely on him or on the money we have in the bank, he will determine our success either way. All we can accomplish through our mistrustful worrying is to make ourselves sick, take time off our lives, and lose a lot of our enjoyment of them in the process; we can’t do anything to make them better than what God has planned for us, because it’s beyond our ability and the breadth of our understanding. God alone is able to guide us perfectly through the choices we make and the challenges we face, because he alone knows perfectly what we need and what is best for us, he is powerful enough to give us perfectly what we need and what is best for us, and he absolutely desires to do so; we can’t do that, and we’re the worst kind of fools to try, because all we ever manage to do by our own efforts is to get in the way.

What we hear Jesus saying here is what we hear God saying so many places in Scripture: “Just trust me.” Just lay down your anxiety, just lay down your striving, just lay down your frantic efforts to get things for yourself when I’m trying to give you something better. I know what you need, and I’m not going to fail you—I will take care of you, as I always have. Don’t worry about yourself—just put me first, make serving me your top priority, and I’ll provide for you, everything you need to do what I’ve called you to do and be whom I’ve called you to be. Don’t worry about the future—just do what I’ve given you to do right now, care for the people who are before you this moment, and let the future take care of itself, because I’m watching over it, too. Just let go, Jesus tells us, lay down the weight of your life, and let God be God; he’s better at it than we are. Give generously, live freely, and don’t worry about keeping yourself up—trust God to do that. He’s faithful, and he will never let you down. Never.