10th Anniversary Facebook Posts

Nice to see I haven’t posted anything here for a year and a half… Oh well.  In the interest of preserving these particular Facebook posts where I can re-read them someday without looking for 10 individual status updates, I’ve decided to preserve them here.  Yesterday was the 10th Anniversary of our wedding and I decided that I could do better than a greeting card.  Here are my posts from throughout the day:

 

Ten years ago today, Katrin and I made promises to God and to each other that forever changed the direction of our lives.  I often wonder how she puts up with me and yet, despite my efforts, I continue to fall short of the man she deserves me to be.  It’s in that grace we find freedom and the space to love each other – certainly not perfectly, but I wholeheartedly believe we love each other well.

In the spirit of random Facebook posts associated with numbers and facts, I will post ten facts or stories about the past decade…

 

10^th Anniversary Story #1:

Ten Years ago today, I got in a car accident on my way to my wedding.  An 80 something year old woman was speeding through a residential neighborhood in suburban Chicago, cut a corner, hit the back of my car, drove about 50 more feet down the road before realizing what happened, then careened into a neighbor’s yard and stopped just inched shy of their big oak tree.  We called the police and they took a long time to show up.  When they did, she told him I backed into her and I told him she’d hit me.  The officer could tell it wasn’t my fault but told me, “If you’re willing to take the ticket, I can get you out of here (and to your wedding) quicker.  I promise not to show up at the court if you fight it and you’ll get it dismissed”.  That was probably the most stressful part of the entire day.  I told Kate, but we decided not to tell most people and just let them enjoy our day with us.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #2:

We had the ugliest wedding cake imaginable… Kate had chosen a nice blue color for the bridesmaids’ dresses and for the guys’ ties.  ARA (Aramark, the food service company that does meals at North Park) catered our reception and the food was all fantastic, but if anything was lacking, it was the cake… and boy was it lacking.  They said they could easily match the blue of the dresses and we asked them to make us a small cake that we could keep for our first anniversary and then to make sheet cake, already cut up into pieces for everyone at the reception… which they did… but the so called blue, was some sort of fluorescent aqua blue-green thing that screamed artificial coloring and was pretty hideous.  We simply couldn’t have cared any less though… we were there to celebrate and to share that day with many people who had traveled a long ways to get to Chicago to celebrate with us.  I’d do it all over again, ugly cake and all.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #3:

One thing our marriage has taught me:  I’m an inconsistent gift giver… which is lame, because Kate loves gifts and surprises and she puts thought into every gift she gives.  Some years for Christmas, birthdays, whatever… I have done well; other years, I have failed miserably.  One year for Christmas I got Kate the Hunger Games novels (before anyone knew what they were)… and I knew I had bombed when almost a year later, she’d never picked one up to read it.  But then they became the rage and when everyone knew what they were, Kate read them (and loved them) and has probably re-read them since… so what started out as a bomb, didn’t end so badly… Too often, I just discuss it with her and have her help my pick what she really wants… I don’t do that just because it’s easier (and it is), but because I don’t want her to be disappointed.

Last year, I made her gift… and I didn’t like it… I made it – it’s a stainless steel salmon that I cut with a plasma cutter (Thanks Jono) that we hung on the garage.  It’s what she wanted, but it was obviously made by a novice.  Strangely though, what I didn’t like, she did… further proof that when I do succeed, it’s usually by accident.

Side note: Christmas reminds me of this fact every year: stockings are a real problem.  I have NO INTEREST in buying a bunch of little things that will fit in a stocking… I’d rather spend a few hundred bucks on something awesome that’s actually useful… than 50 bucks on stocking stuffers.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #4:

Loving Kate changes me.  People think I’m a pretty good guy… I mean, I try to be… but I fall short all the time and nobody knows it more than Kate.  But loving anyone involves a certain level of choice and I try to do things that demonstrate that choice… It’s not mushy and romantic and everything that movies are made of, but somehow it just feels a lot more significant and meaningful to me.

A fun choice I’ve made: Kate used to never cook with onions because she knew I didn’t like them… but she loves them.  So, I made the commitment to spend a year learning to like onions.  Their not my favorite thing ever, but I admit it – I like them now (maybe not the super potent ones when they’re raw).  It’s a little thing, but by learning to like them, it’s like a little gift that allows her to enjoy something she likes without worrying about whether I’ll like it or not.

Everyday choices: I think this is where the rubber meets the road.  I choose not to spend money we don’t have; I choose to shovel the driveway, do the dishes, read to the kids, put them to bed, let Kate take Sunday naps, make Saturday morning breakfasts, etc. etc. etc.  Left on my own, I think I’m a slacker.  But loving Kate reminds me that she deserves more than that and I try to just be consistent in making choices everyday that some would say “I’d have to make anyhow”, but let’s face it… when you do something in love, it has a much bigger influence that if you it because “you ought to”…

 

10^th Anniversary Story #5: (short version)

Kate and I always knew we would adopt children (or at least one).  God had laid it on our hearts from the beginning and we were always on the same page with that.  One day, God spoke to me and Kate in the most meaningful way.  I had just witnessed a couple experiencing the pain and torment of potentially losing custody of their adopted son – after having had him in their family for almost 2 years… It was more than I was willing to subject our family to… that sort of loss and grief was more than I was willing to put Kate through… and I told her so… so… even though I was ready to put an end to this dream God had given us, God used the most ridiculous thing to speak clearly and directly into our lives.

That night, while watching TV, I started eating old fortune cookies.  I opened and ate two.  I read the fortunes.  The first one said, “You will gain success in whatever you choose to adopt” and the second said “A short stranger will soon enter your life”.   I showed Kate and we laughed, but didn’t give it a ton of thought… it was just one of those, “Isn’t that kinda ironically funny” sort of things…

Then the third.  I opened it… read it… looked at Kate…started to cry… I couldn’t read it out loud…

I just handed it to her.  She read it silently, looked me in the eyes and started to cry too.  We knew.  It read, “Your ability to love will help a child in need.”

Okay God.  We got it.  You called us to this.  We’ll follow.  And we did.  We named him Isaac because we believe he was promised to us in a very real way.  And he. is. just. the. best!

10^th Anniversary Story #6:

We honeymooned in Ecauador.  Kate and I had looked into a Hawaii honeymoon and decided why blow all our money on 5 days in Hawaii, when we could go to Ecuador for two weeks.  We planned almost nothing about it too.  I emailed friends Andy and Jenell Pluim who were serving at CBC down there and they planned the whole thing for us!  It was truly and adventure…  Quito, La Merced… Casa Del Suizo!  Oh my – think 5 star resort… only to get there, you travel hours by bus, get in a pickup and dropped off on a river bank, picked up by canoes and taken 10-20 minutes upstream (or downstream)  to get to this fantastic getaway!  We spent New Year’s Eve there and it was amazing… Rain Forest, Animal sanctuary, tubing in the headwaters of the Amazon… Back to Quito and off to the ocean for a week on the beach.  Phenominal… Remember those days before children Kate?  Ah yeah! (not that I’d trade them for the world!) J

10^th Anniversary Story #7:

My wife understands me… most of the time… a lot more often than I think and sometimes more often than I care to admit.  There is not one particular story that sums this up.  But I am a pastor and a husband and a father of four… and an introvert… and that doesn’t always mix.  There are sometimes weeks where I swear I don’t get to sit still and breathe… we love to entertain… we love to play with the kids… we love to go, go, go… especially during the summer… but sometimes I need to slow down, simply in order to be a good and healthy person.  Kate gets it.  There have been many times (at what I perceive to be great personal sacrifice) when she has just said, “Go hike a mountain” or “Go fishing” or “Go to the gym” or whatever… she knows that there are certain things that are good for me that make me better for her and for the kids and for the people around us and she willingly sends me off for my solitude despite the fact that it means I won’t be there to help with whatever is next on the schedule.  I need to remember to do this more often for her.

My personality type lends itself to always feeling misunderstood.  I generally want to feel heard… not just listened to, but really heard and understood… and I rarely do.  Kate will go out of her way to make sure that I know she hears me and even if I’m not understood… gosh it sure makes a difference to know she heard me… and wants to understand.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #8:

When we moved to Alaska, I didn’t know any better… When Byron asked if I would go out to lead worship for a youth retreat in Shaktoolik, I said yes… of course.  So I packed my bags – and my guitar – handed it all to the pilots of the little bush plane and climbed about.  Well, they packed my stuff in the wing compartment… when we arrived in Shaktoolik, it was at least -20F on the ground… who knows what the air temperature was at elevation… At any rate, my guitar was frozen solid!  We brought it indoors and what happened… it just started sweating bullets… dripping with condensation.  All the moisture that the wood needed had frozen and melted so quickly that it dried it out and well, the short of it is that it warped some things and did some damage to the guitar… I could get it in tune, but if I moved up the neck to play different chords, it would be out of tune… oops.  Learned that lesson the hard way…

At any rate, I had only one guitar, so I made due… I made it work as best as I could and I continued to use it on Sunday mornings and at youth group and stuff, but it was pretty tough to stick through it.

Well… fast forward to Christmas.  Just Kate, Madeleine and I…  We had a nice morning opening gifts (mostly Madeleine) – I think that was the year I made her rocking horse… We’re all done and Kate says, “Wait, there’s one more gift.”  And she hands me an envelope.  I open it and it’s full of letters and notes from family and friends… people who had sent Kate a little extra cash to help get me a new guitar… but everyone who sent some money also sent a note of encouragement at Kate’s request… Not only that, she had been saving her extra babysitting money and stuff and by then had saved up enough that when combined with the gifts, I was able to go and pick out my Taylor… which I still love and play to this day.

Best. Wife. Ever.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #9:

After seminary, I went on an amazing rafting trip in the wilderness of Alaska as a part of our Faith and Wilderness class… an amazing story in itself of adventure and near death experiences, but that’s not the part for today… when the expedition was over, we spent the night at the Rose’s old house in Palmer.  That night I had a dream…

In my dream, I had woke up the next morning and called Kate and she told me that she was pregnant… we were thrilled!  (Now, listen, I have remembered like 5 or 6 dreams in my entire life – and this was one of them)  I remember how exciting it was to tell all my friends who were with me on the trip and I remember how amazing the relief was that I didn’t actually perish in the frigid waters of the Chitna River… When I woke up I thought for sure I was going to call Kate and it was going to be real.

Well, when I called her, one of the very first things she decided to tell me was that she was having really bad cramps… which I figure, “oh, cramps means PMS means no baby…”  I never brought it up.

Little did I know she was in fact having cramps, but that just so happened to be the exact same day she took a pregnancy test and found out she was in fact pregnant with Madeleine.  Now, I was in Alaska and she was in Colorado or on her way there or something… for one reason or another, we didn’t actually see each other for almost a month and she waited until we were face to face in Chicago to tell me the news…

But as I look back on it, I think that it’s funny that in some little way, God told us on the same day in different ways.

 

10^th Anniversary Story #10:

This has been a really good discipline today.  It’s not that I didn’t already know I love and appreciate my Katrin, but to spend all day reflecting on just how and why I love her… and to be forced (even if self-imposed) to put it into words… it’s just fills me with gratitude and inspires me to be better.

It’s been nice to think about stories – some big “life moments” and other everyday events – and how they represent the way that loving Kate has changed me over these past 10, really 11 years.  But if my loving Kate had changed me, even a little bit, that cant compare to how much Kate’s love for me has transformed me.

When we started dating, I was pretty wounded.  I certainly questioned the wisdom of trusting her or anyone else with the truth about who I was and how I came to be me.  Somehow, in the very best sense of the word, Kate felt “safe”.  I can’t tell you how much that meant and continues to mean to me.

I am always so proud, but never surprised, when other people tell me how amazing she is.  Kate is a giver… and she’s really good at it.  She loves and cares for our children and for me in ways that only she can do; she will go out of her way to make you feel noticed and special – not because she ought to but because you really are noticed and special; if she sees someone in need, she will obsess about what to do and how to help until she is satisfied she has done all that she can; she doesn’t seem to grow tired of hearing me tell the kids the same lame jokes over and over and over and over again (at least she doesn’t show it); she lets me go hunting and fishing and hiking and adventuring; she finds joy in the things that bring me joy.  I wanted to garden.  I wanted chickens.  Two summers ago, Kate started to fish with me.  This fall, we will hunt together.  I mean seriously… Dude, who is this woman!?!  It’s not even fair that I got her.  I mean SHE said yes to me.  Ha!  I know I didn’t do anything to deserve this.

I have so much to be thankful for and Kate, you are either a part of or you are responsible for the majority of that list.  When I consider who I was, who I am, and who we are together, I do not think it is a stretch to say, I believe God put you in my life to save me from myself and to challenge and inspire me to keep pursuing him.

I’ll close with this story:  It’s short and simple, but it is so Kate.  Tonight, for our anniversary we went on a date.  Kate arranged for Bethany to watch the kiddos while we went out.  Now a typical Phil and Kate date is not planned out ahead of time – usually dinner and a movie… but tonight, we went to a pottery class and we both spun two bowls.  We’ll go back and glaze them after they’ve been fired and then they’ll be done.  Pretty cool.  We’ve never done that before.

But here’s why Kate chose that for our anniversary date. She knew that back in 2001 I made a bucket list of 50 things to do before I die (the bucket list movie hadn’t come out yet, so I didn’t know to call it a bucket list until much later).  Anyhow, number 38 on my list is “learn to spin my own pottery”.

So, sure… it was a really fun, unique date night for the two of us, but it is so much more significant than just that, because Kate’s goal tonight was to help me check something off of my bucket list.  Like I said before… It’s just not fair.  It’s like I won a game I didn’t know I was playing…

If I were to remake my bucket list, it would look a lot different now than it did 12 years ago, but I tell you what.  Right up there at the top of my list would be to never let that woman doubt for one instance that she is the best gift God has ever given me.

 

Sermon June 26, 2011

Sunday June 26, 2011

Sermon

Romans 7

I know some of you probably can not relate to me on this, but I think most of my adult life, I have struggled with weight management. It seems like I’m either gaining weight or I’m losing weight… sometimes, I can maintain weight, but those seasons have been short lived.  And a big part of my own struggles with weight management come down to a bunch little tiny individual decisions… and many times, I fail.  The temptation for that bowl of ice cream or that pizza or those onion rings or whatever is so great… I cave and I make what, for me and my health, was the wrong decision.  But sometimes I make the right decisions too.  Sometimes, even though I don’t want to, I go the gym.  I work out, I eat well and stay healthy.  But my experience has been a lot of back and forth.  Seasons of success and seasons of failure… but probably the biggest part of the problem is that I get entrenched in a mindset of weight management instead sitting down with Kate, and intentionally working out a new way of life… a new way of living that doesn’t focus on weight management, but just giving ourselves to healthy living.

For me, the worst thing about weight management is when I’m eating out.  There’s a menu full of things to choose from and while there’s a lot healthy choices, there’s also a lot of unhealthy choices… and it’s even worse when the person at the table next you is eating that greasy burger and fries… I can smell it, I can see it… It’s what my brain wants, but it’s not what’s good for me.  In that moment though, I’m not thinking about my heart or the scale or what will nourish my body to keep it in good health… I’m thinking about what it will taste like and I’m not sure that the fact that it’s unhealthy doesn’t actually make it more appealing too.  I mean, there’s something about caving to temptation and doing the wrong thing that can be exciting in the moment as well.  Sometimes we almost brag to others, “yeah, I decided not to care and I ordered some comfort food”… just the fact that we call it comfort food betrays the fact that we know it’s bad for us, but we feel comforted by going ahead and eating it anyhow.

Well, I think that this struggle… to indulge or not to indulge is something like the struggle the Apostle Paul was describing in relation to sin and living in Christ when he was writing his letter to the church in Rome.

Before we read and study Romans 7, I want to give just a quick overview of how Paul got to this part of his argument.  See, Romans is in many ways is Paul’s manifesto – his crowning theological achievement and everything in it is based on what came before it, so I feel like in order for us to study Romans 7, we need a quick refresher on what sort of argument Paul’s making here.

In the first five chapters of the book, Paul has outlined the gospel message and what salvation history has been all about.  He starts by wrestling with issues over who God’s plan has been for all along.  He begins by reminding his readers that everyone has known right and wrong and things of God from the beginning.  He wrestles with the relationship with God and the people of Israel and the law that he gave them to follow.  He argues that everyone, regardless of birth, heritage, or anything else – everyone is affected by sin and the just penalty for that sin is death and separation from God.  Then, in the end of chapter three, he explains how God, in his great love for us, allowed Jesus to die that death that humanity deserved and how salvation is on the basis of faith through Jesus Christ.  Chapter 4 is a long illustration of how even Abraham experienced salvation from God on the basis of his faith and trust in God.  In chapter five Paul explains that because of what Jesus did, salvation is like the healing of a broken relationship between God and humanity… he says that salvation means peace with God.

Now in chapters 6-8, Paul deals with the issues of sin, law and grace… how trying to live out the law apart from God’s grace will simply condemn us to death because we can’t do it… we will give ourselves to trying to manage our sinfulness and we will fail.   So instead of living according the law, Paul says, live in Christ – in accordance with the Holy Spirit.  That’s where our passage today comes from. But before we take a closer look at these verses again, please pray with me as we ask God to speak clearly and directly to us this morning through the reading and reflecting upon his word.

PRAYER

Paul begins chapter 7 with an analogy and he specifically says he is using it to explain his thoughts to the Jews because they were the ones who knew the laws.  Their laws said that when a man and woman were married, they were bound together by the law… unless he died, then she could remarry without being considered to be living in sin.  A quick note: Paul isn’t really making a statement about divorce or remarriage and so I’m not going to dwell on this, especially since he goes on to say that those who are living in Christ have died to the law.  He brings this up, simply to use it as an example from the laws that they knew, to demonstrate how when someone’s husband died, they were freed from the law that bound them to their husband.  And Paul is using this analogy to say that the people of God who believed in Jesus died to the law, so that they could be freed from the law and be bound (or married) to another – namely Jesus who God raised to new life.    Throughout all of chapter six, Paul had been dealing with the questions of sin and grace?  Should we keep on sinning so that grace may abound?  No… when we surrendered our lives to Christ we died with him and experience the hope and reality of resurrected life in him.  He holds out baptism as an example of dying and rising (going under and rising up anew) with Jesus Christ and he said that when we died with Christ, we died to sin.  We are no longer slaves to sin, but are slaves to God he says.  We are bound to a new master – not the rules of the law, not the weaknesses of the flesh, not sin which leads to death.  We are bound to Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit through whom we have life.

The majority of chapter 7 wrestles with the value of the law that God gave and it’s role in identifying sin and then Paul gets really personal and he gives a personal example of his own struggles to live in Christ instead of caving to the desires of his sinful nature.

So, if God through Jesus freed people from the law, does that imply that the law was inherently bad?  The normal way of thinking would be that if Jesus freed people from something (even the law) it must have been a bad thing so in verse 7, Paul asks, “Was the law sinful?”   His answer? Certainly not!  The law was a precious gift from God and no one would have even known what sin was if they didn’t have the law.  How can someone be aware that they are not living the life God designed them for if they don’t know what that life is?  The law was given to God’s people out of love.  He wanted them to know the life he wanted for them – the life that they were made for.  The problem was not the law; it was sin.

Sin takes hold of us and leads us to act contrary to that life laid out for us by God.  Paul defends the law rigorously.  In verse 13, he says “in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good (that’s the law) to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.  He wants people to know it was the love of God that gave them the law.  God loved his people enough to show them what sin was, so that they could avoid it.  The problem is sin… sin, wrongdoing, any thought, word or deed contrary to the will of God… sin crept in and took hold of humanity and we were powerless to overcome it on our own.

So the same loving God who gave his law, sent his Son to die so that we might have life and peace with God.  That son – Jesus – changed everything!  God through his Holy Spirit made it possible for us to share in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  When we surrender to him, we “die to ourselves” and live in Christ.  That means that the old self – in Paul’s words, the sinful flesh – that is past away… we can die to that self and live in a wholly different way… the way of Christ, the giver of life.

Now Paul obviously believed this with all of his heart, but evidently he also knew what it meant to live in the tension between these two realities: (1) life in Christ and (2) life according to the flesh. Listen to his words from Romans 7, verse 15-25:

I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate, I do.  And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.  As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.  For I know the good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.  So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.  WHAT A WRETCHED MAN I AM!  Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?  Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord.  So, then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

I don’t know about you, but I am so glad that Paul put this little personal testimony into his letter!  This is the same guy who wrote that we should be imitators of Christ.  We should try to live and minister in the same way that he and his fellow ministers did… Sometimes, it’s easy to think, “There’s no way I could ever live like Paul”.  I mean, such devotion and passion… He traveled all over the Mediterranean telling people about Jesus, planting churches, and he even died because of his faith!  His example, nevermind that of Jesus Christ, often seem simply too far out of reach for “sinners like us”.  But when I hear these words from Romans 7, I see that Paul also struggled with living out his faith and Jesus was renown for spending time with those who everyone knew were sinners.

But who hasn’t at some point felt like Paul in Romans 7?  I know I have.  I’ve surrendered my life to Christ.  I want to follow him in every aspect of my life.  I want to live a good and Godly life.  But yet, I continue to struggle with sin and temptation… and it’s just not helpful to pretend that we don’t.  I don’t want to sin, but sin is a part of our world – a part of our reality.  And like Paul says, thanks be to God that sin doesn’t get the final word.  Grace does.  It’s through Jesus Christ and our faith and trust in him that we are freed from the law of sin which leads to death.  In his death and resurrection, God’s mercy – our forgiveness – is found.

I thought it was ironic that Monday night, I was reading these words on the plane as I traveled back to Alaska from Minneapolis with two screaming kids.  For some reason, I just do not respond well to inconsolable children… and here I was, angry that we couldn’t reason with our children to get them to behave on the airplane… literally, getting furious, and then I start to read Romans 7 and I see the even the apostle Paul struggled to overcome sin in his life… and somehow, that made me feel better – not because it justified my sin and anger, or made me want to be okay with my anger, but it made me feel better because in that moment, I was reminded that I wasn’t the first or last person to struggle with this going back and forth, living in Christ and still falling captive to my sin nature.

But I kept reading, and I came to the end of chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8.  Listen to the familiar first verse of chapter 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.  In Christ, I am not condemned for my sins!  Because of what Jesus has already done, our sin doesn’t get the final word.  Apart from him, sin leads to death, but because he has already overcome sin and death, we too can find life by surrendering to him.

Now, see, in many ways, even as I say these words I am like, “well, yeah… that’s true… it’s all about grace.”  Salvation and life in Christ are gifts that we receive from God, not things that we somehow achieve or earn or even just submit to… and every time I try to wrap my mind around grace, I just come up short… it seems so simple, and yet, it’s anything but simple… it’s counter-intuitive to me for sure… and I don’t know if it’s because of the way I was raised, or the performance-based culture I grew up in, or what it was that makes grace so impossible to completely understand, but often times I find that the concept is best explained in a story as opposed to some formula or explanation of how it works and when it works and who it works for and so on…

Jesus told the story of the Prodigal son and his loving Father… how the son went off and squandered his portion of his inheritance before his father even died… how he fell on hard times and even though he knew that everything he had done was wrong and was a disgrace to his father, he decided to go back and beg him to be one of his servants, but his father saw him from a distance, ran out to greet him; he welcomed him home and threw a feast in his son’s honor.  That’s grace.

Anytime we love someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved, we extend the grace of God to them.  After all, that’s what God did for us, right?  He loved us?  He let his Son die for our sake, even though sin was our problem, not his.  That’s grace.  That’s a gift.  We cannot earn that kind of love, and yet, even though I think we know that to be true, the temptation in our lives – in our churches – in our families… is still to try and be good enough to deserve that love.  When we think about sin, we usually think about the things that we do – not necessarily as a part of the thing that we are.  So, in our attempt to be a good Christian, too often we focus on avoiding sin in terms of thoughts or behavior, which in itself isn’t a bad thing.  We want to do away with sin in our lives, but for us, it so easy to live out a gospel of what Dallas Willard calls “sin management”.  It’s a gospel that doesn’t see the big picture… it’s a gospel that simply says Jesus died to forgive you of your sins, so repent and don’t sin anymore.  And if you do, repent again and start over… but before long, if we keep on sinning and can’t seem to overcome sin on our own, we get discouraged; we become embarrassed and ashamed that we can’t seem to be good enough people to actually be considered good followers of Jesus.  Sin management simply doesn’t lead to transformation… it doesn’t actually lead us deeper into a transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.

Detrich Bonhoeffer famously began his book “The Cost of Discipleship” with a discussion about the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace”.  Cheap grace is temporary – it’s sin management… it’s when we claim the forgiveness of God, but do nothing about who we are to become better disciples of Jesus.  Costly grace means that because God loved us enough to extend his grace to us, we give ourselves even more to him and his transforming work in our lives – NOT SO THAT WE CAN BECOME BETTER LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS of the kingdom of God… but simply so that we can love him better.  Yes, our behaviors change and we do “different” things… we probably even become better followers of God’s law, but we do so because we are led by His Spirit to do so and we do it because we love God.  If we just change the way we act and live because “the Bible says I should” apart from a loving relationship with God, it won’t be long before we’re just frustrated trying to manage our sinfulness all over again.

I think that’s what Paul is getting with this chapter in Romans.  The law is good.  It helps us know what sin is… it makes sin recognizable.  But of course, once we can recognize it, we have the problem of knowing our own sinfulness.  Thankfully, God has taken care of that for us… He gave his Son and conquered sin for us so that we can live in Christ.  Life in Christ doesn’t happen by being better law-followers… it happens by being better Holy Spirit followers… But we live in and participate in a world where sin is still everywhere around and in us.  So it’s so frustrating trying to manage that sinfulness or trying to go back and forth between living according to our sin nature and living by His Spirit… But this is where Jesus’ death and resurrection made all the difference.  Because of what he’s done, sin has been defeated – even the sin’s that we may do someday in the future – even the sin that inherently a part of who we are… God’s grace is much bigger that we usually tend to think it is.

Paul already dealt in chapter 6 with the question of, if God’s grace is that big, should we just keep sinning?  No.  Of course not… we ought to give ourselves to loving God in response to his love for us.

Last weekend, I was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a wedding on Father’s Day.  My sister-in-law was married and the wedding was officiated her father, my father in law.  What a great Father’s Day gift, right – to officiate your daughter’s marriage to a wonderful man?  Well, he said something in his homily that I thought was incredibly profound and as a parent and follower of Jesus, it made me stop and think about the way I love my kids as well as the way God loves me.

He kinda stopped to ask the question, “What’s the best advice a Father can give to his daughter or her wedding day – and truth be told – it transcends the wedding day… what’s the best thing a parent can say to a child to help them become everything we dream for them and more? (And the truth is for everyone of us, what’s the best thing God can say to us?)

Is the best advice we can our kids, “Really work hard. Study hard.  Work hard.  Achieve everything you can in life so that you can create a situation in which you’ll experience security and safety and stability.”?  Is that the best advice we can our kids? Maybe not, but we do it all the time…

Is the best advice we can give our kids, “Try to be a good person.  Listen to people.  Obey your elders and teacher and parents – especially God.  They know what’s good for you, so just be good.  Obey. Listen.  Be respectful. Be moral.”?  There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this advice… but it’s still probably not the best thing we can say.

How about this though?  How about “Serve people.  Give to the poor.  Work for the benefit of those in society who have little and who have no one to advocate for them.  Pray for people.  Get involved in politics.  Try to make society look more like God’s kingdom.  Devote your life to Godly purposes.”

Again, all of this can be good and faithful work and descriptive of aspects of the life God may want for us, but when comes down to it, what is the best thing we can tell our children?  What is the best thing we can tell each other?  What is the best thing God says to us?  According to my father in law (and I think he’s right) it’s this: “I love you”.

Nothing more and nothing less than the perfect love of God.  If I hope that my kids might someday exceed even the best things that I want to for them, I will still continue to make known the kind of life I hope and dream for them… but telling them about that life isn’t the same as trying to prescribe it for them.  The best thing I can tell them is this, “I love you”.  If they know that I love them, I believe that love will be reciprocal.  I believe that they will love me too and in the course of our loving relationship, they will learn that my desires for them are in many ways related to their own hopes and dreams.  Yes, I hope and pray that they know God and his Son Jesus Christ; I hope that they will pursue God’s best for themselves, but I also pray and hope that they will find that joy in following Jesus in a way that fulfills their hopes and dreams more than it does “mine”.  If I love them well, they will know this and they may end up doing a lot of the things that I would have been tempted to tell them to do anyhow.  And they may screw up at times to and make terrible decisions.  But I will not stop loving them because of it.  I hope that I will always be able to be grace-filled with them because I believe that God IS always grace-filled with us.  I hope that I will never guilt or shame them into being something I want them to be and I don’t believe that God has any use for shame and perhaps the only use he has for guilt is simply allowing us to know our sinfulness.  We are not meant to wallow in it – he wants us to return to Him – not unlike the prodigal son.  Shame is what keeps us from coming back to Him, and the longer we distance ourselves from his grace, the harder it often is to come back and we usually feel like “well, I screwed up”, so we just keep sinning.

It’s not altogether unlike the whole weight management thing.  After struggling with the temptation to eat or not eat something – after I make the wrong decision and eat that ice cream or those cookies or whatever… once I feel like I’ve lost my self control in one thing, it’s so much easier to just throw in the towel and eat more junk food or whatever.  And before I know it, I’ve gained 5 or 10 pounds in a short period, because I was ashamed of that one instance that on it’s own, probably wasn’t even that big a deal in the grand scope of things.

So how does God want us to wrestle with law and grace?  What does Paul offer in Romans to help us figure out what to do when we feel so tormented by the tension created between surrendering to God and still being sinful people?  I want to read again Romans 8:1.  “There is now NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.  It means we trust him.  We trust that grace is bigger than our sin.  We give ourselves to life in Him.  We let his Spirit be our guide and counselor as we pursue the way of trying to love him back.  When God gave his Son that we might experience real life again, he said to all of humanity, “I love you… always, unconditionally, perfectly… I     LOVE    YOU.

May we hear those words and allow the love of God to be the thing that draws us deeper into abundant life in Christ.  May we be the kind of people who have learned to not dwell on our mistakes, but rather on his grace and on his love.  May we become better lovers… of God and our neighbors.  And may this God who loves so deeply, be faithful to lead us by his Spirit further into freedom from shame and torment and show us the way to abundant life.

Pray with me.  (thank you God…)

 

Benediction (Romans 8:38-39):

Hear these words from Romans 8 as the benediction and assurance of God’s love:

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present NOR THE FUTURE, nor ANY powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

 

 

 

Love Wins

So, now I’m reading Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins.  There has been so much hype as well as criticism, but it’s one thing to read review after review after review… so I got the book and before even picking it up, I worked very hard to finish the other books I was reading given that they were excellent books and I would have probably never finished them if I got sucked in Bell’s book.

By the way, if you want to read a great book on Alaska filled with awesome story-telling, unimaginable circumstances and life in the villages of Western Alaska going all the way back to even before Westerners had really moved in… check out the book I just finished: The Roots of Ticasuk, by Emily Ivanoff Brown.  I’ll definitely read it at least a few more times.

The other book I just finished was One.Life by Scot McKnight.  Also an incredibly helpful book.  Oddly enough though, as I was reading things about the kingdom of God in it Sunday night, my laughed out loud and told Kate, “Man, I wish I would have read this BEFORE I wrote my sermon” (that I had just given that morning…

So on the Love Wins… He starts by saying why he wrote the book: 1 – it is for those people who’ve been hurt or pushed aside by what the church has told them and who don’t want anything to do with the Church. 2 – it’s something that is worth writing because (as I would say is his approach with everything) difficult questions absolutely must be asked.  If there is a common critique of his approach it’s that he often asks SO MANY questions and fails to provide many of the answers to those questions and sometimes, he leaves his readers or listeners in a place where they think he’s implying answers that are either non-traditional or borderline heretical…

Personally, I like the ask a ton of questions approach.  It’s the way my mind likes to work and I’m comfortable not knowing all of the answers…

So far, I think I have read the less-controversial part of the book… I’ve read through the end of the section on heaven.  Rob asks GREAT questions about heaven and what it is, where it is, when it is, and who will be there… I think in the end, he says it is the place where God lives with his people and his will is done perfectly… and in that place, many of the things we now know (war, injustice, pain, sorrow, suffering, etc.) won’t exist and many of the good things we know now will be even better.  As far as where, he would say it is here – not somewhere else… it is here now though not yet fully.  When is it?  We experience heaven (and probably hell) on a daily basis… and who is there?  I don’t know, but the answer will be a surprise and the people who will be there will be highly unexpected.

Maybe that’s not fair or exactly what he said, but that’s the impression I was left with.  I don’t hear anything terribly horrible or wrong yet…  I appreciate that he tries to help us understand the notion of heaven in a better contextual setting… like when the rich man came to Jesus asking about entering the kingdom of heaven… He wasn’t coming asking how to go to heaven when he died… he was trying to understand how to enter the kingdom on earth.  Jesus told his what stood in the way of his entering fully into that – that’s why Jesus told him to go and do something right away – go and sell your possessions, give the money to the poor… because that’s what the kingdom of heaven here on earth looks like…???

The strongest thing he does is he reminds us it’s not just about escaping this planet when we die.  If heaven is just somewhere else, we shouldn’t really care too much about what happens here and we would just be awaiting our future escape and nothing more.  But Jesus didn’t come to tells us how to escape but how to transform the world around us… his way of life mattered and he suggested that ours does too.

“A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of the coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.”

He does do a couple of interpretive things that I didn’t understand (as even necessary) and hadn’t really ever heard before which make me slightly wary… but at one point he equates the use of the word “heaven” with “God”… and at another point he translates aion (the greek for “forever” or “eternal”) as “a long time” but not time passing into eternity… I assume he will use that to make a point later, but I don’t know what just yet…

I do like the way he concludes this section though…

 

“There’s heaven now, somewhere else.

There’s heaven here, sometime else.

And then there’s Jesus’ invitation to heaven

here

and

now,

in this moment

in this place.”

Today’s Sermon – March 27, 2011

Good morning.  Today is the Third Sunday in the season of Lent.  Lent is a season in which Christians have traditionally devoted themselves to prayer, fasting and meditating on the sufferings of Christ as he began his journey toward the cross.  Now, usually that season of fasting and prayer is meant to help us become more aware of the sin in our lives and our need for the salvation Jesus offers us through his death and resurrection.

 

And to be honest, I think it’s really a healthy thing that we can do as Christians – especially those of us who have been Christians for a long time… to be reminded of our own sinfulness… not so that we can wallow in our guilt and shame or be sorrowful to the point of feeling paralyzed by how bad of sinners we are… But rather, we need to remind ourselves of our sinfulness for one simple reason: so that we don’t forget our constant need for the grace of God.  And sometimes, being aware of our own sinfulness, can be just what it takes to keep us from passing judgments and casting the first stone at the other sinners among us.  In many ways, our sin is what leveled the playing field and then it’s Christ who changes things when he offers us a way out through new life in him.  And the longer we’ve been Christians and a part of the Church, the easier it is to give into the temptation to believe the lie that we’ve somehow got it all together… or at least mostly together.  The longer we’re following Jesus, the easier it is to forget how much we actually need him.

 

Well, I think this happens because for us church people in many respects, God helped us grow in our knowledge and faith in him and HE, over time, has been faithful to do a transforming work in our lives.  God does help us get things in order and many times our lives start to look prettier if you will over time.  I know I can look back and see the person I was before I followed Jesus and I’m astonished by how different my life has become as a result of surrendering to him.  My life was pretty obviously headed towards something different before Christ was a real part of it and it’s not hard to imagine the ugly place I would have ended up were it not for the fact that he set my life in an altogether new direction.  Well, thinking about how far I’ve come unfortunately can lead to a false sense of security in who I’ve become – as if I’ve arrived – as if somehow because the major sins in my life have been somewhat dealt with (or if I’m feeling cynical, just hidden better) – that false security in who I’ve become creates a space in my life and in my mind for the lie that I must somehow need God less than I used to… which sure, sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but I think that thought creeps in without our even knowing it sometimes.

 

So we’re all sinners, standing in need of the grace of God.  Why is this important to us this morning?  Because this morning we’re going to look at a story Jesus told his disciples about the Kingdom of heaven and who was welcomed and who belonged and who could and couldn’t fit in… and I think that in today’s world, the Church generally gets a bad reputation for being an unwelcoming place.  I don’t want to try to prove this morning whether that’s true or not.  I’m not even super interested in arguing about who we’ve been in the past.  I’d rather just look to God’s word, get a glimpse of his Kingdom and ask, “How can we set our lives in that direction?”

 

I think it’s generally accepted that many people who don’t go to church, say that they don’t go because they are afraid they won’t be welcomed – they’re afraid of feeling judged or being expected to either fix their lives before they can come, or otherwise they’ll have to immediately start following a bunch of rules in order to fit in and belong.  I just think it’s important for those of us who have been following Jesus for a long time to remember that we were once there too… or at least many of us were.  Looking for God, seeking something more in life, not being sure of what it was but sensing that church may be a place to find that.  I wonder if Lent and the season of meditating on our sinfulness and need for God can’t be a helpful tool that we can use to extend grace and welcome to people that we wouldn’t normally be inclined to welcome and love…?

 

But this creates a sense of tension doesn’t it?  I mean if we just welcome and accept everyone, won’t we water down the gene pool?  Won’t we compromise the integrity of the gospel if we start letting sinners be a part of what we’re doing?  I don’t think we’d actually say that out loud, but we do communicate our questions and answers about welcome and belonging all the time when we decide who can and can’t be a part of things – or to what extent they can be a part of things… For instance, we don’t have non-believers teaching our kids Sunday school.  We require people make a statement of faith in Christ to become members of the church.  But what if someone who hasn’t surrendered to Christ yet just wanted to play in the worship band?  Or be a greeter?  Or design our website, operate the sound board, or take our youth group hiking?

 

We need to answer the question, what does true welcome look like?  Is it blanket acceptance?  Or just borderline tolerance?  Does it mean approval of the sin in other peoples’ lives or is it a stance of love that looks past the sin and sees the fellow sinner?  Who gets that grace and who doesn’t?

 

When I think about living in this tension between sin and grace in our community, I think of what my friend Brian calls “the ache”.  The ache is that feeling deep down that all is not quite right.  Things may even be good, but they’re still not good enough… there’s something just a little bit wrong and we deep down live with that ache, because we don’t know what to do about it.  I think it’s the tension of experiencing God’s kingdom now, but also not yet.  We sometimes get pictures of God’s kingdom and when we experience it in our lives, it is so good, but then sin creeps in, then doubts arise, and when we choose ourselves over God, we experience that deep despair that something’s not quite right and that ache can be paralyzing… we don’t know how to move forward, so we figure out a way to just get somewhere more comfortable.  We decide how much of the ache we can live with and tolerate – then we aim for that.  That’s not the kingdom vision of Jesus though… that’s settling for too little because we’re afraid of risking too much.

 

Most of the time, I think we’re all aware of where we fall short.  We’re aware of the things we probably should have done or said, and if not, we certainly remember the things we shouldn’t have done and said.  And far too many times the temptation is to try to make up for those things by doing something – we give some food or money to the poor and hungry… Maybe we go and actually serve at the soup kitchen?  Maybe we put a little extra money in the offering or join another Bible study?  If we’re honest, no matter how hard we try, it is just SO HARD to stop trying to somehow earn God’s favor by doing things…

 

But doing one thing here and there, isn’t transformation… it’s not kingdom living.  It’s like being lost in the woods and trying to follow a compass to safety without looking at the landscape or horizon.  If you’re trying to travel, say east, through hilly or wooded terrain, every so often you have to get your bearings and find something on the horizon – a tree, or a mountain peak, or some distinguishable mark that you can head towards.  Otherwise it’s too easy to get turned around and you never get anywhere…  If all you do is stare down at your compass as you travel, you’re more likely to get even more lost than you already were.  If we want to see our lives end up looking more like Jesus’ kingdom vision, then we have to get our bearings on what kind of a place that is – we need to find out where that place is on the horizon and we need to humbly let God set our lives in that direction.

 

What does that mean?  How do we let God set our lives in a particular direction?  How do we say yes to the Kingdom of Heaven and say no to living with the ache?   I remember hearing someone who was talking about discipleship and the “way of following Jesus”.  I remember he compared it to a singer – I think he even referred to Sarah Brightman and I want to steal that analogy and use it here today.  I want to take just a few seconds and let you hear her sing…

 

You don’t become a singer like that on accident.  You don’t learn to control your voice like that without intentionally setting your whole life in that direction.  At some point in her life, she had to say yes to the life pointed in that direction.  But a yes to something, is never just a yes.  One yes to something like this probably involved a thousand or more no’s.

 

I don’t know this woman or what her life was like, but I can imagine that in order for her to take the lessons she had to take, to practice for hours upon hours, to sing in the choirs she sang in, to become a recording artist, and on and on and on… she certainly had to say no to a lot of other things.  Perhaps other extra curricular activities?  Maybe sports? Maybe certain types of relationships?  I imagine she even had to say no to other forms and styles of music in order to train her voice to sing like this… but at some point, she determined that it was worth it… pointed her life in that direction and headed that way.

 

I think that’s a good way for us to think about pointing our lives in the direction of the kingdom of God.  We don’t necessarily just sit down, look at our Bibles just follow the ten steps to kingdom living.  That’s not how the scriptures work. But all throughout the scriptures, we get pictures of the kind of people God calls his people to be and what sort of a community he wants for them.  All throughout the gospels, Jesus tells parables about this kingdom – and many of them point out different aspects of what that kingdom is all about.  It doesn’t take too long before we have a pretty good idea of what his kingdom is all about…

 

Today, we’re read one of these parables – from Matthew 22.  Jesus tells a story about a wedding banquet… and he starts by saying that this is what the Kingdom of heaven is like… he then proceeds to tell them this story of a king whose son was getting married and they were throwing him a banquet.  This king had invited all the people one would normally expect to be at a prince’s wedding banquet, but the guests didn’t come.  When everything was prepared, nobody showed up.  So the king sent his servants out to go and get those people, but still they refused.  When his guest were sent for, they didn’t come – some even acted violently to the servants who were sent to fetch them…. Well, when they didn’t come, the king invited others – in fact, he invited everyone else.  He literally said to his servants, “Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.”  And the servants went out and it says they “gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good and the wedding banquet was filled with guests.”

 

Now, that’s not the end of the story, but let’s just think about this for a minute.  THIS is what the kingdom of heaven is like?   This story is not exactly a picture like the beautiful utopian existence I tend to think of when I think of the kingdom of heaven in all it’s glory… This story is about how the people who were supposed to be there, didn’t show up and couldn’t even be convinced to go to the party… It’s a story about how the party is still a full party though and the guests who do come are the unexpected people from the street corners… the BAD ones and the GOOD ones.   I feel like that ought to create some tension for those of us who are comfortable here, shouldn’t it? I think the longer we’re a part of the church, the easier it is to give in to the temptation to think we know who should be able to fit in here and who shouldn’t.

 

But really, when it comes down to it, if there is any place on planet earth where all people should be able to experience welcome, it is wherever the church is gathered.  I don’t know how it happens, but somewhere along the way, we put up walls that tend to keep people outside because we start to be afraid of what would happen to a church full of sinners (which by the way is what already are, right?).   Whether its intentional or not, we start to communicate that to belong here, you need to believe what we believe or look like we look or act like we act…  and that’s why we need Lent – that’s why we need to be reminded that no one among is without sin.  There’s something about recognizing our common need for Jesus that creates the space for us to be grace-filled enough to allow other people – people different than us to still belong among us.

 

Now this is something that’s been growing on my heart over the last few months.  It started when I was listening to a speaker in Chicago who was talking about youth culture and some of the changes going on in how adolescents develop relationships and how they search out their sense of identity and belonging.  As he was speaking, I was astounded by how well he was able to articulate exactly what I already see several times a week at youth and young adult groups.

 

He talked about the progression of how people used to become a part of the church… and he called it a process of assimilation. It used to be that if you wanted to be a part of the church, you would first go and find a church that believed like you.  If you believed the same core truths, you would go to that church and with time, you would learn to develop some of the same, shared patterns of living – or behavior.  So first you believe the same and then you learn to behave the same… if you could get those things down, THEN you could experience belonging… then you could belong.

 

Well, this is where those people who are frustrated with the church get their frustration.  They know that they have in the past been expected to adopt a boatload of theological beliefs and then they had better learn to change their lifestyle pretty quick if they ever hope to belong in the church… and what fun is it to keep going to a place where you don’t belong and really can’t belong until you change?

 

So this speaker said that THIS is now the way people (especially young people) are starting to become assimilated into the church.  First, people just want a place to belong.  That’s it… They’re not looking for us to convince them of anything or tell them how to change their life – especially at first when we don’t really even know them… they want to know and experience the grace of God and our expectations on them should not push away from a place where that is possible.  THEN, if we can allow people to belong with us for long enough, they might start to believe the sorts of things that we believe… and actually, that makes a lot of sense to me.  I’d never really thought that through before but think about it for a minute.  People outside this community want to be known and welcomed.  If our faith and trust in God’s word truly teaches us to extend the grace we’ve been shown, then our actions will be the thing that authenticates our faith – our actions will speak loudly that we actually believe what we say we believe and that’s the sort of thing that people can buy into…  I think that makes the gospel message stronger, not weaker.

 

He went on to say that if young people today experience a place of belonging, eventually they may come to share common beliefs, and then after that, they might start to try on some of our behaviors like someone might try on a pair of jeans.  They might join a Bible study or serve at a soup kitchen, or volunteer at a youth group.  They might start to clean up their language or start tithing and living generously, they might give up destructive behavior, who knows… but this stuff doesn’t happen overnight and they may try out these behaviors and check them out for a while and then stop and then start again…

 

Now, this concept is something I see in action all the time… it kinda makes me proud of our youth ministry here.  Our youth groups are all paces where I would say with great confidence that all sorts of people – across a wide spectrum of faith commitments – consider themselves truly a part of their group.  They belong.  That includes the kids who aren’t Christians, the kids who are strong Christians and that includes the Christians who aren’t living like Christians.  I strongly believe that almost everyone there knows that their youth group is a place where they will always be welcome and is a place where they belong.  Now, over time, as we study the Bible together, serve together, go on trips together… all this and more… through these things, we begin to share a common faith or beliefs… If we are faithful to live out an authentic faith in front of then, they often do come to share our faith in Christ… but the hardest part to live with – the place with the most tension – is when these “church kids” aren’t living like church kids.

 

It’s hard to preach about the life God wants for us and then watch people live in contradiction to the truth they already know.  This is where we have to simply trust that real transformation will be the result of God’s Spirit at work in their lives.  It doesn’t mean we stop praying for them, teaching them, encouraging them and so on… But one of the reasons I think our ministry is successful is because it is a place where anyone can come and experience the love and grace of God.

 

And the fact is it’s a good thing that hopefully everyone feels welcome and experiences belonging the way I think Jesus would want them to.  And I think that based on Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet, I can say that this is at least in part, what the kingdom of God is like.

 

But, … I still haven’t dealt with the end of that parable though.  When the party starts and the king enters the banquet, he notices that there’s a guy at the banquet who isn’t wearing wedding clothes.  It was customary then if you went to a wedding, you had to dress for the occasion and even if you didn’t have proper clothing, the hosts would provide you with it.  This man had apparently rejected the wedding clothes and so he was thrown out.  He didn’t get to stay.  And it says that they bound him up and threw him out where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 

Immediately, we see that this parable is about more than just a wedding banquet.  It’s about heaven and hell – who gets in and who is out.  And as much as we are the people of God, devoted to living out the kingdom of heaven here in earth, we don’t experience it is full yet.  Right now, our job is to invite people to the banquet, but as this parable of Jesus reminds us – there will come a time for the banquet to begin and the King will enter – and there may be people present who weren’t willing to put on the wedding garments.  There will likely be people who won’t get to stay… and that’s heart-breaking.

 

It seems so sad to know that there are those who will be offered heaven and all it’s glory and they will reject it.  And yet, that’s free will.  That’s their choice.  It is not our place to choose or decide who is in and who is out though.  That decision rests with the King.  That decision belongs to God.

 

It seems to me that we have been given permission to go to the streets – to invite literally ANYONE into the kingdom – to allow them a place to belong.  And we hope and then we pray that the God who was faithful enough to bring us to faith in him, will do the same through our loving actions with those who don’t know him yet. Transformation will happen.  If we are the kind of place that welcomes people and gives them a chance to come to faith, God will be faithful to work on their behavior with them.  But if we insist they work on their behavior right away, we may never give them that chance to experience grace.

 

This means evangelism is more than just sharing the good news, getting people to pray a prayer, and then moving on.  Pointing our lives in this direction and living this out would mean that our community would be different and we would enter into loving relationships with people who aren’t quite as much like us and maybe don’t even believe or behave like us.  And this sort of transformation doesn’t happen overnight either… we have continue looking for pictures, glimpses of what the kingdom is – then we have to find that spot in the horizon – and give ourselves to heading that direction – saying yes to the values of the kingdom of God and then saying no to everything that doesn’t line up with that.

 

This works on an individual level too.  How many people go to church every week, pray to God, read their Bibles, but feel like they can’t actually change their everyday living enough to actually become what they consider a “good Christian”.  Certain things – events in our lives, behaviors or addictions have such a stronghold on us that we don’t feel like we can make enough of a wholesale change to really fit that category.  Believe me, with God even wholesale change is possible.  But what if we were given the grace to let that process take longer? God will give us a vision of what sort of person or family he is calling us to be… That vision is what we cling to and as we say yes to that vision and let him point our lives in that direction, the no’s will just come.  If we are truly committed to that yes, we will learn what we have to say no to.  And His Spirit will never leave us alone to figure out this kingdom living thing either…

 

Now, Julie and I have been working on trying to get a good definition of the kingdom of God that any 12 yr. old would understand.  The best definition we have so far is “It is the place where God’s will is done – here on earth as it is in heaven”.  I like it, but it’s still too hard to picture what happens in that kingdom because then I need to know what God’s will is… for justice, peace, love, everyday living and such… I think that’s probably one of the reasons why Jesus used parables to talk about the kingdom… he was giving us stories – snapshots – of what it is like, but he knew it had to be experienced to be known.

 

So, what do we do about all this?  Where do we go from here?  Well, I hope and I pray that God will lay it on our hearts to consider what our commitment to his kingdom really is.  If we have filled our lives with so much stuff centered around ourselves and our own little kingdoms that we don’t have time to live out his kingdom, then we may need to repent.  We may need to figure out how to let God reorient our compass and to point us in the right direction.   We may need to study our scriptures to figure out what the kingdom life is all about so that we can find our bearings and figure out which direction we need to head.  There’s actually a lot of things that we may need to do… the thing I’m certain of though is that we don’t do any of them alone.  The first thing we do, is we acknowledge our need for Jesus, then we say yes to him and to his kingdom vision.  We surrender our lives and our plans to his plans and his will.  The rest will follow.

 

We’ve been invited to a banquet in honor of the King’s Son.  May we have to courage to show up at the party.  May we have the thoughtfulness to bring our neighbors with us.  May we have the humility to wear the wedding garments provided for us.  And most of all, may God – the King himself – free us from the need to play the role of bouncer… may we have the faith to trust that God will decide who is in and who is out, so that we can err on the side of grace… that same grace that has been shown to us.  Who knows, maybe then we’ll see a better picture of “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.  Amen.

 

Benediction:  The Lord bless you and keep you.  The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.  The Lord lift up his countenance upon and give you his peace.  This day and always.  Amen.

 

January 2, 2011 – Epiphany 2 – Sermon

01.02.11

Isaiah 60:1-6

Matthew 2:1-12

Have you ever felt like life is lived more in darkness than it is in the light?  Around here, during this time of the year, it literally is… and yet, while sunlight is not exactly what I mean, I think it begins to get at what I do mean a little bit.  Today is the Sunday we celebrate Epiphany (which is actually Thursday).  Epiphany is both a day and a season in the church year… as are many other Christian holidays like Christmas, Easter and Pentecost… For instance, we celebrate the good news of Christmas on December 25^th, but the news is so good that it can’t all be told in one day or one worship service… according the church calendar, the Christmas season begins on December 25^th and goes  about two weeks – to Epiphany.  It allows more time for a fuller telling of the story of the incarnation and the Word become flesh.  Well, Epiphany begins this week and it is a time when we hit the pause button and let our jaws drop a little in wonder and amazement of the mystery being revealed.  It’s a season of lighting up the darkness with the good news that God became one of us and just how big of a deal that really is.

 

And so perhaps the fact that we live in Alaska and that our days are so short this time of year is convenient – at least inasmuch as it relates to telling this part of the story.  Alaska is the only place I have ever lived where people routinely discuss how many minutes (or even seconds) of daylight we are either gaining or losing every day.  Growing up in Lower Michigan, I don’t think I was ever even aware of the fact that the days were getting longer or shorter on a daily basis.  I knew they were longer in summer and shorter in winter, but not so much that it mattered too much in my day to day living… but here, gaining daylight is literally a cause for hope in peoples’ everyday life.  Before moving here, I’d never heard the words seasonal affective disorder used together in a sentence and certainly had never heard of happy lights (or SAD lights or whatever they’re called – those lights you use to get manufactured sunlight) to combat the depression that often accompanies the darkness of winter.  Now we own one and I do understand how big a difference a few minutes of daylight can actually make in our lives…….  So, maybe our heightened sensitivity to the light and the dark is something that can actually help give us some insight to the what it is that our scriptures hold for us this morning.

 

Light and dark have long been used to describe understanding or a lack thereof.  To be “in the dark” is to be out of the loop – to be without understanding – to lack the ability to see clearly enough to understand what is going on.  When we don’t understand things we seek “illumination” or we ask someone to “shed some light on the subject”.  We want to see more, so that we can gain some much needed knowledge and perspective about whatever it is we are trying to understand… in this case, the mystery and glory of the God who is beyond our comprehension…

 

You see, there is nothing that we can do in and of ourselves alone to know God.  In order for us to know God, he has to reveal himself to us.  God has to actually participate with us in our pursuit of Him in order for us to know him.  Thankfully he has – he hasn’t left us in the dark, lost and trying to find him on our own.  His light shines as evidence of himself and his nature throughout all of creation.  He shows himself to us through the things he has made, from the heavens to the earth to everything on the earth.  He is present with us through his Holy Spirit and in his Word – the scriptures.  In him we have life to the fullest and through him our dark world receives light.

 

At Epiphany, we take a step back and allow this light to penetrate our lives and illumine the world around us, and we pray that as we try to comprehend the splendor of God’s plan for our world, that he will reveal himself more and we will grow in our knowledge and understanding of his love made known beneath the Bethlehem star that first Christmas long ago.

 

Let’s take just a moment to prepare our hearts to hear his word and ask God to show himself to us here in this place this morning.  Please pray with me.

 

You sent your Son into our world to bring us light and life.  We are forever grateful.  We ask that you would meet us in this place and speak directly to us. In Jesus name,

 

Well, I’d like to start with the Isaiah passage this morning because in a very real sense it is the bookends around which the gospel text from Matthew is located. It is a text that was written before the gospel story but in a very real sense it is about both the time before it as well as a time that is still yet to come.  But when I read this passage and other passages like it, I struggle to locate this part of the story in it’s proper place in history.  You see, Isaiah is a book in general that it is incredibly difficult to put into context because Isaiah is primarily concerned with his prophecy and the Word of the Lord.  Only in a few places does the book refer to historical situations that allow the reader to figure out what was going on in the life of the people of God when its words were written… and see, that’s where I like to begin.

 

One of the first questions I ask myself, when looking at a particular passage of scripture is, “What did the author intend to communicate to the people it was first written to?”  Most of the time, if we can wrap our minds around what was going on in their story, it becomes much easier to understand how it relates to our story… especially when dealing with prophecy like Isaiah.  You see, the Hebrew people had an understanding of prophecy as something a lot bigger than just prophecy like we tend to think of it.  I think most people hear the word prophecy and they think about telling the future before it happens – and while that’s a part of what it is – that’s not really the important part of it…

 

It’d certainly be impressive to be able to tell the future, but for the Hebrew people, their understanding of prophecy was much deeper than that.  You see, for them, a story was never all used up by its circumstances.  What I mean is that the heart of the story – the message of it – that’s the important part… not the events themselves.  The ancient Hebrew understanding would be that often the same story gets told time and time again throughout the history of the people of God, but the circumstances – the details and events – they change… but the story about God creating a people for himself, loving them enough to deliver them from destruction and provide a way for salvation – that story gets told over and over again throughout history, from God providing a ram in place of Abraham’s sacrifice of Issac, to His saving Noah and his family from the flood, to his delivering the people of Israel from Pharaoh’s hand, to bringing them out of exile, to the the raising up of Judges and more… The events may change, but the big story of God and his plan for salvation remains the same.  That story gets told to varying degrees in the different circumstances, but I think that one of the best ways to think about Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament Law and Prophecies is like this: while the story of God gets told over and over again throughout the history of his people, that story ultimately get told best and fullest in the person of Jesus.  No other story better communicates the love and grace of God than does the story of Jesus.  In that sense, he is the fullest telling of the story of God and his plan in all of the scriptures.

 

I share all of this with you because I think it’s helpful to have this understanding in mind anytime we think about the Old Testament prophecies, but especially today.  Today, we read Isaiah 60 and the lectionary reading only uses the first 6 verses, but really the whole chapter is a poem that wasn’t meant to be separated into sections.  We get the first six verses during epiphany however because of which part of the prophecy these verses contain.  They speak of the glory of the Lord coming to the people of Israel and of a light that people from other nations will be drawn to and it even refers to people coming from afar to bring offerings of gold and incense… which sounds an awful lot like our gospel text from Matthew.  In that story we read about the wise men finding their way to the manger in Bethlehem, having been led by the light of a star to the place where God himself had become one of us, and having brought him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

 

The similarities are too striking to ignore… it’s not hard to see that each of these passages is telling some part of the same story, but to assume that the people of Israel would have looked at these words from Isaiah and deduced that hundreds of years later wise men from the East would have come to find the glory of the Lord wrapped in swaddling clothes wearing human flesh… that’s a pretty big stretch.  In hindsight, these passages share similarities, but if this prophecy was in some way a foreshadowing of an event that they still couldn’t have predicted, then where was the inherent value of this message for those who first heard it?  What did they think when they first heard these words?  And how does understanding their perspective help us?  Well, it’s hard to say for certain how they heard these words because we only have a general sense of when it was written.  Depending on which resource I consulted, I found different expert opinions of when it was written.  Some scholars think that Israel was still in captivity in Babylon and others think that this was written after their exile was ended and they were allowed to return to Jerusalem.  In either case though, it was probably first understood to be about the restoration of their nation and livelihood and a return to a place of prominence as the people of God – literally a light – the place where other nations would be drawn to and where they would encounter the glory of the one true God.

 

And actually, in either case, it’s a promise of a future hope regardless – because even if they’ve been released from captivity and returned to Jerusalem, there is little doubt that they hadn’t actually experienced all the goodness and promise held in these words from Isaiah.  If they had returned, they were likely consumed with rebuilding the city and their homes and trying to literally restart their nation.  So even if they had returned home by now, these words of promise held encouragement for the future.  Let’s look at this passage again:

 

1 “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.  4 “Lift up your eyes and look about you: All assemble and come to you; 
your sons come from afar, and your daughters are carried on the hip. 
5 Then you will look and be radiant, your heart will throb and swell with joy;
 the wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come. 
6 Herds of camels will cover your land, young camels of Midian and Ephah. 
And all from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense and proclaiming the praise of the LORD.

No matter how you look at these words, it’s not difficult to tell that they contain a future promise.  It sounds SO good that it would be hard to imagine that the reality it describes is even possible on this side of heavenly glory.  And that wouldn’t have been lost on the people of Israel either.  I can’t tell you exactly how they understood heaven and life after death – and Jesus has come to be so central in what we believe with regards to that – but they knew that they held a special place in that plan and I’m sure that while they were encouraged by a prophecy of restoration like this, they probably knew that in this life, they would only experience it is part… but even a small part of God’s glory experienced here on earth is still more amazing that anything imaginable!  The ultimate fulfillment of a prophecy like this seems more like what they would have referred to as Zion.  Zion was everything that Jerusalem was supposed to be only in it’s perfect, heavenly reality… the beacon of light – the place where God dwells as King with his people and draws all nations unto himself – the place where there is perfect peace – where everything literally is “as it should be”.

 

So these words from Isaiah actually held a lot more for the people of Israel than just a prediction of the future.  They were words which recalled God’s promises going all the way back to the very beginning of his story; but they were written and told in a way that during their specific place in history, they were able to see in the events around them that God was still in fact keeping his promises.  Whether they had already been freed from exile or were soon to be freed, they would be able to read these words of promise in light of what was happening to them and it would give them hope – they would see that God was in fact restoring them to his people and that all hope was not in fact lost.  You see, if they hadn’t been freed from captivity, that was it – that was the end of their story.  But even here we see that God protected a remnant of his people so that he could still continue to keep his covenant promises.  This is the sort of thing that would have restored faith and trust in God on a nationwide level and would have produced a new hope for that eternal heavenly reality where the God reigns as their perfect King in the end.

 

Which brings us to our gospel text from Matthew.  In this passage, we read about the wise men and their journey to find the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.  But I think that there are two things that really have to be drawn out for us today.  First, it’s important that we take notice of the parallels with the Isaiah passage and secondly, when we look at this passage, it seems to be as much about the wise men’s dealings with King Herod as it is with their finding the baby in Bethlehem, if not more so.

 

So, because this is a story about an actual historical event, it comes after the original prophecy given by Isaiah but before the eternal fulfillment of everything that prophecy means.  It’s probably no accident that Matthew framed this story about Jesus’ birth in this way.  He certainly knew and was familiar with the scriptures and he probably thought it was really important to tell this part of the story because of the fact that when held up next to his people’s hopes and expectations, he knew that this was just another way that God was telling his story and reminding his people that He was in fact keeping his promises.  This story of Magi being drawn to Jesus’ birthplace by the light of a heavenly star probably couldn’t have been predicted and yet, in hindsight, Matthew was able to look back and see that God was in fact still working.

 

Isn’t that the way it usually is for us?  Usually I am too self-centered to see the big picture of what is happening in any given moment.  Usually, I’m too concerned with my problems or my busyness or with my immediate situation so much that I can’t see the forest for the trees.  I can’t see where God is and isn’t at work, but on the other side of those circumstances, I can often look back and see where it was that he was working all along.  I think this is one of those situations, where after the fact, as Matthew reflected on this story, he was able to see the bigger picture and tell the story in a way that it would remind people that God has been and still is being faithful to keep his promises.

 

But for Matthew there’s another important piece; this isn’t just about seeing that God is still being faithful; it’s a revelation of how in fact, God is going to be faithful to keep his word.  This is about Jesus and the fact that the heavenly King has come and has been revealed – not just to his people, but to those from afar.  It’s interesting that the Jews weren’t the ones to know that their true king had been born.  It’s the wise men from the east who come to Jerusalem and ask, “Where is this King of yours?”  We’ve seen his star and we want to worship him.

 

The obvious tension in the story comes form the fact that they go to Herod – the puppet king who had been installed by the Romans to keep control of the Jews.  And it’s a complete surprise to him – what’s this about a new king being born?  Herod had sons and I’m sure his plan was to continue his reign through his children and the notion that someone had been born who was going to usurp his throne was a threat that had to be dealt with right away.  Of course, he tells the Magi to go find the baby and then come back and tell him where the baby is so that he can also worship him… all the while planning to let them find the baby so he could kill him.  But then God steps in – in a dream he tells the Magi not to return to Herod and ultimately warns Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt to escape the massacre of children in the area, thus ensuring the safety of the baby Jesus.

 

Matthew intentionally starts his gospel by immediately creating tension between Jesus and Herod as King of God’s people. That story stands at the beginning of the Gospel to point the way to the end; to reveal at the start that Jesus is the king who has been awaited, and that in him a new light has dawned. But just as we often “don’t understand what a story means at first, we don’t fully understand the significance of this one, until we hear of the sign above Jesus on the cross. His kingdom is not of the type we might normally expect, one marked by power, strength and authority… (in the end it will) be marked by a cross”.

 

And when this story of Jesus’ birth and the wise men’s pilgrimage is coupled with Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 60, the mystery of God’s plan is revealed even more. Isaiah’s vision is of the light coming, the light (which in verse 20) is the Lord himself. The story of the birth of Jesus can easily be seen in and of itself as an end, an end of the waiting of Advent, the coming of the expected One. It is that, because in the person of Jesus, God became one of us. But it is more than that too. Together, these passages show us a light that points us toward another end, the fullness of the kingdom of heaven as Matthew calls it, and it helps shape how we live our lives and life together toward that end.

 

So, let’s take these last few moments and consider just that.  How does Isaiah 60 and the story of Jesus’ birth shed light on our journey toward the kingdom of heaven?  How do we engage the greater story of God and his overarching story as we live out our own stories?  Each of us engages it on our own immediate level and yet, as a community, we engage it together as well.

 

One of the biggest helps we have is that we have more than just these stories.  While these stories point us toward that end of the kingdom of heaven and the reign of the one true King, we also have a wide variety of witnesses throughout the rest of the scriptures that tell us what this kingdom will look like.  Many of Jesus’ teachings deal explicitly with the kingdom and we can look at God’s designs for his people in the Old Testament as well as the New and we can begin to build a fuller picture of what sort of reality he created us for and what sort of reality he intends to restore and redeem one day.  But his light is much bigger than that which can only be seen by his people.  If there’s one thing we can be certain of based on today’s passages it’s that those who are on the outside will recognize his light and be drawn to it on their own.

 

Perhaps the biggest warning for us comes from the gospel story.  The people of God were the ones who didn’t notice the star or even know that Jesus had been born.  It was the outsiders who came to them and said, “Where is he?”  I know that it happens, but may we, as the people of God, never be caught in a situation where we have become so consumed with ourselves that we fail to recognize the presence of God in our very midst.  May God give us eyes to see where he is and where he is working – and wherever we fail to see him, may he give us the hindsight to recognize that he was with us all along and strengthen our faith and trust in him.

 

But perhaps the reason the wise men saw the light that the Jews didn’t notice, was simply because they were the ones looking for it.  Sometimes it’s the insiders who get too comfortable – who feel like they’ve found the light, so they stop trying to find more of it.  Complacency leads to stagnancy.  If we get too comfortable, we might like the little kingdom that we’ve built for ourselves too much, and stop looking for ways to build his kingdom instead of ours.  We need to keep looking for him and even when we find him, we need to keep looking for more of him… and all along we need to become the kind of people who holds the light that we have found up for all to see so that God may draw them unto himself.

 

His light is here – we gather in his name and He has promised to be with us, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he is.  But like the people of Israel who first heard Isaiah’s message, may we learn to recognize where God is being faithful to build his kingdom in our midst and may that inspire within us the faith and hope to trust that he is still working to bring that reality to it’s completion.  May he give us hearts to be receptive to his will for us and may he give us the faith to follow him as He does his work of restoration in our lives and in our church.

 

And may we never stop hungering for more of him.  Just as Matthew’s gospel begins by establishing Jesus as the true king of the Jews and points to the end where he is crucified and ridiculed for such an idea, we know that death was not his end.  We know that he was raised from the grave and is in fact the King of all kings.  This is the central message of the Christian faith: Christ has died.  Christ has risen.  Christ will come again.  This morning is the first Sunday of the month and on every first Sunday, we gather at his table and proclaim this message and receive his grace.  May God meet us in this place and may his light begin to grow within us.

 

And as we prepare to leave this place, maybe we can be mindful enough to let the world around us remind us of this truth.  As spring and summer approach, our days will continue to get longer and the world around us will literally get brighter.  My hope and my prayer is that when we think about the light increasing in our sky, it will serve as a call to commitment for us – to let the light of Christ continue to grow in our lives as well.

 

Please pray with me.

 

 

God, the giver of light and life, as we transition from hearing your word to proclaiming your death and resurrection at your table, we ask that you would begin to increase your light within us.  Expose the dark places we’d rather admit were not there and do a healing work that only you can do.  We are eternally grateful that you became human, that you know our condition, but even in spite of all our sin, your love remains unconditional.  We stand in constant need of your grace and ask that as we move to your table that you would give us a special portion of just that this morning.  We love and trust you in Jesus name, Amen.

 

December 5, 2010 – Sermon (Advent 2)

12.05.10 Sermon

 

Lectionary Texts:

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

 

Today is the second Sunday in the season of Advent.  Now advent is a season I generally like but I admit I have had mixed feelings about it in the past.  I mean, I look forward to it every year – especially at the start of it, but the thing is, I want to observe it with real devotion but every year, but usually it goes so quick and I find myself wishing I had had a more spiritual experience of Advent than I usually do.  The idea of Advent is compelling to me… I like the thought of setting time aside to remember that the people of Israel waited hundreds of years for the long-awaited Messiah to come… but as I was reflecting on why I often feel let down by the season of Advent, I’ve come to the conclusion that my experience of Advent is lacking because for me, it’s still all about Christmas.  I think I enter into the season of Advent hoping every year that it will make Christmas seem like a bigger deal than it often feels… like if I can somehow enter into a longer period of anticipating Christmas, it’ll somehow be a bigger surprise than last year.

 

But Advent should be observed for the sake of Advent – not for the sake of Christmas.  Christmas is a big deal in and of itself.  Out of pure love, God, the Creator of the universe, put on human flesh and entered into our frail existence. We will sing Hallelujah and proclaim that truth when the time comes; but right now, it’s advent.  For hundreds of years, the people of God waited for their Messiah, having no idea when he might show up and restore the people of God to their former glory.  Can we really experience the same kind of anxious anticipation when we know that the season of waiting will only last 4 weeks on our calendars? And that we’ll do it again next year just like we did last year?  Sometimes it feels like watching a movie I’ve seen 20 times before.  The suspense just isn’t the same when you know what’s coming.  But that’s where I my thinking tends to go wrong for sure.  Too often, I’m waiting for the wrong thing.  I’m waiting for December 25^th on my calendar, hoping it’ll be a surprise – not unlike a child waits for the opening of presents Christmas morning – but at least they have the suspense of not knowing what’s under the wrapping paper.  Sure, maybe I can make my waiting sound more spiritual by talking about being excited to experience again the story of Joseph and Mary and the Word become flesh, but there is so much more we are waiting for than just the opportunity to retell the story of Jesus’ birth – that is a good thing, but the whole world is anxiously awaiting his return… and the season of Advent is exactly the right time to embrace that reality.

 

If you were here last week (which, I was not by the way) you heard Pastor Max’s reminder that although Advent is a time not only to remember how long the people of God waited for Christ to come in the past, it is also a time in which we acknowledge the we are awaiting his second Advent – waiting for Christ to come again… and his return will be just as much a surprise to us as was his birth in Bethlehem that first Christmas morning.   We don’t need to waste our time trying to guess or figure out the day and time of his return, but neither should we do nothing and pay it no attention.  We ought to be ready.  We want to be living in anticipation of his return at any given moment.  We’re waiting… but we’re not JUST waiting.  We’re actively living in a way that says we are getting ready for his return.

 

Fortunately for us, prophets long ago foretold about this one – Jesus – who would come, and throughout the scriptures we are given clues and instructions as to what could be anticipated upon his coming as well as his return.  This morning we’ll take a closer look at one of those texts: Isaiah 11 – a messianic text and a traditional text during this season of Advent.  I hope that as we consider it’s message, God will draw us into a more eager anticipation of his return and will give us clues as to what we are to be all about as we wait.  So, let’s take a moment and ask him to do just that.

 

Pray

 

Well, I spent most of my week this week doing everything else that had to be done this week other than writing this sermon because I just couldn’t figure out how to get into this text.  I felt drawn to the Isaiah text – it’s certainly fits the advent season really well, but every time I read it, I could hear my seminary professor’s voices echoing in the back of my head… “You shouldn’t read Paul into Matthew.” “Don’t read James into John”. “And certainly don’t read Jesus into the Old Testament”…   What they meant by this was don’t go looking for things that aren’t inherent to the book you are reading from.  For instance, you don’t read something from the gospel of Matthew and think “Well, since Paul said something like this in Romans, that must be exactly what Matthew was thinking too…”  Their point was that we should let each author first speak for themselves and then see how the different scriptures fit together to tell the greater story of God.  And with the Old Testament, it’s too easy for us to read scriptures and assume that they are about Jesus… because in many cases that’s exactly who they point to… but to jump to that conclusion right off the bat is to dismiss the fact that those scriptures were more to the people of Israel in their original context than just a foretelling of a future Messiah.  It’s easy for us, who come after Jesus to see how he fulfilled the Law and the Prophets, but for them, all they had was the Law and the Prophets and this Messiah was still a distant hope.

 

They didn’t have Jesus yet, to come and show them what was meant by the Law, or to explain this kingdom of which the prophets spoke.  Instead, the faithful gave themselves to living the Law as best they knew how, seeking God’s direction and trying as best they could to live into the kind of kingdom that the people of God had prophesied about for ages.

 

And oddly enough, I feel like that’s still how we ought to read Isaiah 11.  I mean, it’s okay for us to read Jesus into it (meaning assume that it is about him), and we usually do… but even if we do that, I think we still run into a problem… It’s not tough to imagine that this passage was pointing to Jesus and that he is the ultimate of fulfillment of what it was speaking about, but as soon as we get a few verses into it, I think we have to ask ourselves why hasn’t all of it been fulfilled yet then.

 

Let’s read it again and then reflect on it some more.  If you have your Bible, please turn with me to Isaiah 11.  If you are using a pew Bible, it is on page 686. We will read the first 10 verses.

 

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a branch will bear fruit.  The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him – the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord – and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.  He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.  Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.  The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together and the lion will eat straw like the ox.  The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.  They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

In that day, the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him and his place of rest will be glorious.

 

This passage has always been considered Messianic (meaning if was about the Messiah) and it falls into the category of a prophecy fulfilled by Jesus because of it’s beginning.  A shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse.  Jesse was the father of King David and this prophecy tells of someone who will come from that family line right at a time when it looks like it has died off… when there’s nothing left but a stump to the family tree.  Jesus is of course, of the lineage of King David, but barely… You see, it was Joseph, not Mary who was descended from David and our Bibles tell us Jesus was born from Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit – not Joseph.  So, out the stump of that family, new life begins through Jesus, the Messiah.

 

It goes on to talk about the Spirit of God resting on him with wisdom and understanding, counsel and power, knowledge and the fear of the Lord… It is definitely easy to read these attributes into the life of Jesus.  In all of human history, no one has displayed such Godly wisdom, counsel, understanding and knowledge.

 

But then it goes on to talk about how this descendant of Jesse will act as judge, but he will judge not based on what sees and hears with his eyes and ears.  No, most likely by the Spirit of the Lord who rests upon him; and his judgment will be just and righteous and faithful.  He will make judgments for the poor and needy and will slay the wicked with his breath… Now this part of the prophecy seems to have been left unfulfilled… at least so far…

 

While this passage is about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Messiah, there is still some of this passage awaiting fulfillment… He will come again; there will be a final judgment, but the day this passage refers to – the Day of the Lord – this day clearly hasn’t happened yet…especially as we keep reading.

 

If we keep going, we read about wolves and lambs, leopard and goats, lions and cows laying down and eating at peace with each other.  It’s like a picture of some utopian place not unlike how I imagine the Garden of Eden to have been.  But it’s probably more than just that too… surely it’s no accident that in each of these examples it is predator and prey who are at peace with each other; it’s not just random animals – it is a pictures of enemies at perfect peace – prey lying down, making itself vulnerable to the predator who would normally devour it, but having such peace that it trusts its natural enemy perfectly with it’s own life.  It says children will be able to play near venomous serpents without fear of harm.

 

This reminds us of the story from Genesis when God curses the serpent for deceiving Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.  He says in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”  According to the scriptures, ever since sin entered the world, there has been this “enmity” between serpents and young children, but this prophecy speaks of more than just a time when serpents won’t hurt children… it speaks of a time when even this curse born of sin and deceit will be broken and true peace will reign again in the kingdom of the Messiah.  And all of these things are considered signs of his reign and his kingdom and it goes on to say that all the nations will rally to him… Well, this certainly hasn’t been fulfilled yet, right?  I haven’t seen this sort of utopian existence anywhere just yet… So what do we do with it?  Just go on about our lives waiting for it to happen?

 

I think that as we read this passage, we find ourselves in a place somewhat similar to the place the people of Israel must have been in when they read Messianic prophecies before the time of Jesus.  We don’t completely understand it… we don’t know exactly how or when it will be fulfilled.  But just like them, we don’t just sit idly by and just wait for it to happen.  Surely they didn’t read about a Messiah who would reign with justice and righteousness and then go on about living lives in contradiction to the sort of kingdom the king was preparing them for.  No, they anticipated his coming.  They waited expectantly for him to come and they tried as best as they could to prepare themselves for that day.  And so should we.

 

Here’s where I would like to draw a distinction – between waiting and anticipating.  Waiting is passive.  To wait implies to do nothing about things – to be inactive until something you expect to happen happens… I wait for a bus to come.  I wait in line to be buy things… But we shouldn’t just wait for Jesus to return.  We should anticipate it.  To anticipate something implies that we perform actions before the thing we expect to happen actually happens.

 

Good basketball players have an ability to anticipate the actions of their teammates before they actually do them.  Coaches teach their players not to pass the ball to where their teammate is, but to where they are going to be.  Sometimes they have to pass the ball before the player who is going to receive the pass has even had time to look yet… but because they know each other and their game plan so well, they can act in faith, anticipating that they will do what they are supposed to do.

 

If we are to anticipate Christ’s coming, as opposed to just waiting for it, we will give ourselves to preparing ourselves and our world for His return.  This means that we will do a lot of different things:  we need to proclaim the message of his gospel – introduce those who do not yet know him to the gospel message, so that upon his return, they too will be able to recognize him.  It means we need to live as fully as we can into his kingdom here and now.  It means that we practice now the things that we were made to live out fully in his kingdom – things like forgiveness and mercy, kindness and gentleness, justice and service, grace, love, and like our passage for today so obviously deals with, peace… we give ourselves to making peace.

 

Centuries ago, Isaiah proclaimed that the Messiah would come and that Spirit of God would be upon him and that his kingdom would be a place defined by true peace – the kind of peace where sin’s curse is broken and even enemies will curl up beside each other – all divisions will be no more and the whole of creation will be united under the leadership of the true King who rules with justice and righteousness.

 

We now know who that King is – it’s Jesus Christ, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born to Mary in Bethlehem – the Son of God and the Savior of the world who gave his life as a ransom for sin and who the Spirit of God raised from the dead – in whom we find life and in whom we too, have the hope of resurrection from the dead.  He said that he would come again and the scriptures clue us in as to what his return will look like as well as what sort of things will define our heavenly reality after his return.

 

So, how do we give ourselves to anticipating his return – especially as it pertains to the picture of peace presented to us in our text for today?  If we know that God will one day restore all of creation to true peace, what do we do to anticipate that reality instead of just sitting idly by and waiting for it to happen?  Well, for one, we become peacemakers – for a couple of reasons.  First, because just participating in peace-making in the name of Jesus – just doing that alone – is prophetic.  It’s a physical, real demonstration of what God is about and it proclaims to those around us what kind of God, God is.  It prepares people to see what peace looks like it so that when the Prince of Peace returns, they will recognize him for who he is.  Secondly, we engage in peace-making because living at peace is like practice for living in the kingdom of God.  In as much as we can, we live in his kingdom now and we live at peace with those around us, but we also anticipate the day when literally all hostilities will end and peace is the norm.  Today, we have the opportunity to learn (like a training ground) to learn how to live in that kingdom – both now and not yet… today, but also in eternity.

 

Now, I can’t make wolves stop craving the meat of the lamb or make the lion and cow graze on grass together… but I can give myself to interceding on behalf of those who are caught in the midst of strife and division.  I can make the conscious choice to seek out places of conflict and humbly give myself to seeking resolution.  Some may say, “Well, I can’t bring world peace”, but some people give their entire lives to working toward just that.  Others might say, “If we can’t fully usher ourselves into peaceful existence, why waste our time trying?”  Because, for one – it is part of who we are – what we were made to do by our Creator God.  And also because every little bit that we do in the name of Christ matters.  What a privilege to be united in him, one Body of Christ, invited to participate with him in the healing of the nations, the mending of broken relationships, the reconciling of differences that used to create divisions.

 

It’s like the conservationists say, “Think global, act local”.  In our passage for today we get a glimpse of global peace… peace on such a grand scale that we can’t make it happen.  Nevertheless, it is a peace that we can anticipate, that we can get a foretaste of; it is a peace that we can work toward in our relationships with family, friends, coworkers, you name it… It is a peace that we don’t make on our own, but a peace that we find in Christ.  There are many ways we can give ourselves to this sort of living – this sort of anticipating his return and the peace he will bring.

 

Maybe it starts with forgiving someone who you’ve been holding a grudge against.  Maybe it starts with being honest about your part in a conflict or disagreement and seeking forgiveness that you need.  Maybe you see others who are torn apart by whatever divides them and it starts with praying for them – interceding on someone’s behalf…  Maybe you need to write a heartfelt letter or make a long overdue phone call… Where is there a peace that has been broken in your relationships and how might God be calling you to seek resolve?

 

Maybe you have a heart for a particular issue or injustice – something that your heart sees and hurts for… and you know that a part of the solution – a part of true justice means that people will have to band together and work toward peace.  Maybe you need to give yourself to bringing peace to people who don’t know peace.

 

Maybe you have a boss you don’t like or who doesn’t appreciate you.  Maybe it’s the way you drive… maybe it’s your secret thoughts…

 

You know, what better place to start to give ourselves to making and proclaiming peace than at the Table of our Lord?  Today is communion Sunday and on the first Sunday of every month, we gather at this table and proclaim our faith that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been shown grace and mercy – that because of Jesus, we have peace with God and peace with one another in Christ.  It’s no wonder those Christmas angels sang about peace on earth and goodwill to men.  That’s exactly why he came.

 

He came to bring us peace.  Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Prince of Peace, gave his life that we may have peace with God.  He will come again as king and judge and will reconcile all things unto himself.  On that day there will be perfect peace.

 

Until that day, may we not only come to know the peace of God that passes understanding, but may we give ourselves more fully to peace-making in anticipation of his return… preparing the way… promoting and maintaining peace in our relationships, in our churches and in our world.  Amen.

 

 

Receive these words from the Apostle Paul to the church in Corinth:

May the peace of Christ rule in your hearts since as members of one body, you were called to peace. Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.  Amen.

 

June 27, 2010 – Sermon

June 27, 2010

Sermon

Lectionary Texts:

Ø    1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21

Ø    Psalm 16

Ø    Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Ø    Luke 9:51-62

 

A first glance at the lectionary texts for today might seem like a bit of a paradox… they did to me.   Two of the passages remind us that to be a follower of God is an “all-or-nothing” endeavor that can be wrought with difficulty.  But on the other hand, the Psalm and the passage from Galatians speak of the freedom and ease of living that comes with following the path God lays before us.  So following God is difficult and easy?  Thus the paradox… Is it both tough and easy?  Probably, but if so, then how is it tough and how is it easy?  That’s kinda the question I think our texts deal with and so that’s what we will wrestle with as well.

 

Now, I think most people who come to church, come for a variety of reasons.  Some of us do it because it’s part of our family’s routine – on Sunday’s we go to church.  Some of us come because we need prayer.  Some come because we love being with this community.  Others because we are curious about God and we know that church is a good place to hear about him.  Some people just love to worship.  Others need to be encouraged so they can keep walking with Jesus.  Well, no matter why you’ve come to church today, it’s probably safe to say that answering this question – how is following Jesus tough and how is it easy? – where is discipline required and where does it bring or give freedom? – this is a question worth considering and I hope and pray that God will use this time to give us all hope for the kind of life he designed us for in his kingdom.

 

This paradox of life with God as both difficult and easy reminds me of a session Kate and I had with our marriage counselor.  During our engagement, we thought it was important to meet with a pastor or someone who could help us make sure we were on the right track, moving toward a godly marriage and future family.  Well, Kate’s dad was performing our wedding and we didn’t want him to be our counselor, so we asked one of my seminary professors to do it.  Klyne Snodgrass is his name and he basically wrote the Covenant church’s publication on a biblical and theological view of divorce and remarriage.  It’s an extensive document and it’s as much about marriage as it is about divorce or remarriage.  A biblical view of marriage helps shape a biblical view of divorce.  If anyone was going to have good, biblical insight into what it takes to have a healthy, godly marriage, it was going to be Klyne.  The other thing he had going for him was that his wife and Kate worked together and we had plenty of opportunities to watch and observe how good his own marriage was and is.  Since he was well armed with Biblical knowledge about Christian marriage and his own marriage was one worth aspiring to as an example for us, we considered him a natural choice… but then, there at that first meeting – he said such unexpected things… well, really, only one thing was unexpected, but it was so fundamental to the whole philosophy of being married and it was so different from what everyone else was saying, that for a while afterward, I just didn’t know who to believe.

 

He told us that being married is one of the easiest and most natural things you can do.  I mean that’s it… word for word, he said, “marriage is easy”.  And he wasn’t trying to spin some angle where he could explain how its easy if you look at it from some different perspective or something.  He just meant it.  Marriage is easy.  And he was speaking from experience.  He said that being married to Phyllis (his wife) was one of the easiest things he’d ever done and he thought it should be just as easy for anyone and everyone else.  He believe that the key to his marriage being easy was a promise that they had made while they were still dating.  He said that they promised each other years and years ago that they would always (with no exceptions) be honest with each other.  That meant that they could ask each other anything and they would always be 100% honest and forthcoming – humble when at fault and forgiving and full of grace.

 

Well, that sounds great, but there I was, a 27 year old seminary student who had been dating this woman for about 8 or 9 months, planning a wedding, but full of baggage that I am not proud of at all.  I didn’t and still don’t get excited about opening up that bag of past sins or hurts if asked about them.  And I know my own tendencies – how I am prone to selfishness and sin.  Committing to being completely forthcoming and honest in all situations wasn’t probably very high on my priority list.  I’m introverted naturally anyhow – keeping feelings and secrets buried – that’s what I’m good at.  Being honest and vulnerable is incredibly difficult for me.  But there it is right?  Following Klyne’s premise that marriage is easy leads me to a place where I realize that it’s only easy if I fully give myself to it…which was going to be difficult for me.  Oh, he told us that he knew his words were going to go against everything that everyone else was telling us – that marriage is tough – hard work.  May people say that you have to be willing to weather the dry and difficult times in order to experience the fruit and blessings of being a family… But he was saying something else… The difference between the two perspectives isn’t even so much that one is right and the other is wrong.

 

It’s that one looks at the relationship and fundamentally trusts, while the other doesn’t.  If we expect to fail and hide our failures – if we expect to be hurt and slow to forgive – if we expect to have conflict and insist on being right – then yes, it will be difficult – not just in marriage, but in life in relationship to anyone.  But if we really, fundamentally trust that we can know grace and the One who gives it, then those inevitably difficult things sure get a lot easier.

 

Well, I think our scriptures for this morning remind us of the truth that this paradox is never truer than when speaking about life with God.  And that’s where we’re going this morning: God calls us to make a fundamentally difficult choice to go all-in, to surrender to him, but while it is difficult – it’s really not.  As Galatians reminds us that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  We are freed from the false security and sense of our own control in life and we are freed to give control to our maker… we are freed FROM sin and death and we are freed TO something… to follow Christ and live in his kingdom.

 

So there, I’ve gone ahead and given away the ending… J And I hope that it’s helpful that I have – so that we can think about that as we process through today’s scriptures and what they mean for our own living.  Let’s pray.

 

PRAY.

 

Well, I probably won’t spend a lot of time this morning wading verse by verse through all of the different texts – partly because there isn’t time enough to do that and partly because with a couple of them, I think it’s enough to just get an overall sense of what this passage is addressing.  Many times, when you look at the assigned scripture readings for a particular Sunday, you can immediately sense a theme developing and you can understand why some people long ago chose to arrange that day’s readings together.  Other times, I find myself wondering what they were thinking…  For today’s sake, I just want to highlight some of them, but spend the majority of time reflecting on the passage from Galatians chapter 5.  Sermon after sermon could probably be written on just the first verse alone… in fact they have.  So, let me confess this first: In many ways, I’m over my head.  I get it; and still I don’t.  I understand the premises of grace and freedom and yet, more often than not, I fail to live in them.  And I don’t like to be reminded of that – I don’t like admitting that I haven’t yet arrived at God’s destination for me – a fact that just serves to show me that I still have more to surrender.  I still haven’t fully trusted him the way he wants us to.  I feel like Peter – the disciple who had some great, amazing moments of clarity – where he trusted Jesus and saw God work and turned around and did something foolish that demonstrated that his faith wasn’t yet perfected in Christ.

 

And honestly, that gives me hope.  It’s easy to look at Peter and dwell on his mistakes and how daft he seemed for so long, and yet God used him in many miraculous ways to build his church and lead literally thousands and thousands of people to faith in Christ.  If that isn’t evidence that there’s hope for us all, I don’t know what is.

 

Well, let’s look at some of the other texts here.  In the passage that was read from 1 Kings, we see Elijah going and placing his mantle upon Elisha, literally calling him to be the next prophet in his place.  Everything (or nearly everything) that a prophet did was symbolic.  And here, Elijah places his mantle on Elisha – like a yoke is placed on oxen.  A yoke is a burdensome thing – it is symbolic of being harnessed for a particular work.  And once God calls Elisha to serve under Elijah, he (Elisha) literally leaves everything – his family, his work, his lifestyle – to follow Elijah and TO BE A SERVANT to Elijah for the sake of God and the people of God… these are some pretty major sacrifices, they certainly would be for us today.  Sometimes, I think it’s too easy to read these stories and forget that this is real – that someone else really made those sacrifices and to consider if we would ever have the courage to do the same.

 

In the gospel passage from Luke, we get three real short stories in which Jesus kinda warns his would-be followers to count the costs before choosing to follow him.  In the first situation, a man comes and offers to follow Jesus to which he replies, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”  The general feeling is, “it’s not going to be easy”.  Jesus kinda says, “hey, make sure you’re really in for this.  Giving yourself to following me means to basically be volunteering for homeless ministry – and not ministry to the homeless – ministry as a homeless person.

 

In the second situation, Jesus tells someone to follow him, but he wants to go bury his parents first and Jesus has harsh words for him too: “Let the dead bury the dead – you, proclaim the kingdom of God”.  The implication here is that the man is of two minds – he wants to follow Jesus, but he wants to do what is right in his other life – his life before meeting Jesus – and Jesus strongly reminds him that his call is a call away from the old life and a call to a new life ordered by God’s principles, not peoples’.

 

The Third situation is a lot like the second, but this man only wants to go back and say goodbye to his family.  Even then, Jesus responds with “No one who looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God”.  The obvious feeling here is that the call to discipleship is an “all or nothing” kind of call.  You can’t even want to say goodbye to the old life, because that betrays the fact that we still yearn for it in some way.

 

It’s like the person who wants to quit smoking, so they go out to smoke their last pack before quitting.  How often does that work?  Their actions betray the fact that they still hunger for it.  They don’t really want to quit – or at the very least they want both – to quit and not to quit… it’s like being torn in two directions.

For me, it’s like dieting.  Right before I go on a diet, the temptation is to eat dessert or something that I know is bad for me because it’s my last chance before I have to impose a higher level of self-control… but that can only last so long anyhow.  I don’t have the will power to resist the temptation of a big bowl of ice cream forever… maybe I can resist it once or twice or even for a year, but not forever.  Eventually, I’m gonna cave as long as I love it and want it so much.  And really, I think it’s all in how I look at it.  If dieting is all about denying those impulses, then it’s hard – then it’s difficult – maybe even impossible.  But the longer I give myself to healthy living, the more I love this kind of life.  The healthier I am, the more I can do, the better my chances of being around for my family, and frankly the more enjoyable life really is.  Following Jesus is similar in that it doesn’t necessarily sound easy – especially at first and even more so if we still love the old life too much to want to leave it behind.  It feels a lot like something we shouldn’t even try to do unless we are going to be able to give our all to it…

I’m actually quite convinced that my first impression of this passage and others like it in the gospels has often been wrong.  I’ve often read the words of Jesus and thought he was warning his potential followers to count the costs, because following him would be such a rigorous and difficult series of selfless tasks to perform… that Jesus is warning people about the costs of following him because it was going to be so tough and tiresome.  And yet, when you think about it – the same Jesus who said these words of warning also said that his yoke is easy and his burden is light.  It’s only tough and tiresome if we don’t really give ourselves to him alone – if we stay on the fence, wanting what’s on both sides.  This passage from Luke is seems actually more in line with Jesus’ teaching about money when he says “No one can serve two masters”… you will either love one and hate the other or hate one and love the other.  Discipleship to Jesus is an all-or-nothing thing, but it’s not supposed to be scary and difficult.  It’s just that following Jesus requires complete surrender to him and so we can’t follow Jesus and someone else or something else.  It’s gotta be Jesus only or not at all… that’s the tough part.  But as the other passages we read this morning remind us, once we get over that hurdle, with God’s help things tend to get easier.

This isn’t some promise that once you follow Jesus, all your problems in life will get fixed or that sort of thing.  Following Jesus doesn’t immediately and utterly do away with the effects of sin in our world, but it does free us from the death that comes with sin.  Psalm 16, which we read at the beginning of the service as our call to worship speaks of life with God like this: “You make known to me the path of life; you … fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”  The path of following God and his will for us referred to as the “path of life” – it is the path that gives life – real life… the kind of life that Jesus called abundant life.  I don’t think that abundant life and blissful, pain-free life are necessarily one and the same thing.  In fact, the abundant life can seem to us like a difficult thing at times.  When I was in high school and college and began following Jesus more seriously, the rest of my family pretty much stayed the same and I wasn’t able to share these new experiences with them and in my home, following Jesus at times was something that alienated me from those who were supposed to be closest to me.  That doesn’t mean that life was worse or that I failed to experience abundant life – I knew the life that Jesus gives and in fact – that was what was able to get me through the tough times at home during those years.

I think that we tend to see it as difficult, because we struggle to get over that initial hurdle of surrender.  And so we surrender for a week at a time or a day at a time or even a season at a time.  It’s especially easy for me to see right now, having come back form Bible Camp only a couple weeks ago.  Students come to Bible Camp and have dramatic experiences with God because of the way camp is structured… every day for a week, they are pointed toward what God wants to say to them and it gets easier to surrender to his will.  But the stories of what happen when everyone goes home are consistently that it gets more difficult to stay true to those decisions they made at camp.  Back at home, we experience the pull back to the life we knew before we surrendered to God.  And so many people describe this struggle in terms of trying to “stay good” or be “good”.

 

One of the most powerful things I heard this year at Bible Camp came from Curtis Ivanoff, who was the main speaker for high school camp.  When addressing the struggle to try to be good, he put it in these terms (and he might have got it from someone else; I don’t know).  He said, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good; he came to make dead people live”.  JESUS DIDN’T COME TO MAKE BAD PEOPLE GOOD; HE CAME TO MAKE DEAD PEOPLE LIVE”.  That’s it!  That’s exactly it.

 

Too often we boil our faith down to trying to live a good enough life – following the rules – even for good reasons, but Jesus’ call on our lives is consistently the same.  Deny yourself and follow me.  It’s hard to follow Jesus if we are torn by our own desires to do what we want, but somehow, it’s a lot easier when we actually let go of our love for the life we leave behind – when you trust him completely and live in him, you find real life – the life you’ve always wanted, the life you were made for.

 

All morning long I’ve been calling that part of life in Christ the easy part.  It’s difficult and it’s easy – but maybe easy isn’t the best choice of words.  How about “freeing”?  I think following Jesus is supposed to be easy in the sense that it’s supposed to be the natural way of living that God intended for us – but in a world ruled by sin, that’s not always easy as we tend to think of it – when we think of easy, we usually think of something where we don’t experience any hardships, where we don’t experience pain, where it requires little to no effort to accomplish things… that’s easy by our definition.  So how about freeing?  That’s the way that Paul describes it in Galatians 5.  In verse 1, he says “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm then” he says, “and don’t let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery”.  There’s that image of a yoke again.  Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden is light and here Paul says Christ has set us free so that we are not burdened by a yoke of slavery.

 

Now, we’re gonna have to follow someone or something.  Too many times I’ve heard pastors quote Bob Dylan on this topic – “You gotta serve somebody”… but he’s right.  Nowhere in the Bible does it imply that God wants to free us to be completely independent creatures or people – an island all to ourselves.  God sent his son Jesus into this world to die and rise again, so that he could free us from sin and the death that comes with it, but ever since the very beginnings, God has always called his people to serve Him – because that is what we were made for – that is where we experience true life.  Even way back in the days of Israel’s slavery to Egypt, God sent Moses to go free his people from the hand of Pharaoh – so that they could serve the one true God.  God called Abraham to obedience to him.  Jesus’ sacrifice frees us from the burden of sin, but it frees us from that so that we are FREE TO do what we were made for – serve and live for the one true God whose Spirit raised Jesus from the dead and in whom we live and move and exist or have our very being.

 

Certainly, we can know that Paul assumed this when he wrote that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  All we have to do is look at his example set forth in the rest of our passage for today.  Verses 13-25 are in many ways an explanation of what he means.  He urges his readers not to use that freedom to indulge their sinful desires… the desires basically, of their human life before surrendering to God.  Instead, he urges them to do something that seems like the opposite of freedom – he says, use your freedom to serve your neighbor in love.  We usually think of freedom as a release from servitude to something and yet Paul says we ought to use our freedom in a way that leads us into servitude to God and our neighbors.

 

And he tells us how to do that as well.  Live by the Spirit.  For Paul, in most of his letters, he has two categories for living: (1) Living according to the flesh, which is always in contrast to the second (2) Living in Christ – a reality made possible by God’s Holy Spirit and our surrender to Him.  In this passage he lists off a bunch of different things that are evidence of who we serve.  Serving our sinful desires results in sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissentions, factions, and envy.  That’s certainly not an exhaustive list, but I think it’s quite easy to see where he’s going with that sort of thinking.  Paul goes on to say that serving our God and neighbor by living by the Spirit results in the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  This too is not likely to be an exhaustive list, but it’s not hard to see the kind of life that comes from living by the Spirit.

 

As a youth pastor, I can’t even begin to think of how many times I’ve seen a curriculum for youth groups that walks through the fruit of the Spirit, one-by-one and teaches students how to work on developing these sorts of things in their life – and usually it goes something like this: If you want to be more patient, you need to be put in situations where you aren’t typically patient so that you can work on it.  If you want the fruit of self-control, you need to get into situations where you usually aren’t self-controlled and pray and ask God to give you self-control in that instance.  But I just don’t understand this passage that way.  I’m pretty sure Paul is saying that the fruit of the Spirit comes from living by the Spirit, the result of which is a life characterized by all these things (at once).  It’s not a list of things to work on one-by-one until you’ve got them mastered.  Mastering them through discipline and hard work is completely the opposite of free living, isn’t it?  That would be more like exchanging the yoke of sin and death for the yoke of hard work or doing good things… essentially the yoke of trying to do for ourselves what God promises to do for free through his Holy Spirit.

 

Now this is where I have to admit this passage gets it’s teeth for me.  As I was reading and studying in preparation for this sermon, the author in one of my commentaries put it very bluntly and it really hit home for me.  He says, “I know of NO Christian parents or youth leaders, or for that matter any pastors who SERIOUSLY believe what Paul teaches in verses 16-26, that the sole foundation of Christian (living) is dependency on the Spirit and a life of freedom in the Spirit.” He essentially says, it sounds nice and all, but we’ve decided that we can’t possibly take Paul seriously on what he says in Galatians because it threatens the structured faith and way of life we have set up for ourselves.

 

Consider this for a minute though.  The very reason that Paul wrote this letter to Galatians is because of the fact that the church in Galatia had been infiltrated with new teachings by a group of people we call the “judaisers”.  They essentially were preaching salvation in Jesus AND the systems and practices of the Jewish faith.  Paul is explicitly clear in his contradiction of these new teachings – Life in Christ frees us from any and all systems based on the legalism of any kind and frees us to live by the Spirit.  Paul knew that anyone who lived by the Spirit lived a life characterized by the fruit of the Spirit – especially love of God and love of neighbor.

 

So the question he leaves us asking is “What sort of freedom and life do we promote among those who follow Jesus?”  Maybe it is difficult to surrender completely initially, but our scriptures remind us that on the other side of that surrender is supposed to be freedom that comes form living by the guidance of God’s Spirit.  Is the life we are teaching a life based on freedom in the Spirit or is it much more like the legalistic teachings of the Judaizers?  I would say that more often than not, we tend to promote legalism and structured living… it’s okay to admit it.  It’s better to admit it and move forward into greater dependence upon God and His Spirit.  That can be really uncomfortable though – especially for the church community.  How can we confess Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and live in tension within the Christian community?  Why can we then be so torn and divided over things like theology and practice if we are united by his Spirit?  Why is it that individual Christians claim to have the Spirit but show so little of his power and his love?  How can Christians claim to live in the Spirit but spend so much time out of step with the Spirit?  If we are to move forward into freedom, we have to be willing to ask these questions, but also have to be willing to consider that the answers to them will sting, and we have to be willing to be moved further and further away from trusting ourselves and moved closer and closer into a trusting dependency upon God.

 

If we’re going to do that though, we ABSOLUTELY MUST believe that God’s Spirit really is sufficient for us… that following Jesus really can be done (and done easily with freedom) by nothing more than being led by His Spirit.  In Galatia, there was a conflict among the people because they had surrendered their lives to living according to the flesh in the name of freedom.  The flesh was given the upper hand.  Paul entered that stage and sent them a message that following Christ is supposed to be freeing and when God’s people live in the free Spirit, they don’t find it to be so difficult.  What Jesus did on the cross and through his resurrection frees us from something that oppresses and condemns us and it frees us to someone who offers us life… real life.

 

May God give us ears, hearts and minds to discern his Spirit’s leading and the freedom to live according to his direction.

 

 

Charge and Benediction: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery… You, my brothers and sisters were called to be free, but do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another humbly in love.”  May God give us the

 

10.10.10 The Fortune Cookie Sermon

10.10.10

Sermon

2 Kings 5:1-15

Psalm 111

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Luke 17:11-19

 

 

Psalm 111 – Call to worship

 

Good morning.  Next Sunday, my sons are being baptized and I was supposed to share with you then a little bit about Isaac’s story and how God influenced us to come to be his foster parents and eventually to adopt him.  But as I got to working on today’s sermon, I kept reading Naaman’s story from 2 Kings – trying to decide which part of the story to focus in on, and the part that kept resonating with me is Naaman’s reluctance to let God’s will be accomplished in God’s way as opposed to his own… something that I think I have struggled with throughout the process of welcoming Isaac into our home and family.  Originally, I wanted to overlook Naaman’s struggle to let go of how he thought things should be done, and just head straight to the end of the story and to Naaman’s gratitude.  After all, this passage of scripture was paired with the gospel passage from Luke, which is about the healing of the ten lepers and how only one came back to express his gratitude to Jesus.

In both stories, God heals someone of a skin disease and in each case, they are commended or recognized for their insistence on expressing gratitude to the God who heals.  And yet, once I began to spend more time with these passages apart from each other, the more I needed to realize that although they are grouped together in the lectionary readings for today, they were not written as a pair.  They come from two completely different eras in the history of the people of God and they deserve to speak for themselves.  The beauty is that all scriptures reveal to us the truth of God and while they were not written as a pair, they were grouped together with the notion that they share some common truths.  God is a God who heals – even those thought to be outside of his people – and the appropriate response to God’s healing actions is praise and gratitude, because even in our expressions of thanks to him, He is honored and the truth of God is revealed even more.

But, rather than jumping to those conclusions right off the bat, I’d like to spend some time looking at the Old Testament passage about Naaman and then jump the gun a little and share with you this week instead of next week about the way God chose to reveal himself to me in the process of becoming Isaac’s dad.  I thought about finding a volunteer who could offer their testimony and give some sort of a public expression of gratitude and thanksgiving but my heart is just bursting with thanks to God for what he has done and in many ways, that’s kinda the point.  When God reveals himself to us in tangible ways, it’s not about us – it’s about Him – and we just can’t help but tell everyone else about it… it’s something we can’t – and wouldn’t ever want – to contain.

But first, before we even dig into the story from 2 Kings, lets approach God together and ask Him to open our hearts and minds to hear directly from him today.

PRAY

Okay, if you have your Bible, I would like to invite you to turn to 2 Kings chapter 5, verse 1.

Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram.  He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram.  He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.  Now bands of raiders from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.  She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria!  He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Naaman went to his master and told him what the girl from Israel had said. “By all means go”, the king of Aram replied.  “I will send a letter to the king of Israel”.  So Naaman left, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousands shekels of gold and ten sets of clothing.  The letter that he took to the king of Israel read: “with this letter I am sending my servant Naaman to you so that you may cure him of his leprosy”.

As soon as the King of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, “Am I God?  Can I kill and bring back to life?  Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy?  See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!”

So, here we have Naaman – a commander in the Aramean army who hears a rumor that there is a prophet in Israel who might be able to cure him of his skin disease.  So, he goes to his king and asks permission to see if he can find this man who might be able to heal him.  The king of Aram not only agrees to send him, he sends a personal letter to the king of Israel asking him to see that the healing takes place.  The letter freaks out the king though – he knows he isn’t God and he assumes that the king of Aram is basically trying to pick a fight with him because he wants to go back to war, which of course he isn’t.  When rumor reached them that there was a prophet in Israel that could heal even leprosy, it was probably a safe assumption that this prophet – whoever he was – would be a part of the kings official court.

Of course he wasn’t. This was just the first in a longer line of wrong assumptions Naaman made about what was required for his healing.  Elisha was the man of God whom they had heard about, but he wasn’t working in service to the king. Now, Naaman was a guy who was a commander in his army – he had horses and chariots with him, even silver and gold for the man who could heal him.  He knew that he was a big deal and he figured that if there was a prophet who could heal him, that prophet would be at the king’s palace and it would create and big to-do.  He had to be surprised to find out that this miraculous healer he had heard of didn’t fit the description set forth in his own expectations.  Now, let’s pick the story back up in verse 8:

When Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king had torn his robes, he sent him this message: “Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel.”  So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house.  Elisha sent a messenger to say to  him, “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”  But Naaman went away angry and said, “I thought that he would surely come out to nme and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy.  Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?  Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?”  So he turned and went off in a rage.

Okay, it’s one thing that this prophet isn’t a part of the king’s court, but when Naaman gets to Elisha’s house, the prophet doesn’t even have the decency to come out and greet this foreign dignitary.  He just sends his servant outside and tells them to leave – “go wash in the Jordan seven times and you will be cleansed”, he says.  And this just sends Naaman over the top.  He flies into a rage… This isn’t anything like I expected.  Here, I’ve come all this way to come and meet some great and powerful man who can heal me and he doesn’t even come talk to me!  He doesn’t even do anything.  He tells me to go take a bath and I’ll be healed. THIS ISN’T HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK!  He’s supposed to come out and call on the name of God and wave his arms and shout and yell and then I’m supposed to be better!  And so what does Naaman do?  He leaves – furious with the prophet and this whole process, he just leaves.

It’s his servants who have the wisdom to give him some perspective.  It’s interesting that it’s his wife’s servant girl who knows to send him to Elisha and it is his own servants who are wise enough to get him to listen.  Even in these minor details we get a picture of a God who is not partial to kings and commanders, but who is capable of being known and recognized by even the servant s and the least of these.  Let’s take a look (verse 13):

Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it?  How much more then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.  Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God.  He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in the world except in Israel.  So please accept a gift from your servant.”

The prophet answered, “As surely as the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will not accept a thing.”  And even though Naaman urged him, he refused.

Finally, after his servants talk some sense into him, Naaman somewhat reluctantly agrees to do what the prophet’s messenger told him to do.  You gotta think that this whole trip in many ways was a sort of a hail mary – a last resort.  Naaman had probably spent a long time trying to figure out some way to be cleansed of his skin disease and I’ve got to imagine that in the back of his mind, he was thinking all along that it was a long shot.  So imagine his disappointment when his desperation cry wasn’t going anything like he’d imagined.  Here he’d come all the way to Israel and the prophet wouldn’t even see him.  For whatever reason, his servants are able to talk some sense into him.  They’re like, “C’mon sir – you’ve come all this way.  Why not give it a try?  It’s worth a shot that it’ll work isn’t it?”  And sure enough, swayed by their encouragement, he goes down to the Jordan, takes a dip and it works.  He is healed!  I like to try to imagine his disbelief and yet I wonder if that wasn’t part of the plan all along from God’s perspective…?

Too often we have our own ideas of who God is and what he wants for us or for the world… and pretty much anytime we try to put our expectations on God, he always exceed those expectations.  God is just too big to be defined by what we expect him to be.  Naaman expected God to work according to his world view, within the confines of how he understood things to work.  He was an important man in his country and he expected to come and meet with an important man in Israel and through their meeting, the God of Israel would perform some supernatural, miraculous sign or wonder.  In many ways, Naaman didn’t go to Israel to be healed by God; he went to be healed by Elisha – this prophet of whom he had heard.

And somehow, Elisha must have known this.  Perhaps God had revealed this him and told him what to do?  Elisha doesn’t even come out and meet the guy until after he is healed.  Remember what the servant girl had told her master – about the prophet who could heal.  It was not Elisha who could heal Naaman at all; it was the Lord – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who had the power to cure his disease.  It’s as if God keeps directing Naaman’s circumstances in a way that he has no other option than to realize that his idea of God was too small.  God was not some power to be harnessed by a prophet, priest, magician or anything else…  God alone was the one who could heal and it was the prophet’s place to simply listen to God and speak on his behalf.  The truth is, Elisha really didn’t do much of anything in this whole episode.  He told the king to send Naaman to him and then he sent his messenger to go deliver God’s instructions to the commander.

Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t accept Naaman’s gift of gratitude.  His refusal to accept the gift further testifies to the fact that it wasn’t Elisha who healed him.  He just pointed Naaman in the direction of the God who could heal him.  We only have what we have in this scripture passage to reference as far to what all happened, but I’ve got to imagine that this isn’t probably a word for word dictation of the actual event.  Perhaps more was said that just what we have here.  It does say that Naaman came to understand that the God of Israel was the one and only God.  It does say that when Elisha refused his gift of thanksgiving, Naaman took with him a bunch of Israeli dirt home with him to Aram.  And it doesn’t say why, but the belief is this.  People then (Naaman included) probably believed that God literally resided in Israel and was present only there.  Israel was the Holy Land and so the only appropriate place to build an altar to the God of Israel would have been on Israeli soil.  It mates me wonder if when refusing the commanders gift, Elisha didn’t explain to him that if he wanted to thank the Lord God, he should follow him alone.  Naaman probably went home and built an altar on that soil so that he could continue to thank God with his devotion and worship from then on.

Now, I said that I was going to share with you the story of our son, Isaac.  Actually, what I want to do is share with you the story of God’s involvement that led to Isaac coming into our home.  The story starts back in seminary when I experienced a conviction that God had called me to someday adopt a child – as a part of my own walk with him and as a part of the way he was calling me to live… and when Kate as Kate and I began to date each other and even got married, we both expected this would be a part of our family’s life together… but the story really kinda starts on a Friday in February, 2009.

I had gone to a meeting in Wasilla that was interrupted by a couple in crisis.  They had come straight to the church for prayer after leaving a courtroom where they had just lost partial custody of their adopted son whom they had adopted almost two years before.  There was no pastor at the church and we ended up praying with them.  At this point in our lives, we had looked into adoption but felt that it was largely something we just simply couldn’t afford financially – legal fees, adoption agencies and so on… Our best option was to wait on God and see if He would present a situation that would work for us…Well, when I got home that afternoon, I told Kate that I didn’t know if I could go down a that road anymore.  I didn’t want to be in that painful place where this couple was.  What if we started to adopt someone and then lost them in the process?  (Can you here the lack of faith in that question?)  That’s where I was though… I didn’t want to get hurt or see Kate get hurt… so I was seriously in a time of crisis.  Was I seriously going to back out of an idea that I had for years thought was what God had been calling us to just because we might get hurt in the process?  I don’t know.

Well, that night, we were sitting around at home, watching TV and I just decided to eat the three leftover fortune cookies from Tuesday night.  We’d had friends over and ordered out, but never ate the cookies.  Well, I ate two in a row and when I read the fortunes on the papers, I chuckled out loud.  I even told Kate that she had to hear this… on the day, I’m ready to back out of the whole adoption plan, I read this.  The first one said “you will gain success in whatever you choose to adopt”.  No big deal right… but when coupled with the second one, it was funny because the other one said “A short stranger will soon enter your life”.  We laughed about it together and I set aside.  It was a while later when I opened the third one – and I had pretty forgotten about the other two – I mean, they were fortune cookies… those things aren’t real.  But when I read the third one, I teared up because even though fortune cookies can’t tell your fortunes and are kinda a big joke, there is nothing that says God can’t use whatever he wants to get our attention.  It stirred my emotions so much that I couldn’t even read it to Kate, I made her read it herself.  It said, “your ability to love will help a child in need”.  She looked at me and we just knew it was one of those moments where God was present in a completely unexpected way and had used that which was secular and profane for his own sacred purposes.  In that moment, I knew that God was encouraging us to stick with it – to go for it, despite the risks.  He wasn’t promising to make it easy.  For all I knew we were in for a rocky road ahead.  But in that moment, the one thing I was sure of was that God really did call us to follow him in this way.  About a month or two later, Isaac was born and within nine days of that, we brought him home.  We were his foster parents for 17 months before we were able to adopt him.  There many moments when we thought we wouldn’t get the privilege to be his forever family and then on August 20^th of this year, it became official.  A number of people here were able to come and be a part of the adoption ceremony and in many ways we owe you a deep, deep thank you for the way that you have all adopted him into this family at First Covenant Church.

Now, let me help you understand my situation that night with the fortune cookies. I was a lot like Naaman.  In my mind, God just does not work this way.  I mean seriously, fortune cookies?!?!  I need something quantifiable if I’m going to testify to it.  I don’t want to sound like someone who actually believes fortune cookies… what will people think of me?  I mean, I’m a pastor for goodness sakes.  If one of my students came to me and said, “I’m thinking about making a major life decision because of a fortune cookie I just read” I would stop them right there and point them to the Bible – not their fortune cookies!  And yet, there I was.  Confronted by what I knew to be true about God’s self revelation and what I thought I knew to be true about how God would work in my life.  Maybe that’s just it though… just like Naaman, I think that God needed to show me that he is a lot bigger than I expected him to be.  I can’t plan out our life according to how I want God to work it out.  I too, need to trust him the way I often challenge my own students to do.  Elisha’s messenger told Naaman to go bathe in the Jordan – a simple task, but as his servants reminded him, he would’ve been willing to do some grandiose act… why not a simple one.

You know, since bringing Issac home over a year and a half ago, it’s been surprisingly simple.  We haven’t had to do any grandiose things in order to become his parents… sure, we’ve experienced anxiety and had to help him through some health issues, but that’s just what all parents do and we’d have done it for any of our kids without blinking an eye.  I think in seminary when I first thought God was calling us to do this, I thought it would be a really difficult thing, but would also be a great example for other Christians looking for ways to make life-long sacrifices for God.  I actually thought it’d be great to have to do some grandiose things in order to be an adoptive parent… but again, God does need us to do big things in order for him to do with things through our actions.  What he needs us to do – is be faithful… listen… obey… trust.

And as this passage reminds us, as does the text from Luke, when God rewards us with his faithfulness, the only appropriate response is gratitude.  Naaman came running back to Elisha and offered him great wealth but left with the understanding that real gratitude could only be expressed though a life of worship to the one true God.

In Luke, we heard about the time when Jesus healed ten lepers…  well, what he really did when they asked him to have pity on them, was he told them to go show themselves to the priests.  He didn’t flail around and wave his arms or shout incantations… he just said go.  And they obeyed.  On the way, the began to be healed and one them – a Samaritan even (Samaritans were considered something like half-breed and were disrespected by Jews)… this one leper, when he realized he was actually being healed, went running back to Jesus to thank him for what he had done.  Jesus’ response to this man?  “Rise and go. Your faith has made you well.”  Many scholars believe that because of his response this leper, in addition to being healed, also experienced salvation that day.  In any case, we definitely know that Jesus approved of the fact that he came back to thank him and that he was disappointed with the nine who did not return.

The right thing to do when we experience the grace of God is with the proper thank you.  Sometimes that means praying and thanking him; sometimes it means testifying publicly or to a friend or to a stranger – about what God did and why we are so grateful.  Certainly, the way we live our lives – the decisions we make – the relationships we maintain – the money we spend – the witness we are – all these things and so much more will ultimately define how grateful we truly are… because every time we thank him, there is a story to be told.  Today, I told you a story about God giving a home to our son, but we all have stories and they all deserve to be told.  Where has God been faithful to you?  How do you want to express your gratitude to him?  Maybe it’s in a worship song?  Maybe it’s in forgiving someone?  Maybe it’s in giving your testimony someday?  The point is this… the “challenge” if you can call it that… responding with thankfulness shouldn’t be a challenge if we are truly grateful… but in any case, the challenge for us is to live out our lives as an expression of gratitude to God so that others might come to recognize him for who he is as he reveals himself in our everyday lives.

Let’s face it – the Bible is the word of God and Jesus is the fullest revelation of him that the world has ever known.  But not everyone reads the Bible.  Not everyone knows Jesus.  And yet, I don’t doubt for a second that God wants to reveal himself to everyone on this planet.  How are we going to partner with him in that…?  Because if you call yourself a Christian, believe me – people are watching you.  How is the way you thank God for his work in your life going to testify to what God has done so that other will know who God is and what God is all about?  How will we honor him by recognizing that there is none like him?  There is no prescription.  No requisite response.  He gives incredible freedom to respond in accordance with who we uniquely are.

So, as we think about leaving this place, may we all reflect on God’s activity in our lives – in the past as well as the present and may he give us eyes to see that he does not have to work in the ways we want him to.  He is much bigger and wiser than we could ever imagine him to be.  May he continue to extend us the grace to understand who he is as he continues to make himself known and may we all – on our own and as a family here – discover new ways to say a heartfelt thanks.

Pray with me.

 

 

 

4th Sunday of Easter 2010 – sermon (April 25th)

04.25.10

Sermon

 

Good morning. Today is the fourth Sunday of Easter. This means that today we are exactly halfway through the Easter season.  I don’t know what that really means to you and your everyday life.  To the average person… to be honest, it probably doesn’t mean all that much, right?  Great, it’s the 4^th Sunday of the Easter season.  Most of the time, I’m pretty sure that when it comes to Easter, we don’t really think of it at as season at all… we think of it as a day – a day on our calendars in late March or early April, when families get all dressed up, go to church, maybe cook a ham or hunt for Easter eggs and then share a meal together.  Well for sure it’s a day when the church gathers and holds probably the biggest celebration of the entire year.  Easter is that Sunday every year where you know that no matter what else happens at church that day, you know the story of Jesus’ resurrection is going to be told.  Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed!  But seriously, how long does it take to tell that part of the story?  I think we’ve managed very well to neatly package it into a one to two hour celebration each Easter Sunday.  But that begs the question then: “Why does the church traditionally take seven Sundays to celebrate Easter?”

Helen Cepero actually just had an article published in The Covenant Companion where she basically asked this question.  She says, “Is there anything more to be said? We already know and celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death.  Why do we need a whole Easter season after the celebration of Easter Sunday?”  In her article, she makes an argument that just like the disciples, we need a season between Easter and Pentecost in which to allow the hope of the resurrection to enter into our everyday lives.

And that’s why we find it so easy to boil Easter down to a single-Sunday celebration in early spring.  We don’t really think very hard about what difference it makes in our everyday lives.  For the most part, we have taken the single greatest event in human history and boiled it down to something that has nothing to do with human history at all, but only with what happens after that.  Let me explain.  We, who live in time, have concerned ourselves so much with what happens after time exists – we ask questions of heaven and hell and where will we spend eternity – but in doing so, we neglect the importance of the present and how the fact that Jesus is alive right now makes a difference in this world and in our families and in our lives – here and now.

Maybe one of the better ways we have of seeing how this is true is by taking a look that the kinds of songs that we sing.  Especially, the songs that WE sing together – here at First Covenant.  We are a part of a wider church and state where the kind of music we sing varies a whole lot.  But without question, one of the music styles that we really value here is the southern gospel hymn and other songs that can be sung in that vain – songs like In the Sweet By and By, Because He Lives, Victory In Jesus, I’ll Fly Away, I Saw The Light, and so on.  These songs, and so many others like them have become some of the classic hymns of the church, but I’d like to take a minute to think about the message that they send.  And now, it feels like I’m going to harsh or critical of something that we value here, so while I may point out some shortcomings of these songs that we love… bear with me – I promise to stick up for them in the end.

And the truth is, my criticism of these songs doesn’t even apply in every case.  But my criticism is simply this.  Many of these gospel songs are mainly concerned with escaping this world and being in heaven with Jesus some day… and they are explicitly so at the expense of the hope of the resurrection in the present.  Here’s just a few quick examples…

 

Ø    Some glad morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away

Ø    There’s a land that is fairer than day, and by faith we can see it afar, for the Father waits over the way, to prepare us a dwelling place there – In the Sweet by and by we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

Ø    When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation, and take me home what joy shall fill my heart. Then I shall bow in humble adoration, and there proclaim, My God how great thou art!

 

These hymns and songs have a less than subtle message that the present is not what we should be concerned about.  This world and all therein is just something we have to survive, because someday it won’t matter – it’ll be over and we can live with God in heaven.  But friends, the Christian hope is more than that.  If it’s only about the future and heaven, then what happens in the present doesn’t really matter.  We just have to get through it.  It wouldn’t matter how we lived or what we did with our earthly lives – except maybe that we’d be constantly worried about if we were living well enough to actually make sure we get to heaven.  But that’s it – life on earth wouldn’t be about life on earth at all… it’d be about getting into heaven.  And that is a message that just isn’t consistent with the message of Jesus found in our scriptures.

Now, I did say I’d stick up for those songs.  Let me do that, especially since many of them have become some of my own favorites.  I think the reason that so many of our classic hymns are focused on heaven more than earth has a lot to do with the context in which those songs were born.  Take for example a song like I’ll Fly Away.  That’s an old spiritual song that hearkens back to the days of slavery and the oppression of an entire people group.  When life is so hard and so difficult, it is incredibly appropriate to sing of one’s hope of abundant life with God in eternity.  And many of the gospel songs that came out in the last 50 years are songs that were a part of en evangelistic movement in the church.  These were songs that were sung at things like Billy Graham crusades and during altar calls.  The message of that movement is a message of the hope of eternal salvation.  And the promise of life in heaven is a very inspirational thing – it’s motivational too… it leads people to make decisions to give their lives to Christ and it is very appropriate to sing those sorts of songs – especially in those instances.

The place where I struggle is when we, who have already given our lives to Christ, who live comfortable lives and don’t often experience genuine suffering or injustice, stand together to sing of escaping earth and flying off to some other spiritual reality.  We can sing those songs, but we should do so alongside of those who suffer and we don’t sing only those songs… we also need to sing about how we surrender and commit ourselves to the way of Jesus here and now as well.

So, I’m not suggesting that we throw out any of them… in fact, I suggest we keep them and cherish them, but let’s tell the whole story and not just a part of it.  But the point here is just that the songs we sing are a good indication of what we believe and it is very easy for us to try to boil the Easter message – that Jesus rose from the dead – into a message only about God creating a way for us to get to heaven someday.  And as good as that message is, it’s even bigger news than even that.  And because it’s so much bigger than that, that’s cause for celebration – like seven weeks of Easter kind of celebration. Think something more like the biblical feasts and festivals practiced by the Israelites in the Old Testament.  When it was time for a major remembrance or celebration, they really knew how to throw a party.  We’re talking about parties with food and drink, music and dancing, sacrifices… parties that lasted for days and weeks at a time.

But great… so it’s a big deal.  But how is it a big deal and why?  I’m very comfortable and I think most of us are pretty comfortable with the message that Jesus’ resurrection means that he has overcome sin and death and made it possible for us to live for eternity in heaven with him someday.  But when faced with the question, what difference does Jesus’ resurrection make in your day-to-day, everyday life, what sorts of answers do we come up with?  I asked this question on facebook the other day and I got a little bit of a mixed bag of answers and I want to take just a minute right now and ask the same question together.  But I want to do so in this way.  I’d like to ask you to talk to each other.  Turn to your neighbor or neighbors, and if you don’t know them briefly introduce yourself and then answer this question. What difference does the fact that Jesus is alive make in your day-to-day life?   Some real quick instructions first though… Try to answer it in a short sentence or two, but try not to talk about salvation or heaven.  It is absolutely true that Jesus’ death and resurrection made salvation and heaven possible, but for this next minute or so, try to consider what, if any, effects it has here and now.  Okay… go ahead…

 

Alright, let’s briefly try to see what a few people came up with.  If you are willing to share what you came up with, just raise your hand and I’ll call on a couple of people to share their answers.  Anybody willing?

 

Okay, just in case nobody wanted to share their answers, I came prepared with a few of the answers I got when I asked people this question on facebook.  Here’s just a couple of those examples too:

Ø    it means no fear

Ø    it means I’m set free and can live a victorious life

Ø    I can’t put into words what it means to me… I am sinful and wretched and if there is any good in me it is because of Jesus. (11-12 minutes)

 

I don’t have any major problems with any of these answers because I know the people who gave them and I understand that there is more behind each of their words, but when I stop and think about what difference does Jesus’ resurrection make in my day-to-day living, my first inclination is to talk about heaven and not about the what he wants for his people today.  And when I think about that, I think we’ve erred and only told a part of the story… and it seems oddly convenient which part of the story we’ve forgotten to tell…

In an effort to tell this other part of the story, I’d like to turn our attention to the passage read earlier from the book of John.  John 10:22-30…

It’s not too hard to picture what’s happening in this passage.  It’s winter… its during one of the Jewish the festivals and Jesus is walking around, perhaps pacing in Solomon’s porch when he is surrounded by some of the Jews and they come to question him and get him to answer them plainly and openly – “Are you the Messiah or not?” they ask.  And their not asking because they’re excited to finally find the Messiah… their asking him if he’s really claiming to be the One… their question is more like “Are you really so blasphemous as to say that you are the Messiah sent from God!?!”  And while Jesus’ answer seems to imply that yes he is, he doesn’t just come out and say it plainly.  Instead he responds with “eipon humin” – these two words are probably the most important part of this whole passage.  When translated, they mean, “I did tell you” or “I have told you”.  He says, the works that I do in my Father’s name testify for me.

When questioned about whether he is the Messiah, Jesus responds with, I’ve been telling you all along who I am.  Are you still unable to hear me?  Have you not seen all the things I’ve done in my Father’s name?  You’ve been watching me so meticulously and carefully to try to catch me in a trap and yet, you haven’t stopped to take in the big picture yet?  You’ve seen the miracles I’ve performed and yet you are more concerned with whether or not I did it on the Sabbath or whose fault it was that the man was born blind in the first place.  Have you not seen a thing I’ve done or heard a thing I’ve said?

The context is different, but this passage is really reminiscent of the time in Matthew 11:3, when the John the Baptist’s disciples came to Jesus and asked him, “Are you the expected one?”  Jesus didn’t answer them with a simple yes or no either.  Jesus’ answer was this: Go to John and tell him what you see and hear.  “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the good news in proclaimed to the poor”.  The obvious implication is… uh, yeah, that’s me.  So, Jesus says “I did tell you” but you didn’t believe… he says my sheep recognize my voice and they follow me… and he’s implying here that his accusers do not know his voice… Those who are his sheep, he says, “I give them eternal life and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand”.  Jesus is clearly alluding to the promise of resurrection life.

But when exactly does this resurrection life begin?  I think that’s very much a question worth considering.  The promise of resurrection life is something that isn’t only reserved for heaven and life after death.  In each of the other lectionary texts for today, we got glimpses of what resurrection life – life with God, life in Christ – we got glimpses of what that life looks like…

Psalm 23 is probably the most read chapter in our Bibles and the place it gets read most often is almost certainly at funerals.  It is a strong and vivid picture of God tending and caring for his people – his sheep – like the perfect shepherd.  And it’s probably read at funerals so often because it’s the kind of life that we envision in heaven… where God provides for our every need.  But when this was written, David said, “the Lord IS my shepherd.  I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures”.  This was a picture of David’s present reality and his understanding of life with God, not his hope of a someday event.  He obviously thought that this sort of life was possible in the present.

In the story from Acts, we read about a real-life resurrection.  In this story, a woman, Tabitha is raised from the dead… not forever… all assumptions with her are that she dies again someday, but it’s probably no accident that this was the woman who was brought back to live even longer.  The text says in verse 36 that she was “always doing good and helping the poor”.  So when she died, the people there called Peter to come and do something about it.  It says that the widows there were weeping and crying and that they showed Peter the different tunics that Tabitha had made for them. The passage itself does not say why they did this but it’s pretty easy to imagine that this may have been a case where the community really couldn’t afford to lose her.  Tabitha was obviously devoted to caring for the poor and for the widows in this community – her life was all about living out the kingdom of God and, if nothing else, the fact that God through Peter raised her from the dead was at the very least a validation of her way of life.  If nothing else, it was deemed worthwhile to God’s purposes for their present reality that this woman Tabitha, get to live for a little longer.

Now, this doesn’t mean necessarily that God chose to heal or raise only those whose lives were devoted to the kingdom… that would imply that they – or we – could somehow earn that privilege by just living right or something.  This is not about Tabitha and how she earned the right to be raised to new life… not at all… it is about God and his finding ways to reveal himself and his kingdom to his people.  I don’t have good answers about why some people are healed, some receive sight, some are raised from the dead and others are not.  But in this account from Acts, we see that it is possible.  We see that God doesn’t have to wait until we’re in heaven to let us experience life in his kingdom.  We see that he is faithful to make sure his kingdom continues in the here and now and in order to make sure that happened, he gave Tabitha back to the community in Joppa.

And if the resurrection of Tabitha has anything to do with her participation in the kingdom of God, how much more so does the resurrection of Jesus validate his way of living.  Jesus wasn’t shy one bit about saying “I am the way the truth and the life”.  He wanted people to see his way of living and follow suit.  He called each of his disciples to follow him and spent years showing them the kind life God wants for us.

Before Jesus, God gave his people the Torah – the Law.  In a lot of Christian churches, the Law gets a bad rap because we think of it as rules and legalism, but Deuteronomy 30, especially verses15-20 remind us that the Torah was not law like we think of law – it was life.  It was to be followed so that the people of God would

experience the life God designed for them… abundant life… Psalm 23 kind of life.

Well, Jesus told his followers in Matthew 5:17-20 that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.  In other words, everything that the law was supposed to be – Jesus was… only better.  If the law was meant to give life, to instruct God’s people how to live, to reveal God and his nature to people, to give God’s children a picture of what life with God could really look like… if the law was meant to do that (and I would argue that it did), well Jesus did so even more.  He was the epitome of all that the law was at it’s best.  He was the giver and revealer of true life, much more so than the Law ever was.

And his resurrection – the fact that he was raised from the dead – accomplished much… certainly, atonement – the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of reunification between God and His people.  But Jesus’ resurrection also validates the fact that he didn’t deserve to die.  His life was lived the way life is supposed to be lived.  He literally lived out the kingdom of God (what we probably think of as heaven) here on earth.  Remember, he taught his disciples to pray “thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.  Well, that’s what Jesus did and it is what he calls us to do.

When he is questioned in the temple courts about whether or not he’s the Messiah in John 10, he doesn’t just say yes or no.  He says, “I’ve been telling you all along”.  My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.  If we want to follow Jesus, we have to literally exchange our life for His.  In Luke 9, Jesus put it this way: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it”.  How do we experience the resurrection of Jesus in our daily lives – by continuing to live out our baptism – by giving ourselves to what Paul talks about in Romans 6 and Ephesians 2… dying and rising with Christ.

Eugene Peterson just had a book published called “Practice Resurrection”.  It’s a book about growing up in Christ and it walks you through the book of Ephesians.  But the main point, which the title clearly alludes to, is that we don’t grow in Christ unless we give ourselves fully to that.  Jesus said to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow him; Paul said that we die to our sinful nature and are raised to new life in Christ; Peterson looks at these scriptures and says the way we do this is we practice resurrection.  First, I think he’s right.  But second, that sounds really nice and kinda churchy if you don’t read the book.  It sounds great to “practice resurrection”, but if you stop and consider what that means, it doesn’t necessarily keep its appeal for everyone.

Resurrection means to come back to life… and the obvious implication then is…?  In order to experience resurrection, we have to experience death.  You can’t be brought back to life if you don’t die first.  So, the call to discipleship by Jesus and the carriers of his gospel is not just a nice message about how God wants to get us to heaven someday.  The truth is that it is still a great message, but it’s not easy for us to swallow if we happen to live somewhat comfortably and are at all attached to the way of living that we experience right now.  So, we try to boil it down into something we can swallow… we try to think of ways to “die to self” that we think we can handle.  I’ll give up my coffee budget so that I can be more generous with people in need.  I’ll spend one Saturday afternoon each month serving my community at the soup kitchen.  Each of us has a line I think… there is so far that we are willing to go in service to our King.  But we need to continue to hold out that question… “Just how far am I willing to let God call me?”  At what point will I become like the rich young ruler who asked Jesus what he needed to do to enter the kingdom, but walked away because Jesus told him he needed to give up everything?

Thankfully, God is a God of grace and he will take everything that we are willing to give to him, but his call remains the same.  “I want all of you”, he says.  Let your life die… completely… that’s hard… that means all my hopes and dreams – everything I want for my family… those have to die.  They don’t just become secondary to what God wants… they die completely.  They are no longer valid at all… but remember Jesus’ words…. “whoever loses his life for me will save it”… maybe not save those hopes and dreams… but on the other side of this death is REAL LIFE… it’s Jesus’ life.  We don’t get it.  We don’t see how much more valuable that life really is most of the time… but it is.  It is better than we could ever know.  Every time I give myself to that life, I do so in trust and in faith that God really does value things differently than I do and that he will transform the way I see things so that I will understand the gift that a life surrounded by his grace and mercy really is.

When Eugene Peterson talks about practicing resurrection he says, “Resurrection life, as defined by Jesus’ resurrection, is totally different from what we are used to – as different as death is from life… resurrection is not something we add on to everything we are already accustomed to; it makes alive what has been ‘dead through… trespasses and sins.”  Later, he says “When we squander life on anything less than the God revealed in Jesus and made present in the Spirit, we miss out on life itself… when we segregate life into secular and sacred, we confine the so-called sacred into what happens on Sundays and in heaven.   And when we do that, we are crippled, prevented from enjoying the glory of God that pulsates in the so-called secular.  This accounts for the considerable sadness that lies in a blanket like smog over our world… The Christian life was never intended to be a conventional, cautious, careful, tiptoeing through the tulips way of life, avoiding mud puddles, staying out of trouble, and hopefully accumulating enough for good behavior to insure us a happy hereafter.  And the church was never intended to be a subculture specializing in holiness… or perfection.”

So what was is intended to be?  What does resurrection look like in everyday life? It looks like complete surrender and a constant willingness to listen to God’s leading and a willingness to improvise in any given situation.  It looks like dropping off food at the food bank; it looks like listening to someone who has no one to talk to; it looks like praying for your enemies, or sponsoring immigrants, or housing people in tough times; it looks like making meals for people who are hungry, adopting children without families, interceding for God to heal the broken and the sick, becoming peacemakers and entering into conflicts seeking God’s resolution, sharing from what God has given us with those who are less fortunate, advocating for those who are powerless… it looks a lot like Jesus’ life.  Because that’s what we are called to be, right?  The Body of Christ… enabled by his Spirit, we are his people carrying out his life and ministry in this world.

Who does it look like?  How about Mother Theresa?  You may say, well that’s too much.  I can’t do that.  That’s over the top… Well… I think it’s true.  Not that we all have to pack up and move across the world to serve lepers in Calcutta… but even if Anchorage were to become your Calcutta, how do you give your life to live like a Mother Theresa here?  God calls us all to different things; we have different passions and strengths.  But there is no doubt in my mind that he calls us all to resurrection living… dying and rising. I can’t tell you where God is calling you… but he can.  The question each of us has to answer is, will we surrender to him?  If so, on the other side of this death is life – REAL LIFE – the abundant life Jesus talks about in John 10.

And we take seven weeks to celebrate Easter because the good news that Jesus is alive makes all the difference in the world around us.  It’s the message of hope no matter how dark our world or individual situations may be.  There is nothing that cannot be redeemed and brought back to new life through him.  Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed.  May we come to not only a new knowledge of the significance of the fact that he is alive – may we enter more and more into his way of living.  And may you come to know the joy of what it means to practice resurrection.

 

Michigan vs. Notre Dame

Three days ago this game wasn’t even gonna matter.  Oh, it was going to be interesting, but now this is potentially the most interesting game on Saturday.  Sure, it’s not the best or even the matchup with the most talent.  But after the way these teams played (and won) yesterday (and I’ve only heard about them… haven’t even watched them. Is there a way to watch them after the fact on the internet?), this has all the storylines.

As a Michigan fan, I’m biased.  I think Michigan is a better team.  I had no idea Denard Robinson was such a freak.  I just hope he really, truly has some passing accuracy and that he won’t end up being a one trick pony.  You gotta think that the sweater vest will find a way to shut him down if all he does is run no matter how fast he is.  Anyhow, Michigan v the Irish… It’s early in the season and either team can overcome a loss down the road, but whoever wins this game is going to come out looking better than anyone expected and is bound to be ranked. And Brian Kelly makes me nervous.  The guy’s a winner.  Am I crazy?

Saturday’s game between the two college football teams with the highest winning percentages all time is one of those games that could be a nail-bitier all the way, but it could also be a blowout in favor of either team.  Michigan’s defense looked good when it had to against Connecticut, but it was very suspect last year and they say it’s not all that improved.  Personally, I’m kinda pulling for a shootout.  I don’t even get NBC at my house, but you can bet I’ll be at the gym on Saturday morning working out where I can see the television because in my mind, when it comes to college sports, this is must see TV.

Sure Alabama is playing Penn State.  The Suckeyes are playing Miami.  Those should be great games and will be important games in the top 25.  As for my own interest, my eyes will be fixed on the goings on in South Bend.