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sermon from Sunday, July 19

2009-07-20T10:21:00.001-04:00

based on the crucifixion narrative in Mark.

The story of the crucifixion of Jesus is one we more often read than hear sermons about. On Good Friday at our church, we have a simple tenebrae service where we read this story, and a few psalms, and extinguish candles to remember Jesus’ sacrifice for us. It seems foolish, in a sense, to preach about it, because the story itself is so powerful.
I have many memories of hearing the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. I remember going to my grandparents’ church on Good Friday, when I was a boy. They had a tenebrae service too, on a grander scale than ours, but it was dark and spooky, and after they had read the last passage, where Jesus dies and is buried, they sounded a loud gong behind us, designed to shake us and remind us of what happened when Jesus died. That church service inspired me to start a tenebrae service wherever I go, and it is likely the church that we will join when we move.
I remember going to the Methodist church in town when I was very young, just a few years old. They were showing a movie about Jesus’ last days and death, I don’t remember which one. I remember my parents telling me that it wasn’t really Jesus up there, it was just actors; but I remember that it looked to me that the actor was actually nailed to the cross, which really upset me. My parents had to take me outside—I may not have been much older than Grace—because I wouldn’t stop asking about why that man was really being crucified when it wasn’t really Jesus, and was just a show.
I remember watching Jesus of Nazareth, a 1977 movie about Jesus’ life which was shown at Easter time. In that movie, Jesus’ death is brought to life again powerfully, and particularly powerful to me when I was ten or so was not the crucifixion itself, but the long walk to the cross. Here, on the walk to the cross, Jesus is mocked and scourged; he looks at the women who are weeping and says, “Weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children.” And I just remember being powerfully moved at seeing the angst on Jesus’ brutalized face, and still seeing the empathy and love he had for people to the end.
It is a powerful story, to be certain. But sometimes, I think that my understanding of the story was incomplete. It was on the right track, but incomplete. Do you know what the overwhelming thing I experienced in the story of the crucifixion when I was a boy? Sympathy. I looked at that picture of Jesus, all bloodied and bruised, and I thought, “That poor, poor man. What a good man, God in the flesh and no one saw it, no one understood it, and this is what they did to him.” I was overwhelmed by the blood and the gore and the violence and the pathos of it all, and I mostly was just thankful it was him and not me. Seeing a representation of the crucifixion makes you thankful for all that Jesus did on the cross, and it overwhelmed me with a sense of sympathy and appreciation for a God who loved me like that.
To be honest, this way of understanding the crucifixion continues to win the day today. Witness Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson movie of six years ago. It was a beautiful and violent movie depicting the events leading up to Jesus’ death and the crucifixion. I saw it and was moved and touched, although I wondered why many churches were using it as an evangelistic tool. It didn’t seem to me to be the right choice for that, but nonetheless it was a profound work of art with a particular slant on Jesus’ death.
People’s response to The Passion was similar to how I felt as a child—that it movingly portrayed the love of God who died for us. Even Billy Graham said something to this effect: “I doubt if there has been a more graphic and moving presentation of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which Christians believe are the most important events in human history. The film is faithful to the Bible’s teaching that we all are responsible for Jesus’ death, because we have all sinned.” For Billy Graham and most others, The Passion was a meditation on the depths of God’s love for us that he took the punishment so we don’t have to.
Now again, I want to be perfectly clear that I believe that, that Jesus’ death for us is supremely important. But there’s a part of me that has come to believe that is not enough. You see, when we view the crucifixion that way, it becomes trapped in history: it becomes confined to one person in one time—Jesus of 2000 years ago. But throughout the New Testament, it becomes obvious that the crucifixion is more than just a one-time event that changed history. It is that, but it is more than that. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection become the patterns for us to live our lives. In short, it is not simply that Jesus took the pain of crucifixion so we didn’t have to. It is that Jesus took the pain of crucifixion because he also knew his followers would have the pain of crucifixion in their lives. Jesus was not only crucified so we wouldn’t have to go to hell; he was crucified and resurrected to help all of his followers who would be crucified with him.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at these choice passages. Galatians 2:19-20, Paul is describing what his life is like, and he says, “I am crucified with Christ; I no longer live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In that passage, Paul understands his life and changes in his life in terms of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Paul believed that there was something in his life that had to be put to death—not just the bad things he had done, but that he had to completely change his priorities from one thing to another, had to die to one way of life and start living to another way of life, had to let go of one reality and embrace another reality. Jesus’ crucifixion gives Paul the image and the strength and the power he needs to stop being the person he naturally believes he is and to start being what God had called him to be.
Look at 1 Corinthians 15:31, where Paul says, “I die every day, brothers and sisters.” Paul understood the Christian life as a process of being crucified, of putting to death one way of living and embracing another way of life. Jesus himself understood following him to mean this. Remember what he said in Matthew 16: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me.” Self-denial for Jesus is not simply forgoing the ice cream and eating a salad instead; self-denial means choosing to live your life as if you were not at the center of it, but God’s will was at the center of it. And to do that meant effectively that you had to put to death that self-centered way of living. And so Jesus says, “If you want to follow me, here’s where I’m going: and so if you want to follow me, you grab a cross and come along because that’s what following me means.” It means to put to death everything which would hinder you pursuing God with everything you have.
So the crucifixion, according to the New Testament, is not locked in history, confined to one man and one time. The crucifixion is a reality for anyone who wants to follow Jesus; anyone who wants to follow Jesus must put part of their natural being to death. And the fact Jesus was crucified gives us the strength that we need to be crucified in a world which encourages us to spoil ourselves and enjoy what we can while we can.
The image of the crucifixion is profound in this context, because it changes how we see the story. No longer are we sitting at home clucking our tongues at this poor person, beaten and tortured to death for us. Instead, those images leap off the screens, leap out of the pages of the Bible, and become events where we are not watching but we are participating: and we are either the crucifiers or the crucified. Either we are on the sidelines, actively mocking Jesus or passively pretending not to notice, or we are out there with him, in line, with our crosses, with our instruments of death, prepared to pursue truth and the God-centered life even when the world thinks it’s silly or throws up roadblocks in our way. And so the question we all must face is “Am I crucified with Christ?” Have I approached the Christian life as a series of duties which I have to do, or an attitude I have to take on, or a set of intellectual ideas to believe or a group of people to belong to? The Christian life is all of those things in part, but at its heart, the Christian life is a willingness to be crucified with Christ, to lay aside all that hinders us just as he laid aside all that hindered him for the sake of the glory which awaits us both?
Well, this is a bit of a downer of a sermon, don’t you think? Death sentences are rarely uplifting. But you know what is uplifting? This little thought: the fact that Jesus’ death is a template for our death means that Jesus’ resurrection is a template for our resurrection. As we have been crucified with Christ, we will certainly be raised with Christ. Just as the crucifixion was not simply a historical event trapped way back then, the resurrection is not simply a historical event, but it’s for us to live and experience.
When Jesus was raised from the dead, it was an enormously fruitful period of ministry for him. Many saw him and were convinced he was trustworthy and so they left everything to follow him—you would too if you saw a dead person come back to life. An encounter with the risen Jesus left people invigorated, excited, and renewed about what God is doing in the world.
Now here’s a question for you. What if the Bible is telling the truth when it calls us the body of Christ? Because this is what that metaphor means, I think: that Christ’s church is made up of people who identify with Christ so deeply that they have become Christ’s presence in the world. “You are the body of Christ,” says Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:27, “and you individually are members of it.” The overwhelming good news of the New Testament is that we are not mere copies of Christ, we are Christ to a world in need of his touch in a new way today.
And just like an encounter with the risen Christ in history left people renewed and invigorated and freshly dedicated to God, that is what an encounter with the body of Christ should do today; seeing you (or more properly seeing the church) should leave people with that same sense of vigor, and renewed dedication to becoming the people God created them to be, living that abundant life that God has for them as a free gift.
In our home Bible study, we read John 14 and 15 the past couple of weeks. That passage is just astounding because it really makes very plain the way that Jesus’ plan for his disciples is for them not just to worship him, but extend the work that he did—in essence, to be him, aside from the whole being God part. Here’s how he put it: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Do you catch how exciting that is? How different it is than most of us live our daily lives? Jesus’ vision is that just as the Father lived in him and exercised his ministry in total partnership with him, Father and Son but one and the same, in that same way, Jesus wants to live in us and for us to exercise his ministry in total partnership with him. And yes, the difficult thing is that his death is our death; but the amazing news is that his resurrection is our resurrection, and the most amazing thing of all is that his ministry of reconciling the world to God has become our ministry. And his presence with us is not just this crutch for us when we are going through difficult times until we get back on our feet again; but instead his presence is this indwelling, palpable reality in which we naturally do what Jesus would do because we are one with him, just as he is one with the Father.
Today we have borne witness to this amazing reality. Today we welcomed Lily Jenks to the realm of baptized believers. We have watched her symbolically be buried beneath the waters of baptism and rising to new life. Lily, in this is a piece of the amazing reality which God has for you; your life is going to be one of crucifixion and resurrection from now on. You have been marked as Jesus’ and you have chosen to take his name, and so you too must die to self and rise to his desires for your life.
And many of us who have been here have today remembered our baptism. And my prayer for us is that like Lily, we will remember that is what life is. In the upcoming time of transition at the church, you will have many chances to exercise your power. You will shape the church with the decisions you make and mostly with the attitudes you show to others. May your life together bear witness to the crucified and risen Christ, living here among you and wherever God’s people are gathered. May your lives individually and together show forth the crucifixion and resurrection that mark you as a follower of the great King Jesus.

Sermon from Sunday, June 21

2009-06-21T19:10:00.000-04:00

Having trouble getting the audio up here. Will post when available. Based on 1 Samuel 1:1-11, the story of Hannah.

It may surprise some of you that Hannah is one of the more popular baby names for American girls the last few years. In 2006, it ranked as the 8th most popular girl name, which was actually down from its peak—between 1998 and 2000, Hannah was the 2nd most popular girl name for babies in the US. This was a relatively new development, as Hannah was the 91st most popular girl name in the 1980s, the 475th most popular girl name of the 1970s, and the 905th most popular girl name of the 1960s.
There probably is a reason for the recent popularity of the name Hannah, and that is that people don’t really know their Bible very well. Because to give your kid a name like Hannah is not to wish on them an easy life. Hannah is a name that weighs heavy at times, because Hannah had a very difficult time of it, at least at first in her life.
Hannah was infertile. When I was writing this sermon in the study, I wrote, “Hannah battled infertility.” But that was not true: Hannah did not battle infertility because the Bible doesn’t reveal that there was very much that women could do at that time except for pray. There was no scientific knowledge about how ovulation worked and no options for things like in vitro fertilization. Generally couples who faced infertility would have the man sleep with a servant girl who would then be forced to give the child to the couple. One article I read expressed in these terms: in Biblical times they viewed the womb as a mystery; today we view the womb as something over which we express mastery. Today we view it almost as a right that women should be able to bear children, whereas in Biblical times it was simply understood to be part of God’s inscrutable will that there was a certain segment of women who simply could not. “The Lord had closed her womb” is how this text expresses it about Hannah.
The text of the Bible, which often seems blind to modern sensibilities about women, is surprisingly tender when talking about Hannah and how all of this made her feel. Her husband, Elkanah, also had another wife named Peninnah; Peninnah had many sons and daughters and Hannah of course had a deep rivalry with her. Polygamy was not all that common in those days, reserved for the very wealthy who could in essence afford 2 wives and families. And Peninnah, we read, used to provoke her severely and irritate her; we can only imagine what that means exactly—it could be that she mocked her outright or gave her the cold shoulder, we don’t know. And Elkanah, the husband, saw what it was doing to Hannah and it made him feel tenderly toward her. When they would go up to offer sacrifices to the Lord, of course there was meat from the sacrifices; some of that meat was given to the priests who offered the sacrifices and who depended on the people for their food. But most of the meat from the animal was given back to the family who brought the animal to be sacrificed. And this was a special treat because meat was not all that common in those ancient times, even for some wealthier families. And Elkanah would split it all up among the members of his household, but he used to give Peninnah a double portion, because he loved her so much and felt so tenderly toward her. One of the most poignant and sweet parts of Scripture is when Elkanah sees Hannah so sad, and he says, “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” And of course, Elkanah doesn’t get it; few husbands really can get this, even today, I think. But his response is sweet and clueless and tender in a way we don’t often see in Scripture.
While infertility is a uniquely difficult issue, and not all of us have dealt with it, I think there is something in Hannah’s life that strikes a chord in all of us. Unlike modern approaches to infertility, Hannah’s sense was not that something in her body was not working properly. Hannah’s sense was that there was a wonderful blessing out there somewhere that for some reason—some inscrutable, unexplainable reason—was not destined for her. She would never know the joy and blessing of parenthood not because there was something fixable that no one could find but because God had closed off those joys and blessings by closing off her womb. And this is something which we all can appreciate.
We all know what it is like to have something beyond our reach and have absolutely no way to get to it. We were out to lunch last Sunday with our little boy, Jack. And I felt so bad for him because here we all were eating these greasy beautiful cheeseburgers up at Red Robin—and he couldn’t have any! And not only that, when I got out the baby food to feed him, he started smacking his lips because he was so hungry, but of course, he doesn’t know how to get the tops off of jars, and so he just sat there smacking his lips because he couldn’t get the baby food open. His yummy food lay just beyond reach, but he couldn’t get to it. He just couldn’t.
We all have experiences like this in our lives, where we feel unable to obtain something we desperately want. Sometimes in our shallower days, that something is a literal thing, a big-screen television or a fancy new home. But more often, those things that we feel unable to attain that really bother us, that really get under our skin, are deeply painful sorts of things. We want to be able to create a new and different life for ourselves but lack the tools to do so and lack the money to get the tools we need. We see one of our grown children on the wrong path in life, and we want them to take a different path but they will not. We want a cure for a disease that threatens our lives or the lives of those we love. In each of these cases, we cannot control the outcomes. We cannot make money appear out of thin air to go back to school and get a new degree. We cannot make our grown children (or even our children who are still at home) choose a different course in life. We cannot snap our fingers and conjure a cure for cancer out of thin air. In all these things, we may feel a bit like Hannah—for some reason God has marked us for a particular burden to bear in life that some people get marked for. We don’t know why it was us, it is beyond us why this would happen that way. And just like Hannah had no weapons in her fight against infertility, we feel that there is nothing that we can do to change this.
And yet Hannah did do something. She got up after eating and she went and presented herself before the Lord, and she prayed. She prayed, “If only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will set him before you as a nazarite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.” A nazarite was a special sort of person, or maybe an ordinary person consecrated to God in a special kind of way. If Hannah were favored with a son, this son would be specially devoted to God; he would not get mixed up in drinking, and his hair would remain uncut as a testimony to his status as a special servant of God.
There are three things I want you to notice about this: two things that Hanna did and one thing she did not do. First, I love that phrase that Hannah “presented herself before the Lord.” There is a lot of honesty here; there is no pretense. Often we bring ourselves before God with pretense, pretending that we’re better off than we are. We say pious sounding things like, “If it’s your will God, make this happen. But if not, help me to cope with your good and gracious will.” Hannah doesn’t do this. She presents herself to God totally as she is, and I think God values that kind of honesty, that says this is where I am right now, God, this is what I feel is right, God, and this is what I want you to do, God. Hannah doesn’t hide herself behind pious language or sentimental words, and she doesn’t give God ultimatums. She just presents herself, just as she is.
And how is she? miserable. If you will only look on the misery of your servant, if you will only remember me, God, and if you will only give me a son. That’s where my heart is right now, that’s what I think I need, what I think I want the most. That’s honesty, that’s real, and God apparently values that sort of speech. After all, consider for a moment the situation from God’s perspective: he created humans with the capability to hurt. He created us with the capability to feel pain on behalf of others or even when something in our lives reflects brokenness. That’s often a very valuable thing; he created us to feel like he feels, he created us that our hearts would break with the things that make his heart break. Would he really then want us to always be hiding our real feelings? Hannah presents herself honestly to God.
Then I love how Hannah offers her desires to God. “If you will give me a son, I will give him back to you.” How often we fail to pause and consider why we want the things we want. It’s easy to see this with financial desires or things that we want. For instance, if I were to get a big-screen TV, I really doubt that I would use it for much good. I mean, I would enjoy it, and I’d have friends over to watch games and things, but I don’t think God’s Kingdom would really be advanced by me having a big-screen TV. I’d just like it. It would be fun to have it.
But sometimes we don’t even know why we want the important things; for instance, why do we want our children on the right path in life? I know that even at 3 years old, I get anxious about how Gracie behaves. But to be honest, my anxiety is mostly about me. I don’t want to be looked at as a bad parent, an indulgent parent, a too-hard parent, or whatever. I want Grace to behave—at times—mostly because her behavior reflects on me. That’s, frankly, not a real good reason for me to want her to choose the right path in life. What would be a good reason? Because I want her to grow up to be like Jesus; because I want her to choose that path for her life because it is the only path that brings real reward, and it is the only path that makes the difficulty and pain of life worthwhile. There are good and bad reasons for wanting kids to choose the right path; there are even good and bad reasons for wanting someone to be healed.
Hannah was commendable because she offered her desires to God; she wanted this to happen, to have a son, but she said, “If you give me this thing I desire, I will hold none of it back from you.” In other words, I will remember that this came from you, that this is a gift, and I will not treat it as something I have earned, and I will treat this boy as yours, not as my own. This is commendable because it is the very definition of a steward, which you and I are called to be. Hannah says, “Whatever is mine is yours, God.”
Prayer is not an easy recipe, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying, “Here’s how to get your prayers answered.” But I will say that I think the reason that many things I pray for do not happen is that I do not always share Hannah’s attitude. It is too easy for me to want things because I want them, not because I want to steward them for God, to use them for his Kingdom. Again, please don’t hear me wrong—I’m not saying that if you build God a good case for why you want something, God will give it to you. To be honest, it probably works the other way: if you become a good steward, if you are growing into God’s image, you are going to start to want the things God wants, and to want them for the right reason. Hannah was just such a person, who wanted what God wanted for God’s good. So I’m struck by that as well as by her willingness to be honest before God.
That’s what she did; now for the one thing she didn’t do that I also think is important. She didn’t try to practice magic. What do I mean by this? By this I mean that she doesn’t try to use human means to manipulate God. She is honest with God about what she is feeling. She is honest about what she wants, and she is sincere in her desire to steward her son rightly. But she doesn’t try to manipulate or trick God. She doesn’t say, “I’ll be extra nice to Elkanah if you give me a son,” or “I’ll stop my backbiting and anger at Peninnah if you give me a son,” she simply says, “If you give me a son, I’ll be a good steward just as I have sought to be my whole life.” Not, “If you don’t give me a son, you and I are through.” A simple statement of what is.
What about us? While likely not many of us are struggling through infertility right now, each of us is praying for something today, each of us is desperately hoping for something. Let’s each of us seek to be like Hannah, who didn’t try to manipulate God, but tried her best to steward what God had given her no matter if she got what she wanted or not.
The story has a happy ending for Hannah—she has a baby boy, Samuel, who she delivers back to God by bringing him back to the temple to serve Eli and the other priests. This may seem strange to us, but for women in that culture, having the child was a sign of blessing, and keeping the child was not quite as necessary. So Hannah was happy to give the baby, and although I’m sure she was somewhat sad to see him go, no one could ever take away her status as a mother.
Will our stories end happily? I don’t know. But I do know that as we give ourselves to God, as we seek to be better stewards of all things he gives us, we will find joy in that we are becoming the kind of people God uses to show his love to the world.

Sermon from Sunday, June 14

2009-06-14T18:40:00.002-04:00

Romans 8:18-24. Val Jenks reads Scripture.

This passage has become one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible in the last few years. I’m not sure it’s one that’s real familiar to most modern readers of the Bible, though; if there is any verse in this passage that is famous, it is verse 18, the first verse which was read this morning: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
It’s a nice image, isn’t it? Often in our lives we can feel that we are on a raging sea, just sort of tossed about from one thing to another. We can see that in many ways in our lives right now—this always seems like a busy time of year, for one thing. Kids are finishing up with school, so families need to make plans for how to handle that reality for the summer; there are concerts and graduations and little league playoffs and this and that and that and this.
And that’s just the innocuous things, the little things that are nuisances but don’t really impact us. There are far more serious things that impact the way we think and feel and make us feel like we are tossed on the waves of a raging sea. My grandmother had breast cancer surgery this past Wednesday. I love my nanna but nothing makes you feel quite so much like you’re tossed on a wave and completely out of control like when you or someone you love has cancer. A friend goes through divorce proceedings, another friend has uncontrollable nausea and doesn’t know what’s causing it, another friend struggles with an eating disorder—this is the stuff of life but it overwhelms you. What do I say to my friend who’s going through the divorce? Do it? Don’t do it? I don’t know what he should do, he doesn’t know what he should do—that’s the waves of life, man, and we just feel so small sometimes.
And in the midst of that verse 18 throws us a lifeboat and offers us salvation. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” And the message is such a relief—we welcome it with open arms—because it says to us that the sufferings of this present time, which seem like an uncontrollable raging sea, are really just a drop in a bucket compared with the glory God is going to reveal to us. And I love the way Paul uses the word “about” here—that any minute now we might just see it, that the glory might just come to us.
Most Christians assume this passage is talking about heaven. We struggle on earth, but we put up with the struggles because one day, one sweet day, we’re going to be in heaven and we won’t have to struggle any more. God’s gonna feed us at his table, take care of us for ever, and we’ll be able to enjoy him and each other without end, Amen. And Amen—this is true! It is exciting to think about a world like that because our world today is just not this way.
This is true. But is it OK to say that some people’s Christianity gets a little bit stuck here? In the old days it was said that people could be too heavenly-minded to be any earthly good. In the old days the argument went that people were so focused on going to heaven and what heaven was going to be like that they failed to make any impact here on earth, and failed to live up to the gospel. This is sort of what I mean by people’s Christianity getting a little bit stuck here—so focused on how God is one day going to make all of our problems fade away. And you might think, well, that’s not what I mean, I’m a good modern open-minded Christian. But even modern Christians get stuck on this when we only focus on how God helps us with our problems. Many prayer meetings get stuck in a rut when people start sharing their problems, and it’s one problem on top of another, and people cluck their tongues a little bit when we hear about so-and-so with cancer and so-and-so who’s drinking again, and before you know it, we’re thinking about how terrible the world is and how only God can provide relief, but even he doesn’t seem much inclined. Any sort of Christianity which looks at the problems of the world and is overwhelmed by them and looks to God only for a way out, is what I mean by getting stuck here.
There’s more to this passage. I want to stretch your thinking on this text a little bit today, because the context in which Paul is speaking is very different from this. Paul doesn’t talk about this in a vacuum—talking about our present sufferings and the glory to come is not something that Paul said as one sentence somewhere. It is part of a carefully constructed argument that Paul is making. Look at the next sentence: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Let’s unpack that sentence, and let’s start with the very first word, “for.” “For” shows us that what Paul is saying is connected to what he has just said. We might say, “Because.” I consider that the sufferings we currently experience cannot compare with the glory we are about to receive—because. Because why? Well, we might expect Paul to say that our current sufferings are not so bad because God’s got a really great heaven waiting for us. But that’s not what he says. It’s true, but it’s not what he says. Instead, he says that our current sufferings are not so bad because we are nearing a pivotal point in history, when the children of God will be revealed. We are nearing a time, says Paul, when the children of God will be revealed. What does this mean? Well, as Paul explains it, the whole creation is subject to futility. All of creation, essentially, cannot get out of its own way. All of creation lives with patterns and lifestyles and attitudes and actions which bring death. We know this is true simply by looking around us. What is the richest nation in the world? Our nation. What nation has the most access to information about the health effects of eating poorly. Our nation. And yet what nation is consistently the most overweight nation in the world? our nation. We have access to the information about what are good food choices, and we have access to healthy food, and yet we eat ourselves to death. The creation is subjected to futility, we can’t get out of our own way.
Or take something so simple as our prayer lives. Prayer works, people. And I don’t mean just for medical conditions. Prayer is a reliable spiritual discipline to change our hearts. When I am troubled about a problem in my life, I find that regular prayer—and not just praying about that problem but simply the act of regular praying—changes my heart and prepares me to deal with whatever that problem is in a much healthier way. And yet when I face a problem, my first inclination is to work like a chicken with my head cut off to try to solve the problem. Even though I know I will handle everything far better if I commit myself to regular prayer, in the heat of the moment prayer seems to take too much time or distract me from my work solving the problem. Even though my brain knows one thing, that prayer is valuable, it’s very difficult to recall that and practice it when push comes to shove. Why? Because the creation is subject to futility—we just can’t get out of our own way.
And Paul argues that this futility is part of God’s plan. Because eventually, we’re going to get frustrated with it and seek a better way. This is what Paul is saying about the children of God. This whole creation, stuck in these unhealthy systems, stuck in these patterns of living that breed death, seeing no alternatives—this creation wants a way out. They are desperately seeking the children of God. All creation longs to see a people who are not stuck in the same old lies as the rest of the world, a people who live different. Paul says that the world is stuck in bondage to decay and desperately seeks free people, people who see the world’s lies for what they are and say, “You know what? Those lies have no power over me, because lies don’t have power.”
Now here’s the rub—that’s us! How awesome—and how scary—is this? The image of the passage is that all of creation, people, animals, stars, planets, all of it, is futile and decaying. And it is just waiting for God to reveal to the world a people who will demonstrate to all of creation what a victorious life in Jesus looks like. It is waiting for a people through whom God will show hope and new life, a people who are not in bondage to decay but demonstrate new life in their every step and their every action. It is waiting for a people who will demonstrate that we are not enslaved to the broken system of these world but that their authority is an empty illusion and any power they have is simply because we choose to give them power. And that’s us! not just us here in Exton, but that’s us, Christians, the people of God around the world throughout time.
When Paul says, “I consider that our current sufferings are small compared to the glory we’re about to receive,” to be honest, he’s not talking about heaven. He’s talking about the glory we receive when we realize that’s who we are! The sufferings that we go through are of little consequence when we realize that we are playing a part in liberating creation from decay; the difficulties we face fade away when we realize that from the very beginning, creation has hinged on this moment, the people of God, taking on the awesome privilege and responsibility of being the people of God in the world, and allowing the world to see what free people look like and live like. He goes on and says that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, until this moment, when finally the church is born, the pinnacle of creation. And our difficulties seem pretty small when we realize that we are part of the pinnacle of creation and that God has made us capable of demonstrating freedom in the midst of slavery, and resurrection in the midst of decay.
This is so different than what we often understand that first verse to say. So often we feel overwhelmed at life’s difficulties, and we feel like we are tossed about on a raging sea. But the point of this passage is not that life is really hard for us poor people and one day we’ll get to heaven and God won’t let anything bad happen to us anymore. The point is that life is hard but because we have seen God in Jesus Christ we are part of liberating people from that life and introducing them to new life in Christ. All of creation has been waiting for a people to be raised up who live with the kind of freedom that only comes from knowing the truth—and they still wait for us with baited breath.
If there is one thing that I burn with as a minister and as a Christian, if there is one message which burns a fire in my bones and I cannot keep inside, it is this: you don’t know who you are. Go to any church and see what they have on their promotional materials. In our bulletin, it says “Welcome to Exton Community Baptist Church! We seek to be a serving, caring loving…(read the rest).” Other churches would say other things, like “We’re a friendly church.” Or “we’re a biblical church.” Or “we’re a conservative church.” Or “we’re a socially active church.” Every church seems to find its niche, and take pride in what they feel sets them apart from other churches. But so little of Christianity seems to get what Paul is saying here. A church is not just a gathering of like-minded people. A church is not a place where we go to hear our preferred kind of music or our preferred kind of preaching. A church is not a place we go to meet people who feel sorry for us, as if Christians were nothing but bottomless wells of sympathy. A church is not a niche to be defined and marketed against other churches.
A church is an outpost of the revolution. A church takes space, makes it sacred as a sanctuary and says, “Within these four walls, the world is as it should be. Within these four walls, we recognize that the systems of this world are broken and within these four walls we begin to live out the Kingdom of God. Within these four walls, we sing songs of the Kingdom of God, we speak the words of the Kingdom of God, we live out the relationships Kingdom people conduct, we exhibit the generosity of the Kingdom of God because creation is longing to see free people living Kingdom freedom. Creation groans in their futility right now and so we must show them what life can be like when you are free from that futility and that decay.”
You don’t know who you are. My daughter Grace is the apple of my eye. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a pretty girl save for her mommy. These days, if you call her cute, she says, “Babies are cute. I’m pwetty.” And she is, she’s pwetty, she’s beautiful. I sometimes can’t quite bear the thought of her growing up in this world which plays such havoc with women’s self-images. I love how she’s proud of her tummy and admires it in a mirror, and I can barely stand the thought of it when she’s 13 and thinks she’s ugly because of something some stupid boy said. Woe to those boys. (Hopefully it’s not her brother.) I keep hoping that somehow she’ll be spared that fate and be one of those rare girls with complete self-confidence, but I know that more than likely she’ll come home some day crushed and sure she is not beautiful.
But she will be and on that day, I will tell her what I have told you today—you don’t know who you are. You think you are what others tell you but you’re not. You’re so much more. You’re so much more beautiful than the world can understand or deserve. You don’t know that you are beautiful, not because anyone says it, but because the one who made you sees beauty in you and sees potential you cannot see now.
Oh church, you don’t know who you are. (not just ECBC, but the Church) You pretty yourself up so that somebody who doesn’t care about you or understand you will say nice things about you. But you don’t know who you are. You make sure everything on Sunday morning is polished up nice, and you say things so you don’t offend people and turn them off, but you don’t know who you are. If you knew who you were, you would know that people will see Jesus in you not when you spit and polish everything just right, not when you plan just the right outreach and avoid whatever might seem offensive, but when you show a desperate world that change is possible, that new life is within reach. If you knew who you were, you would be bold, unafraid, like a young woman who knows that she is loved and so can reach for the sky because if she falls someone will catch her. If you knew who you were, you wouldn’t seek to blend in in a boring world but you’d embrace your inner difference, you’d embrace that prophet Daniel who prayed when it was illegal, you’d embrace that apostle Peter who stood up and spoke in tongues til the world thought he was drunk, you’d embrace that John the Baptist who ate locusts, you’d embrace that Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet when there were more important things to do, you’d even embrace that Jesus who said that the way to save the world was to be cramped into a womb, become a homeless teacher and die like a criminal. Then you would be part of a revolution, then you would be the people the world desperately needs even though they don’t know they need you.
Let me close with a story about my dad. My dad doesn’t know how to run the dishwasher. In the house I grew up in, there was not a dishwasher, but when we moved there was one and he never learned to use it. He has lived in that house for more than 20 years! He claims he’s not smart enough. Of course this is not true—he is a lawyer! Now this is a big family joke, and he does actually run the dishwasher on occasion. Why does he say he’s not smart enough to run the dishwasher? Because he doesn’t want to run the dishwasher! He’s perfectly fine with my mother doing it and having a convenient excuse for not doing it!
Many times in our lives it is easier to pretend we are less than we are so we don’t have to risk failure. Too many smart kids have said, “I’m just not cut out for school” because they don’t want to risk academic failure. Too many people with athletic gifts have said, “I’m just not cut out for sports,” because they either don’t want the physical discipline of sports or they don’t want to risk failing at them and feeling embarrassed. When I went to college, there were so many beautiful girls and beautiful boys for that matter, who were lonely because they were afraid of risking a romantic relationship because it might fail.
Too many Christians hear this message in the Bible, that they are part of the children of God, charged with giving the world this gift that is this free life in Christ, and don’t want to be a part of it, because it is simply easier not to. Too many Christians reject being part of a revolution because it is simply easier to live one’s life as a consumer than a revolutionary. It’s easier just to watch Fox News or CNN and parrot what they say than to constantly stand at a critical distance from the world and insist that you have something to offer it that it does not know.
But to those of us who have embraced being revolutionaries, let me tell you, there is no life like it. To you who graduate today, I remind you of this and charge you before God to never be anything less, even when it’s easier. To baby Sophie and her family, I remind you of this and beg you never to settle for less, even when it’s easier. To all of us who dare to wear the name of Christ, I beg you, do not settle for a life less than his, because even though his life led to death, it led also to resurrection. We are the children of God, and the world is waiting.

Sermon from Sunday, May 24

2009-05-24T14:36:00.000-04:00

Based on the Good Samaritan from Luke 10. Beverlee Everett reads Scripture.

Sermon from Sunday, May 10

2009-05-13T11:38:00.001-04:00

Andrew Henry reads Scripture, from 1 John 4.

Jack's dedication

2009-05-13T10:58:00.002-04:00

The dedication of our baby son, John Garrett "Jack" Jordan, performed by our seminary intern, Herbert Johnson.

Sermon from Sunday, May 3

2009-05-03T16:20:00.002-04:00

Based on Psalm 23. Bruce Reid reads Scripture.

Sermon from Sunday, April 19

2009-04-19T20:41:00.002-04:00

Beverlee Everett reads John 20:19-31.

Easter Sermon Audio

2009-04-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

Audio for Easter Sunday, April 12. Dustin Flay reads Mark 16:1-8.

Audio from April 9, Maundy Thursday

2009-04-10T20:50:00.001-04:00

Audio came out a bit garbled, but still audible. Pity cause it was a good one! :) From John 13, read below if you don't want to fight the audio problems.

Sermon from Thursday, April 9

2009-04-10T20:40:00.001-04:00

“Know thyself.” This is a Greek saying , as old as the hills, and yet it still maintains a bit of a hold on us today. The idea is that the most foundational thing a person can do is to understand themselves, that key to all other callings in life is a calling to self-understanding. If you don’t know yourself, how can you possibly know how to live life in the way God called you to live it? Of course the task is much easier said than done. In reality, it’s very hard to know who we are, because we can’t see ourselves objectively. Robert Burns wrote in a famous line, “O would some power the giftie gie us/to see ourselves as others see us.” We know perfectly well who other people are, and we are very capable of drawing judgments about whether another person’s actions are appropriate or not; but we can’t see ourselves clearly. To our own eyes, we ourselves look like a twisted mess of contradictory motives, some good and some evil; a maze of appetites, some holy, some primal; a knot of impulses, some right and some wrong. A person who has some sense of who they really are is a person who is well-equipped to serve God in the world because they have started to demonstrate some self-mastery.
Self-knowledge is at the heart of this passage that we have read tonight. Look at verses 3-5, some of my favorite verses in the whole Bible because I think they speak powerfully to the human condition in the modern world. “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.” Do you see how Jesus knew himself and how that knowledge impacted his ability to serve? He knew that the Father had given all things into his hands—he knew the power that God had given to him as the Messiah. And then there’s this majestic phrase, that he knew “that he had come from God and was going to God.” He knew where he came from and he knew where he was going. You know, there’s great comfort in that, isn’t there? God uses anybody, anytime—you don’t have to have a great home life—when John gave his testimony on Thursday it was very touching to hear about his difficult years growing up. But at the same time, I appreciate the home I had growing up, a home where my parents were Christians, where they encouraged me to go to school, to study for the ministry if I felt called. I know that was my home and I know that I can go there anytime and be accepted, whether I’ve made a mistake or whatever, I will find love there. It’s great to know where you came from. And it’s also great to know where you’re going—when Jesus touches your heart and reassures you that your true life rests in him, you can face even death without being afraid. It’s an important piece of self-knowledge, to know where you’ve come from and to know where you’re going.
And Jesus did—he knew that he came from God, and he knew that he was going to God, and look what it empowered him to do. Look how he served! Look at how the King of the Universe acted like a servant—he got up from the table. Royalty sits and eats; servants get up and serve. He took off his outer robe, a way of stripping off any pretense and power. Then he ties a towel around himself, certainly a way of laying down any authority at all. And he pours water into a basin, deals with the common items of the house instead of the gilded goblets which he deserves. And then he reaches down and he takes the disciples’ dirty feet in his hands and washes them clean; and then, to top it all off, the cherry on top, he wipes the disciples’ feet off on the towel he’s wearing. It’s a progression; he starts the meal like the master, reclined at table, but gets progressively more and more servant-like. In this way, it’s like an object lesson—the Master becomes more and more like the servant; just as He condescended to come from heaven to earth, and take on flesh to become like us, he becomes more and more like his disciples. The master serves.
See how he humbles himself! Man, I want to be like that. Don’t you? I know we can’t be like Jesus completely, but I want to live like that. And this text implies that it is that self-knowledge that helped that to happen; he knew where he was from, and he knew where he was going, and he knew the power God had given him, and that knowledge had given him the power to serve.
I think the reason I love this passage is because it ties together knowledge and service. I define myself as a compulsive student, someone who loves going to school, someone who seeks truth and who loves the world of ideas. One thing I’ve noticed is that often people see the world of ideas and the world of service as two totally separate areas that never meet. There are people who sit up in the ivory towers and contemplate, and there are people who get their hands dirty and do the hard work of service in the world. And each side kind of looks down on each other. But here in Jesus, we see how his ideas led straight to action. Because he understood the truth, because he understood who he really was, he then was able to live out his calling completely while the whole world watched. This is why I talk so much about ideas and about seeking the truth; it is why, truth be told, I am not an activist; because it is only when we understand who we are that we become capable of living out our calling.
So who are we? What can we understand about ourselves? Like I said before, self-knowledge is really a very difficult task. Who among us can say we know ourselves? It is a lifelong task requiring discipline and humility. But I think this text tonight gives us a starting point. What can we know about ourselves just from this passage tonight? Let me give you two words that you can take to the bank about who you are.
The first thing which we must see when we look at this passage is that we are loved. The love of Jesus positively drips through this passage. Think of what it means that the Creator of the Universe considered his disciples to be of such importance, such utmost value, that he first of all came to earth, but then once he came to earth he laid aside all comforts to become a servant. Think of what it means that the one who invented and fashioned feet got down on his knees and gently washed those feet clean. Think of what it means that God laid aside all manner of privilege just to lavish this extravagant sort of love on his disciples. And then consider what it means that you are just as much a disciple as Peter and John; if you had been born then instead of now, he would have washed your feet as well. Such is the love that God has for you; you are loved!
For some people, this news is simply too good to accept. Peter is one of these people; he says, in essence, “Jesus, get away from me! This is wrong; you can’t wash my feet…this is just…wrong!” And Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Translation: Unless you let me love you, unless you accept how loved you are, you can not ever truly be one of my followers. And some of us are like Peter today and cannot stand to be loved like Jesus wants to love us. We want him to love us on our terms; we cannot accept a free gift of love because we wonder what the catch is or because we feel guilty about it. Some of us can’t accept the free gift of God’s love for us because we don’t want to be religious fanatics. But to be a Christian, Jesus says, to truly share in Christ, is to allow yourself to know the complete and deep love that Jesus has for you.
How would we live differently if we knew we were God’s beloved? I mean, you know it, but what if you really knew it? How would your life be different? What if you were forced to confess that the truest thing in the world, the thing that is the most real in the world, more real than your job or your home or your family or this life each of us constructs for ourselves, the most real thing in the world is the love of Christ for you? How would that change you? I have a guess. I think that, just like Jesus’ self-knowledge empowered him for service, I think you would live your life out of that reality too. If we really knew we were the beloved of the Creator of the Universe, our whole lives would be worship. Each day, each hour, each second would be lived as an act of worship: worshiping when in church, worshiping sitting at the family dinner table, worshiping in the car between meetings, worshiping with each breath in and each breath out. If we would simply confess that before anything else we were beloved of God, it would revolutionize our lives.
But that is not all that the text says we are; very plainly the text also says that we are servants. Starting in v. 13, we read, “You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your teacher and Lord, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” If I, your teacher, have not clung to authority over you but become your servant, then why would you think you should seek authority over each other? If I, your teacher, have rejected earthly authority—and not only that, but revealed earthly authority to be an illusion because I will demonstrate real authority in my death and resurrection—why should you exercise earthly authority over each other?
Perhaps this is the real reason we are reluctant to accept Jesus’ love for us—because it would mean extending Jesus’ love to others, which is a costly process. Who really wants to be a slave when they can be a master? Who really wants to be a benchwarmer when they can be a star? Who really wants to interrupt a nice meal with good friends to get down on your knees and scrub dirty feet before wiping them on the clothes you’re wearing? Even though Jesus reveals earthly power to be an illusion, it still is extraordinarily tempting to us—so tempting, in fact, that we often choose to chase what we know to be an illusion rather than accept the eternal, boundless love of the God of the universe.
But this is a day of new beginnings, new opportunities. Today again is an invitation to remember who you truly are. Today again, Jesus the Master washes your feet and as he does so you know instantly who you are. You look into his eyes and you know at once that you are loved; and all at once you also know that your life must be about serving and loving other people, that true life is to be found in swimming in the deep end of God’s love and inviting other people to know that love too. Today is an invitation to remember again the truth of who you really are, that you are at once beloved and servant, and to let that truth seep into you until you naturally begin to live it out among others.
And we do that here at this table, nourished by God himself. Here at this table, Jesus is the host, and Jesus is the feast. Let us eat and drink together to be nourished to recognize who we are; and when we know who we are, to live out our calling in the world, even as he did.

Sermon from Sunday, April 5

2009-04-05T16:47:00.001-04:00

Bruce Reid reads John 12:12-19.

Sermon from Sunday, Mar 29

2009-03-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

Audio from Sunday, Mar. 29. From Acts 3; Andrew Henry reads Scripture.

Audio from Mar. 22

2009-03-22T15:18:00.001-04:00

Scripture, 1 Peter 1:3-16, read by Val Jenks.

Audio from Mar. 15

2009-03-15T17:24:00.001-04:00

Sermon from Sunday, Mar 15

2009-03-15T17:23:00.000-04:00

Based on Romans 14:1-4, 13-24.

If you’re like me, you really resonate with the first part of this passage. The first four verses of Romans 14 are a passionate plea not to judge, not to be judgmental. “Welcome those who are weak in faith,” says Paul, “but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions” And every little bone in our Exton body goes, “Yes!” Because that’s what we believe here, that the Gospel is not a matter of agreeing about every little thing, but agreeing on our common calling in Jesus and our call to be like him. Paul gives an example from his time, the example of whether or not it was proper to eat meat, or whether Christians should be vegetarians. Apparently at that time there was some disagreement about this, likely related to the fact that most meat available to the Roman Christians was meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Even that meat which was supposedly clean, and had not been sacrificed to idols, had probably been mixed in with meat which had been at some point, and so you couldn’t be sure if what you’re eating was clean, spiritually speaking. So some Christians believed you shouldn’t eat meat at all as a matter of principle—you shouldn’t eat what had been sacrificed to a false God, and you should avoid all meat just to be safe. Other Christians thought it was fine to eat meat even if it was sacrificed to idols, because those were just false gods anyway; since they weren’t real, how could they possibly have the power to destroy perfectly good meat?
Then we hear Paul say the words we love to hear, “Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not despise those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgments on the servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. In other words, you don’t get to judge another person’s servants—only the Master does. In the same way, only God gets to judge us, so we should not judge each other. Only God gets to decide whether we stand or we fall, and those who believe in him will stand (even though they may be wrong about these things), because God is able to make them stand.
As I say, we love these words because we fancy ourselves tolerant religious types, like I said last week, “Christian, but not THAT kind of Christian.” And texts like this texts we like to wrap ourselves up in and feel all cozy in. Further, they are the kind of texts that the average non-Christian does not realize are in the Bible. One of our small groups is studying the book They Like Jesus but Not the Church. We’re reading a lot of how non-Christians often find the church narrow and judgmental. Perhaps this is a text that we should preach on a bit more, as I think it resonates with the world in which we live. Kids today perceive themselves as non-judgmental and are quick to join movements and causes that work toward what they perceive as righting injustices. This text can perhaps tap into some of that youthful energy. Non-judgmentalness is something that the current generation does awfully well, and perhaps something we as the church can learn from them.
Yet at the same time we can congratulate our culture for not being judgmental, we surely need to challenge our culture. Because while our culture does non-judgmentalness really really well, it does not do relationships very well at all. One of the banes of my life is instant messaging. Now I realize that I’m talking to people here who instant message all the time, and people who never have done that and have no idea what it is. Essentially what instant messaging is is a way to type messages back and forth to people over the internet. A little screen pops up and you type a message to someone and they type back to you and you can have a conversation. What’s wrong with that? Well, nothing. But I still hate it. Because I never focus on this kind of conversation when I’m having it; I’m always doing something else. I’m on the internet, someone types something to me, I keep doing whatever I’m doing on the internet, ignore the message for a couple of seconds, then write back. Often, people IMing (as it’s called) will carry on multiple conversations at once, never giving their full attention to any one person at any one time. One internet friend says he can talk to five people at once; another says he can carry on up to twelve conversations at one time! The result is a world that is a paradox: in our world we are in touch with more and more people but in increasingly shallow ways. All of the sudden, I am not a person with deep experiences, rooted in a community with a complex personality, rich in nuance; all of the sudden I am whoever I project myself to be on the computer, who I can convince you I am before I move onto something else.
I’ve been reading a book by Maggie Jackson called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. She paints a stark picture of the human cost of our lack of deep relationships:
“I think we’re beginning to see a time of darkness when, amid a plethora of high-tech connectivity, one-quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, more than double the number twenty years ago.” Think of that for a second—one out of every four of us here says that we don’t have any real deep friends. And how amazing is that that the number is double what it was twenty years ago? What does that mean? In essence, the increased productivity of the last twenty years has cost one out of every eight of us our best friend. Just shocking stuff. “It’s a darkening time,” writes Jackson, “when we think togetherness means keeping one eye, hand, or ear on our gadgets, ever ready to tune into another channel of life, when we begin to turn to robots to tend the sick and the old, when doctors listen to patients on average for just eighteen seconds before interrupting, and when two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the television on half or more of the time, an environment linked to attention deficiencies.” Her point? We live in a culture where community is being sacrificed on the altar of productivity, on the altar of entertainment, and on the altar ironically of connection. We are connected with everybody across the globe yet deeply connected to no one. Is it any wonder that we watch the breakup of the nuclear family at astounding speeds? Is it any wonder that husbands and wives do not know how to relate to each other for the long haul? Is it any wonder that children mock their parents and parents amuse their children rather than raise them? Is any of this a surprise in a culture like ours?
Our culture does non-judgmentalism well but it does not do relationships well. Which is where the church comes in. Or at least where the church should come in. Consider the rest of this passage which we have read this morning. While Paul is urging the church not to be judgmental, at the same time, he is presuming a certain depth to their relationships. Paul says, “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself.” In other words, I know that there’s nothing wrong with eating meat. But, he says, it is unclean for anyone who thinks it is unclean. That is, if you are sure that God doesn’t want you to eat meat, then it is wrong for you to be eating meat because you are choosing what you want over what you think God wants, which is an attitude and a posture you just don’t take with God. That being said, then, Paul says, “I’m going to choose to forgo meat, choose not to eat it, even though I can, because I don’t want to harm the spiritual walk of my brothers and sisters. I’m not going to let exercising my rights harm another person; I’d rather just not exercise what are my rights than harm them.” There is a sense here that goes way beyond normal non-judgmentalism—because there is this deep relationship where what I do impacts not just me, but a whole community. The community rises and falls because of the acts of its members, and each choice individuals make on issues of controversy affects not just themselves, but everyone around them in the church.
Paul sums up his point by saying, “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and mutual edification.” In other words, in our dealings together, when we talk about whatever may be an issue, let’s strive for two main things. The first is peace, suggesting let’s not let conflict gain a toehold among us. Let’s assume the goodwill of each other rather than assuming that the others are out to get us. But the second goal we should always have in mind is mutual edification, mutual upbuilding as the NIV says it. Our relationships exist so that each of us through our actions and speech can help everyone else in the community grow closer to the example of Jesus. We should not take action that would drive people away from growth into the image of Jesus, and everything we say and do should be done with this goal in mind: helping to build each other up.
This is a far cry from the world’s non-judgmentalism. Because in the eyes of the world, being non-judgmental is essentially “live and let live.” You do your thing, and that’s cool with me, because what you do doesn’t really impact me at all. That may be true in society, but it is not true of the church. Paul says the church can be open to a diversity of understandings on controversial issues, but not because “what I do with my life is my business.” Instead, the church can be open to a diversity of understandings on controversial issues precisely because we are all on a journey together into becoming like Jesus, and it behooves us when we are trying to become like Jesus to listen to all points of view just in case Jesus is in there somewhere. Because we all have the same goal, and because we are all traveling together, we can afford to be nonjudgmental—because we all want to become like Jesus, we can help each other grow by working together through difficult things.
What is most important to Paul here is the idea that the church is an intricately woven web, not a mere group of individuals, but a family headed by God where the actions of one person impact the whole body. This both excites us and terrifies us at the same time; it excites us because we all want this kind of family in our lives. We need it to survive; we need to have people willing to walk our journeys with us, people who are present with us when we are suffering, who make us casseroles when we have a family member in the hospital. We need people like this in our lives, people who speak love to us when we feel unloveable, people who challenge us to live up to our best impulses, people who encourage us not to settle for being less than God made us to be. We need that sort of family, and we thrill at the thought of finding it here among God’s people.
But at the same time we find ourselves recoiling because it costs a lot to be in this kind of relationship with each other. If we’re going to be in a relationship, a real relationship, a relationship of the depth that Paul seems to be talking about here, it means that we both can’t just do whatever we want to do; because what you do affects me and what I do affects you. Relationships mean wonderful benefits and intense sacrifice. Consider for a second the most intimate of human relationships, marriage. Marriage as a relationship has so many benefits. Marriage, more specifically marriage to Jill, has meant so much to me—I’m a different person because of my marriage to her. I have a stable footing in the world because of our marriage. I am promised continued loyalty and love; I have the benefit of being married to someone who has complementary gifts from me, so it is as if I have access to all the many gifts that she has and she has access to the gifts that I have and together we can enjoy those gifts and use them on behalf of the great God who created us. It’s unbelievable because since we are one person, it is as if I am twice the person I was before I met her!
But marriage has incredible costs as well. Because I’m married there are things which I must never do. I can never give my heart or body in the same way to someone else, no matter what seems natural or right to me. I have to be sure I am protecting time with my family. I have to lay down what I want to do in order to protect and nurture that relationship that brings so many benefits. This is the way it is in all our relationships; marriage is the most intense human relationship, and has the most potential benefits and is the most restrictive on our behavior. But if a relationship truly has the power to give us benefits, it also must mean that we give something up to be part of such a relationship.
So it must be among us. Our church covenant talks about the need for mutual support. It means simply that we will be there for each other, that we agree not to simply go our separate ways on Sunday afternoons, but that we will care for each other. As with any relationships, this must be costly if it is to be beneficial. It must mean something in terms of our time and our attitudes toward each other if it is to really help us when we are down.
Jill joined a “Mothers of Pre-Schoolers” group a couple years back in Downingtown. One thing I noticed right off is how often she was cooking meals for other people in the group. Just taking a casserole to one person, a dessert to another. I thought to myself, how many people are in this group? But then we had Jack—and we had meals, 3 meals a week, for a month. So many different people pitched in and made it so easy for us that first month after Jack was born. Then I realized that the women in the MOPS group were committed to helping each other as family even though it meant a lot more cooking on their own end. The relationship cost everyone more but it was more meaningful and more beneficial as a result.
The world’s non-judgmentalism is easy. We don’t judge other people because their lives in the end have little to do with ours; you do your thing and I’ll do mine, and you’ll be responsible for the consequences of your actions and I’ll be responsible for mine. But Paul says this is not what the church is. We do not judge each other because we have a relationship strong enough to say, “I trust you.” But a relationship that strong is costly. It means we must be about the work of building each other up and supporting each other—not just with our intentions, but with our lives.

Audio from Mar. 1

2009-03-01T15:40:00.000-05:00

Andrew Henry reads Psalm 81.

Sermon from Sunday, Mar 1

2009-03-01T15:39:00.001-05:00

On Psalm 81.

Today is the first Sunday of the season of Lent. Lent is a 46-day time period just before Easter that in much of the church is dedicated to spiritual renewal and reflection. In some churches, the whole period before Lent is taken up with a renewed focus on the cross; this is true to some extent in our church, where Dick Rusbuldt has penned a Lenten Devotional that is in essence a journey to the cross, where we walk with Jesus to the crucifixion and focus on that event. I recommend this year’s devotional to you as an important exercise.

But in some ways, Lent is about more than what Jesus did on the cross; it is about what we are doing today. Because Lent focuses us in on the cross, we also must ask the question, “In light of Jesus’ love for us (exemplified on the cross), how should we respond in our way of living?” What difference does it make that Jesus died on the cross? Is it simply a ticket to heaven for us? Or is it an implicit challenge, a picture that says, “Live your life as if God loves you this much?” So the other theme of Lent is spiritual discipline. It is during the season of Lent when we must ask about how we are living. How are we spending this precious life God has given us, this life that is so precious that Jesus died to give it to us for all eternity? If we sit down and take stock, what are we really happy with and what do we really want to change, if we will admit to ourselves that we want to change some things? Lent invites us in to ponder this question, to ponder how we might live differently by disciplining our bodies and our spirits.

We don’t naturally live good lives on this earth; it is not our default setting. We need a strategy for how to live like Jesus, because the world does not encourage us to live like Jesus. You can’t swim upstream unless you decide to swim upstream and take steps to make it happen. We can’t naturally live holy lives in a world which encourages us not to. Early Baptists knew this and so they came up with a strategy for how to live godly lives in an ungodly world: a covenant.

A church covenant is a document agreed to by the members of a church that set down standards for church membership. In some churches, a covenant is a rather major part of church life. When new members join the church, they literally sign the covenant, that these are the standards they are willing to abide by for the sake of their common life together. I know of one church where when members agree to abide by the covenant, they sign the tablecloth that is used for communion: the idea is that by abiding by the standards of the community, you become part of the fabric of the community, indeed part of the communion we enjoy together. Another church I know of has an intense process of becoming a member where the covenant is taken so seriously that you can be either a covenanting member or a non-covenanting member; but if you take the covenant, you are expected to keep the covenant. Every few years, everyone in the church re-thinks their decision and can choose to withdraw from the covenant if they feel they can’t keep it.

Our church has a covenant too; though it has long laid dusty on the shelves. When I came up with the idea of looking at our church covenant during Lent, I first had to go looking for the covenant. I found it, and then I wanted to find out some of the history of it; I e-mailed our church’s former pastor, Beth Congdon-Martin, who suggested it may have been early in her pastorate that the covenant was last examined; I followed up and I found out that indeed it was in 1989 and 1990 that the esteemed deacon board of this church last took up the issue of the church covenant. That was 20 years ago! In fact, a church covenant is so far from most of our minds that when I came to pastor the church 7 years ago, I never even thought to ask about the church’s covenant—and in fact had to go hunting one down when a new member of our church asked if we had one.

During Lent I’m going to lead us through a series of sermons on the church covenant. We will also be hosting meetings in people’s homes to discuss the covenant and to see how we can keep it better as individuals and as a church. Given the fact that the covenant is sort of arcane, you may wonder why I want to do this now. Well, there are a few reasons, but the biggest is that it dovetails nicely with the season of Lent. Because Lent focuses us in on the pursuit of Christlikeness, because Lent makes us take stock of our lives, it seems to make sense to look at our covenant during Lent and say, “OK, how are we doing? If we really have this strategy to become more like Jesus, are we keeping this strategy?”

This past Wednesday, the Phillies played their first spring training game. I love this time of year because even for the worst baseball team in the league, hope springs eternal during spring training. But when your team has just won the championship, you really feel like anything is possible during spring training. I was listening the other day to an interview with Phillies backup catcher Chris Coste. And the interviewer was asking him who the easiest Phillies pitcher was to catch. He responded that it was Cole Hamels or Jamie Moyer, because as a catcher you knew they were going to pitch the ball right where you set up your mitt, that it was very predictable and easy. Then the interviewer asked him who the most difficult catcher was to catch, and he responded Brett Myers. And he said it was not so much that he was erratic or that his pitches were uncontrollable, but he said it was more mental. Mentally, he said, he and Myers would have a plan before the game; this was how they would pitch to certain batters, this was how they’d approach the game. But, if one thing went wrong, the slightest little thing, Myers would want to change course, to push out of the game plan and try something different. As a catcher, Coste said, you had to try to rein that in, to keep to the plan in order to get the results you want.

I picture this Lent as a chance to review our game plan. It’s a pretty good game plan, even if we haven’t looked at it in 20 years. It focuses on five main areas, which I’ll be talking about for today and the next four weeks. And the truth is that keeping these five main areas will result in a change of heart as individuals and a change of culture as a church. Like they say in AA, it works if you work it. If we want to take the time and pains to make measureable changes in our lives, we will see measurable change in our spirits and in our church. I’ll ask the ushers to pass out the copies I have made of the covenants now, and you’ll see that these are little folders to get you ready for the home meetings we’re going to be holding during the month of March. I hope you’ll sign up for one of these meetings to discuss how we can better live out these ideals as a church.

What I want to focus on today is the first three paragraphs of the covenant, which focus on worship. The first item in the game plan to have a Christ-centered and fruitful fellowship together is worship. I’ll just read that aloud for us: “We, the members and friends of the Exton Community Baptist Church, in accordance with our understanding of our responsibility to the kingdom of God as it is derived from the scriptures, do hereby covenant: To acknowledge and celebrate the existence and loving presence of God in our lives. To affirm Jesus Christ as the Son of God, our Lord, and Savior, and the center of what we think, feel and do.” These first two items in the church covenant focus us in on worship: acknowledging and celebrating God’s existence and presence in our lives, and to affirm that Jesus is the center of everything in our lives, that whatever goes on, he is in the middle of it. Jesus is the one who serves as the guidepost for our decision-making; Jesus gets to say yes and no to everything. Worship is where we give witness to the fact of this reality in our lives, that God is present in our lives, that God is central in our lives.

Let’s look at the passage Andrew read for us this morning, Psalm 81. You can’t read the psalms without realizing how important worship was to the ancient Israelites: Raise a song, sound the tambourine, make music with the lyre and the harp, blow the trumpet…why? Simply because God said to. We worship because that’s part of how God created us, with the ability to recognize the one who made us, who redeems us, who sustains us. God calls us to be his people, and when he does, he wants us to worship him.

Well, we might say, that’s all well and good, but isn’t it kind of selfish of God to create us just to worship him? I mean, it’s one thing for Gracie to have a doll who loves her unconditionally and does whatever she wants it to. It’s another thing for Jill and I to have a baby, a real live person who has free will and free choices and sometimes loves us and sometimes demands their own way. If God is creating people, doesn’t it seem sort of like he treats us like Gracie’s dolls, with the expectation that we are created just to make him happy?

Ah, but read the rest of the Psalm. The first thing a person must do when they come to worship is honor God, praise God, recognize that God is awesome, and raise a sacrifice of praise to God. But the Psalm doesn’t end there. Because once the person has done that, once the person has confessed how awesome God is, we see something amazing happen—God talks to the psalmist. And God says some things we might expect God to say if we heard from him today. He says, first, “I relieved your shoulder of the burden; your hands were freed from the basket.” This is a reference to Israel’s time in slavery, and God is saying, “I was the one who freed you; I was the one with you when you thought you were lost; I was the one who made all of this happen. I was the one who brought you out of bondage.” So in the context of worship, once the worshiper has turned his heart toward God, we find that God turns his heart toward the worshiper, and talks with the worshiper; this is not at all God treating us selfishly, because it appears that once the worshiper becomes vulnerable to God, God becomes vulnerable to the worshiper.

Then we read a bit more; as we go on, we see “Hear, O Israel, while I admonish you; O Israel, if you will just listen to me!” Then God lays out a path for the worshiper to follow: don’t have any other gods, no foreign gods, no false gods. If you do this, says God, there will be good consequences, and if you fail to do this, there will be negative consequences. If you fail to do this, you will follow your own wisdom, and you will be harmed, because you’re not as smart as you think you are. But, he says, if you follow the path I have set for you, I will feed you, I will give you the best that I have. “Open your mouth wide,” says verse 10, “and I will fill it.” “I would feed you with the finest of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you,” says verse 16. This image is beautiful, that God would give us the wheat, the staple, nutritious food that we need to survive; and God would give us the honey, something we don’t really need, but would simply delight us, simply to make us happy.

This Psalm, then, functions as a picture of worship. We orient our hearts rightly to God, give him praise, glory and honor. When we tune our hearts right, we are able then to encounter God, to see Him, to hear Him when he speaks to us. And when he speaks to us, he sets out a way of life for us, and if we are willing to follow that way, he offers us the deep needs and the deep desires of our soul. If we will come and worship him, he offers us a path to follow and the gift of finest wheat.

This is why worship is the first thing listed in our church covenant; this is why worship is the key to a strategy to change our hearts and to change our church. Worship is where it happens; worship is where we pause from the busy-ness of our lives, worship is where we intentionally cast aside all the competing agendas of this world and worship is where we re-orient our hearts. Consequently, worship is where we catch a vision for our lives, a path to follow, and worship is where we taste the finest gifts that God has for our lives. A church that does not take worship seriously cannot prosper long; it can be popular, it can rise with a charismatic leader or a catchy advertising campaign, but it cannot prosper for long because it depends on human activity. But a church that worships has gone beyond human leadership and gone beyond cool marketing ploys into a relationship with the living God. If you don’t have that, plain and simple, you don’t have a church. You have a cool club of nice people doing nice things for each other and nice things for the world, but you don’t have a church, because you don’t have a gathering of people who are seriously pursuing what God would have them to do in their lives and receiving those good gifts from God.

This Lent, I’m challenging you to commit to worship in a way you never have before. I realize that we all come from different places on the worship spectrum, that some of us are extremely committed to worship and some not so much; so I’m not asking for you to make a jump. I’m asking you to take one step up the worship ladder this Lent. If you never come to church, I’m asking you to consider coming more often. If you come to church when you feel like it, and not when you don’t, I’m asking you to make it a priority to come to church here each week—your spirit and your church will thank you. If you come to church each week, I’m asking you to make it a priority to deepen your sense of private worship, to live at least a few minutes everyday with the awareness of being in God’s presence, of taking time each day to read your Bible or spiritual writing and to pray. If you do that every day, then I will challenge you to be aware of God and asking him to be present with you two minutes out of every hour every day. Whatever you are doing now to worship, Lent is a chance to step up your worship involvement so that you are constantly re-orienting your heart rightly. And as this psalm shows us, when you are re-orienting your heart rightly, God gives you a path to follow and delights us with the gift of finest wheat.

Check back...

2009-02-23T09:14:00.000-05:00

...next week. Didn't preach this week; but I'm on the next 14 Sundays in a row! Yikes!

Audio from Sunday, Feb. 15

2009-02-15T15:21:00.001-05:00

From Mark 1:40-45. Andrew Henry reads Scripture.

Sermon from Sunday, Feb. 15

2009-02-15T09:28:00.002-05:00

Based on Mark 1:40-45.

Part of what is special about being a person is making choices. We love to make choices; maybe I should scratch that and say we love to have options. We don’t always love having to choose between two options, especially when we feel like both options are worthy or exciting ones. But we certainly don’t love having other people make those choices for us—even if there are hard choices to be made, we want to be the one to make them. In fact, this is part of what is so threatening to us about growing old or becoming disabled—the inability we would have to make our own choices. The thought of someone else choosing for us when we will wake up or when we will go to sleep, what our range of choices will be to eat, etc. is very difficult for us. We can’t even abide the thought of being unable to choose what to eat for breakfast or how to fix our hair; we are a culture in love with choice. This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing; it has good and bad consequences, for sure, but it’s more or less just reality. We love choices.

“If you choose, you can make me clean.” So says the leper to Jesus. It is an interesting phrase, isn’t it? Not, “if you want to, you can make me clean,” but “if you choose, you can make me clean.” In other words, it is not a matter of having the proper orientation of the heart—the leper believes that Jesus wants to make him clean, but he is encouraging Jesus to choose to do it. Not, “if you had a bar of magical soap, you could make me clean.” But “if you choose, you can make me clean.” The leper also believes Jesus has the power to make him clean; but he is encouraging Jesus to use that power on his behalf.

Maybe you have heard of one of the oldest theological questions, a question people still write books about today; why bad things happen to good people. The question goes, “If God is truly all-loving and all-powerful, then why do people suffer?” Right, if he truly loves people, he doesn’t want people to suffer, and if he’s truly powerful, he could wipe out suffering with a wave of his hand. So either God isn’t good or he isn’t powerful, goes the argument. Either he’s an impotent God who can’t stop suffering or he’s a hateful God who enjoys suffering.

What this debate has always seemed to miss to me is this word, choice. What if God allows suffering in the world not because he can’t get rid of it and not because he loves it, but because suffering often has a redemptive purpose; in short, what if there is suffering not because God loves it, but because God chooses to allow it? This shouldn’t surprise us if we’ve read about God in the Bible and how frequently suffering is used in order to redeem and change things. Look at Habakkuk, for instance, one of the dearest books of the Bible to me; in this book Habakkuk cries out at the injustice of his nation and God says, “OK, I’m going to bring in a nation to conquer it.” Habakkuk says I didn’t have that in mind, but God does and throughout the conquering and suffering, he says, I will have you clearly in the palm of my hand; there is a great and inscrutable purpose here that you cannot see or understand but I am the God even of suffering. Look at Jesus, whose suffering brings new life and not incidentally results in his own resurrection. Look at the early church, who rejoices to be counted worthy of suffering because they were following Jesus and believed as they suffered with him, they would also be raised with him. It seems to me that suffering in the Bible is a choice—sometimes that people make in choosing to follow God—and sometimes a choice that God makes to do redemptive work in people. I don’t think that explains all suffering, but there is a lot about suffering that falls into place when we say, “Can God eliminate suffering? Yes. But does he sometimes choose to and sometimes choose not to? Yes. Why? We don’t know. We don’t always understand God.”

So when the man says, “If you so choose, you can make me well,” it is an interesting phrase to me because it recognizes Jesus’ choice as a powerful thing. He doesn’t doubt that Jesus is a nice guy and has positive feelings towards him, he doesn’t doubt Jesus’ power, but what he does doubt is that when the rubber meets the road Jesus will actually choose to do it. Will Jesus choose to extend his hand, to make the effort, or will Jesus move on to the next thing—still a good guy, still a powerful guy—without extending that effort on behalf of the man? Or will this be some other suffering that Jesus will choose to let go on?

I want to ask you to put yourself in the position of the leper. What are those things that we are hoping God will heal in our lives? All of us come to God with some kind of leprosy, some kind of sickness that we are hoping God will heal. What is it for you? Think about it. For some of us the sickness is just that, a literal, physical sickness: we come to God with an ailment we hope he will heal. I have been there and I have been healed and that is a testimony for me. But there is a difficult truth here: if it is really a matter of God’s choice to heal us, then the inescapable point is that God may also choose not to. For all of us at least once in our lives there will be an ailment which we will not be healed from, because all of our bodies in this room will break down at some point, sooner or later. That’s just reality. There is a certain threat and a certain comfort that comes from recognizing that it may or may not be God’s choice to heal you. Often, when we don’t recognize this, we get into trouble. If we believe that, “oh, God will heal me if I have enough faith or if I pray the right way,” and you don’t get healed, you start to think, “Well, something’s either wrong with me or something’s wrong with God!” And a crisis in your body becomes a crisis in your spirit. And so even though it’s scary to say, “God may not choose to heal me,” it ultimately relaxes you from this constant worry that either you’re doing something wrong or that God isn’t really big enough to help you. So it’s ultimately a relief to realize that God doesn’t play by our rules, that God is big enough to heal you but ultimately may or may not based on what he thinks is best. You see, while sickness is horrible and we don’t see signs of it in heaven, it does accomplish a rather major good in many of our lives. Talk to people who are sick sometime—I do—and see what has happened to their priorities since they have become sick. Sickness reminds people that they are not invincible and reminds them to live their lives in a way that they truly want to live it. If what we really need in our lives from God’s perspective is to live with certain priorities, and sickness makes many of us start living with those priorities, it shouldn’t surprise us that God occasionally allows sickness to creep into our lives.

As I began working on this sermon last week, I had what I thought was a pimple coming in on my forehead. I thought to myself, “Oh my goodness, Michael, you are almost 31 years old. It’s time to stop getting pimples.” But the pimple didn’t feel just right, and by the evening it grew into a full-blown rash and I called the doctor and made an appointment for the next day where he told me I had shingles. Shingles, if you don’t know, is when the virus that gives you chickenpox mysteriously reactivates and attacks your nerves; those who have had it will testify that it can be an extremely painful condition. And so I had to re-evaluate this sermon in light of what I was going through: did all my high-minded rhetoric about suffering really pass muster in my own life?

I decided it did. You know what the main temptation in the world is for a young American who is relatively wealthy? It’s to feel invincible, like you cannot be touched, like there is nothing you cannot do. The world is your oyster and all you gotta do is open it up and enjoy. Of course, nothing is further from the truth and there is perhaps no more dangerous attitude to the Christian spiritual life, where we are constantly reminded that the world is God’s and exists for his glory, not our existing for our own pleasure. And something has got to prick that attitude from time to time; why not shingles? Nothing like a virus attacking your nerves and making you feel like you’re being poked again and again with electric pins to make you realize you’re not in charge here. Which is of course what my spirit needed; there are times where making someone well might undermined good things going on in their spirit.

I’m not alone in this idea, that our sickness has the capability of teaching us, that our sickness has the capability of making us different people that we wouldn’t be without the sickness. People with far greater disabilities and sicknesses than me will tell you that they have become the people they are because of their disabilities and have a unique story to share with the world because of their sickness. They see God in a different way because of their sickness than others do and so they have a unique way to talk about God with the world. So while it may scare us that our future is in God’s hands, what could be better news, really? Because whether healed or not, our future is in God’s hands. If God chooses, he can heal us and we can glorify him in our healing. If God chooses, he can choose not to heal us and we can glorify him in our sickness. This is the good God we serve.
Of course, there are many other options besides physical sickness. Many of us are hurting in the current economic situation. We are scared of what the future holds, we are unsure about whether what we thought was secure really is as secure as we assumed it was. In this case, we must be aware again that God may or may not bring healing to us; things may or may not go back to what they were before. I have noticed the way in which our national culture has changed in this recession; people are saving more, buying less. People are reconsidering whether things will bring them happiness after all. Is it any surprise that God might choose to let us endure poverty, either individually or as a people? There are all sorts of problems where we must be able to say, “If you choose, you can make us well.” This is our preference, to go back to a soaring stock market, secure retirement funds and a measure of financial security. But we don’t know whether that desire for security is borne of our good sides or our bad sides. We don’t know what kind of people we’d become if we had it: would we truly use our financial security to reach out and touch the world with God’s love or would we use it to buy nicer cars and TVs? I don’t know what I would do—do you? So we leave the choice with God because we’re not wise enough to make it. If he chooses, he can make us well.

Well, as we read on in the story we read what Jesus says next: “I do so choose. Be made clean!” And the man is instantly and completely healed. And even though Jesus told him to kind of keep the message quiet for now, not to share it with too many people because Jesus is not ready for that kind of publicity, but the man can’t keep quiet about it and he just has to share it with everybody.

Your story may end up that way. I hope it does. I hope that whatever you are seeking healing for, physical, emotional, financial healing, whatever it is, I hope Jesus hopes to heal it. He has many times before for me and for many of us here. I think the lesson of this part of the story is that when that healing does happen for us, we need to share it broadly. When Jesus touches us and heals us, there should be something in us that cannot be silent. When this happens, it helps the whole community remember that God is powerful and that God heals. Can you imagine the buzz that that town must have felt long ago when they saw this man proclaim that he had been touched and healed of an incurable disease? The town must have been so excited—we know they were because they all showed up and asked Jesus for healing. Something in us must sing and not be silent when we are touched and healed.
But because it is God’s choice, your story may not end up with this immediate happy ending. The sickness may stay or grow. The financial situation may not improve.

This all may or may not happen in the way we would choose. But if it does not happen for you, take heart; because this is not only a picture of immediate healing: it is a picture of the healing that awaits all those who believe in Jesus. Whether or not every physical ailment was healed, we all who are Christians have been touched by Jesus; and that touch itself makes us realize that in every meaningful way, we are healed. Whatever becomes of our bodies here, we realize that we do not carry those sicknesses forever. Heaven is depicted as being a place where all of our wounds are healed, even those wounds we didn’t know we were carrying around with us here; it is depicted as a place where the will of God is more perfectly known and a place where his desire for all of us to be healed is more perfectly carried out. It is that vision that keeps us going, whether we have been healed here or not.

Audio from Sunday, Feb. 8

2009-02-09T11:40:00.001-05:00

Jim Brior reads the Scripture.

Sermon from Sunday, Feb. 8

2009-02-09T11:37:00.001-05:00

Based on Mark 1:29-39.

This text starts off as a continuation of last week’s text where Jesus was healing in the context of a regular synagogue service. If you remember, Jesus started the service in the usual way, by teaching, but his listeners realized that he spoke in an uncommon way, with uncommon power and authority. And then there was a man with an evil spirit who tried to disrupt the service, but Jesus cast out the evil spirit and it further demonstrated Jesus’ authority. People began to realize that Jesus really did possess some sort of special connection with God because the healing made it quite obvious. Now the service is over and immediately they go to Simon’s house for an excellent post-church meal. We know that all food tastes better right after church, right? You’re all hungry and in the right frame of mind. Simon’s mother-in-law has been working on a feast for them there but when they arrive home, they find to their shock that she has gotten sick, in bed with a fever.

Jesus sees this and decides he can also heal this woman, and so we read that he takes her by the hand and he lifts her up and heals her. And by this time the secret is out about Jesus, at least in this little town it is, and so the town has all gathered around. They’re lined up outside Simon’s door 5 and 6 deep. Verse 33 says, “The whole city gathered outside his door.” And this was probably not literally true, but I’m sure it felt that way. And I’m sure they sat in that house and thought, “Okay, today’s been interesting. We started today anonymous, a young teacher and four followers, and now we’ve got the whole city outside our door, everybody wants a piece of us, everybody knows we’ve got the keys to something special.” And there’s something exciting about that.

So Jesus and the disciples go outside and greeted their public. We read that he cured many people who were sick, and that he also cast out many more demons. And not only did he cast the demons out, he also made ‘em shut up when he did. And Jesus and his friends—man, they were rock stars right then. And his four disciples—remember, he hasn’t called the other 8 yet, so it’s Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John—are thinking, man, we did the right thing when we left those fishing boats behind. If we hadn’t gone with this guy, we’d be back on our stupid boats spending the cold mornings mending nets and gutting fish. But this, man, we could get used to this life. They are loving the attention and the affection of the crowd. After everybody gets healed and the crowds dispersed, I just imagine the five men going in the house, sitting around with a few beverages and just chilling. I imagine Simon and Andrew patting Jesus on the back saying, “you were great man! How did you do that stuff?” I imagine James and John rubbing his head like young men do with each other and saying, “How’d you do that stuff? Tell me your secret. I wanna know what you know.”

I also imagine Jesus not being real interested in the conversation, being slightly uncomfortable with all the attention, and eventually just saying, “You know what guys? I need to get some shuteye,” and going to bed. The day was just as much a whirlwind for him, but I don’t imagine it energizing him as much as it seemed to energize the other guys; this wasn’t just a show for Jesus, but it was a difficult encounter with actual needy and oppressed people. These weren’t just nameless faces out there to Jesus, but people afflicted with real illnesses, with real demons, demons that wished him ill. These people weren’t just a chance for him to do some neat tricks, but real people, people who all of the sudden, because he has taken on flesh, he can only help one at a time. It’s one thing to watch the guy with all the power and think, “that would be so cool…” and it’s another thing to be the guy with all the power who has so much responsibility, so much authority…

I’ve come to understand this a little bit as a pastor, this sense of being overwhelmed with people’s needs. A pastor’s job description is varied enough that there is no person in the world who can be good at all of it—a good pastor is adept at consoling the sick, giving counsel to the dying, an excellent and dynamic preacher, an effective teacher, a swell organizer, a charismatic vision-caster and a pretty good cook for those church dinners. And sometimes you look at that and you think, “Wow, that’s so many needs, so many expectations.”

But of course it is not only pastors who occasionally feel overwhelmed—it is all Christians who feel overwhelmed at our calling. Look at the world—turn on the TV if you want a start—and see all of the needs! There are fires in Coatesville and starving children in Africa and broken families and racism all over our nation and hunger in our nation’s cities and rural areas and suburbs, and in the midst of all these needs there are all these subtle reminders that we, Christians, are the ones who are supposed to be doing something about it. “You are the light of the world,” said our savior himself, Jesus, just as he had once said that he was the light of the world, now we are the light of the world. We hear the modern writers: “you are the only Jesus that most people will ever meet.” “Your life is the only Bible most people will ever read.” “Jesus has no hands but our hands.” And with each phrase like that our frustration mounts: so many issues to address, all of them valuable, all of them reasonable, all of them worthwhile but we simply cannot do all of these things. Like Jesus looking out at the crowd 5 and 6 deep, we wonder whose needs we can meet and whose needs we cannot meet simply because we can’t do everything. We know what Jesus was feeling because we feel it too—so many needs, and our humanness keeps us from meeting them all.

So they all go to sleep and all the disciples are buzzing. They can’t sleep so well but eventually they fall asleep—and like most young men, they sleep late. But when they wake up the next morning, they see a bunch of other people outside just waiting to be healed. And they think, “Oh yeah, it’s happening again. Let’s get Jesus up and let’s get started healing and casting out demons,” and they go into Jesus’ room to wake him up so they can go re-start the party.

But there’s a problem—Jesus isn’t there. Apparently Jesus had gone off by himself to pray. He went to a deserted place, a place alone, while it was still dark, where he could be by himself, and he just wanted to talk to God. Who knows why exactly? Who knows what he said exactly? Scripture tells us what he prayed toward the end of his earthly life, in the Garden of Gethsemane. But we don’t know at all what he prayed here, at the beginning of his earthly ministry. Odds are Scripture doesn’t tell us because it’s really not the words he said which were so important—it was the time and the place, which suggested withdrawing from society even if that meant getting up at the crack of dawn to do so. And Simon and the three other disciples went out to find him, to track him down and they find him, and they say, “Everybody is looking for you.” “Susie’s sick, Donnie’s got a demon, so aren’t we going to go back and do the whole rock-star-magical-healing thing we did yesterday?” Aren’t we going to go back and save the world and do that whole thing we did? Ummm….Jesus? Aren’t you gonna come back now?

And Jesus’ response is sort of yes, sort of no—yes, we’re going to go and do some more healing but we’re not going to go do that back in Capernaum, but we’re going to take this on the road a little bit, we’re going to go to other towns in Galilee to spread this word wider because this is what I came to do.

I think Jesus’ actions and response here are very interesting. When he is confronted with all this human need, he recognizes that to sort all of this out he needs to be alone with God. This is important, and all too often it’s something we forget about when we are pressed with human needs. It is tempting to all of us to be activists, but if we are activists without knowing what we should be activists about, we will not be most useful to what God is doing in the world. We’ll be working hard but not truly useful.

But Jesus also recognizes that his desire to go off and be by himself with God is not the final stage. Prayer is good and we must pray—but we must pray so that we may be changed to go out and serve the world. Immediately after prayer, do you see how Jesus was again confronted with the immediate problems of the world? Simon comes in and says, “Everybody’s looking for you.” Is this true? Not exactly. Not everyone is looking for him. But Simon is reflecting here his own anxiety—it seems like everyone to Simon because the need is so urgent, so pressing. And he passes that anxiety on to Jesus—come on! You gotta do something! Everyone is out there waiting for you. He desperately wants Jesus to come back, to relieve the tension.

You have to be brave to stand up to the anxiety of that. And you have to have your wits about you—if you don’t want to do what hundreds of anxious people want you to do, you have to have a sense of composure that can only come from a firm knowledge of what God wants you to do. And this is what Jesus has. After he has spent this time with God in prayer, he sees clearly what he has been called to do. And he says, “we’re not going back, but we’re going to go to the neighboring towns”—why?—because that is what I came out to do. Prayer, re-connecting with His Father, deepening that level of intimacy: this gives him the strength and the wisdom to do what is right, to follow his calling even in the midst of all this anxiety, all this hubbub.

Remember that we are in the season of Epiphany in the church, and that we are talking about different ways Jesus was revealed to us. In this text, Jesus is revealed to be a man of deep intimacy with His Father, a man whose heart beat with the pulse of God, a man who knew His father and his father knew him. When you read of this kind of intimacy with God, it is impossible not to want it for yourself. Don’t you wish you had this same kind of intimacy with God that Jesus had?

Consider this: the Bible says it is possible. Consider that the language used for Jesus, “the Son of God,” is also used for us: “Look how much God loves us,” reads 1 John 3:1, “that we could be called the children of God—and this is what we are!” Look at the Lord’s Prayer and consider that we are to call God not “Great Lord, creator and master of the universe,” but simply, “Daddy.” Abba. As open and vulnerable to us as he could be. A daddy is ready for a relationship with the children he loves—trust me on this, I’ll tell you about it sometime—and God is that kind of available to us. Jesus reveals that kind of relationship made flesh, that kind of intimacy made tangible so that we can see it and have a model to shoot for.
We too can experience that sense of peace and that bold sense of calling.

And in Jesus, we get a picture of what that looks like. For one, it means not being overwhelmed at the amount of need out there. There are a lot of genuine needs—no one knew it better than Jesus. But he also knew that being overwhelmed by it was not helpful either; certainly he had a grasp of real deep pains that people felt but that the pains of the world would best be addressed by him living out his calling. This is an important point for us to grasp; often when we are confronted by needs, we run around like a chicken with our head cut off trying to meet all the needs, or at least going crazy that we can’t. But Jesus does not do this. He goes to another town, knowing full well that he is leaving behind people who are sick, people who need healing, people who have demons that he just can’t help now. Why? It’s simply not what he’s called to do. Just so—you can only address the problems in life that God has given you gifts to address. My good friend Pastor Tim just moved from Pughtown to Galveston, TX, to do full-time hurricane Ike relief. I have no idea how he does it. I couldn’t do it. I told him that. I felt stupid, like a fake Christian, like a cold-hearted Christian, around him and do you know what he said to me? I’ve told you this before. He said, “I couldn’t read books like you do and study worship like you do, and go to class like you do or write papers like you do.” Then I realized that I was using my gifts to the best of my ability for God’s good purposes and he was doing the same thing. And you know what? I feel less stupid. I feel less cold-hearted. Because he has his calling and I have mine; and the world’s a lot better off if he throws himself into his calling with his whole heart and I throw myself into mine with my whole heart than if we both tried to do everything. Now do I still have a lot to learn and does he still have a lot to learn? You bet. But we’re on the right track. Like Jesus, I’m learning to feel peace when I’m confronted with troubles that are simply not my calling to address. Do I feel for those issues? Yes, and I pray that God will raise up people to address them or help me to see some new way that I can address them. But I am learning that what God has given me is mine; and what God has given you is yours.

The other side of what I’m learning, though, is a boldness about what is my calling. Jesus discovered what his calling was and he followed it boldly. Even though as we shall see it was not an easy road, he had this unshakeable sense of what he was called to do. And so prayer is not only a time to sort out what we are not to do, but what we must do. Despite the fact that our callings are not always easy, there comes an unshakeable satisfaction when we know we are doing what we must do. And this is the kind of thing we can only know when we make an encounter with God a priority in our lives. Just like Jesus, it may mean getting up early in the morning, it may mean finding a place alone, it may mean doing what needs to be done to pursue this relationship with God. In your life, it may mean a step like making worship a priority, it may mean finding a way either in our church or outside our church to serve the community, to touch people with the love of Christ; it may mean rekindling your prayer life; it may mean an emotional turning-around, a simple saying, “This is enough, I’m tired of half-pursuing this Christian life, I want to pursue it with all my heart, all my mind and all my strength.” If you do this, you too will be better able to sort out the things you shouldn’t do from the things you must do.

Audio from Sunday, Feb. 1

2009-02-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

Sermon from Sunday, Feb. 1

2009-02-01T16:01:00.001-05:00

Based on Mark 1:21-28.

The past couple of weeks we have been reading from Mark 1 and looking at the way Jesus burst on the scene. Mark was probably the first of the four gospels to be written, and part of the reason scholars believe this is the case is that it’s so short. The other three gospels are much longer and the theory is that it is likely that Mark was written first and the other three writers filled in details—at least that’s more likely than Matthew and Luke and John writing long gospels and Mark writing a Cliffs Notes version.

Because Mark is so short, it is also rather stark. Here we are in the first chapter of the book, and already so much has happened—we have read about John the Baptist’s ministry; it didn’t bother telling us very much at all about Jesus’ birth; already, as we read last week, Jesus has started gathering disciples about him; and now, all of 21 verses into the book, Jesus has begun his public teaching ministry. And the action is just so intense, and the details are so few, that the book sort of fills you with a sense of “Who is this man?” Mark’s strategy in telling the story is to keep the details few because he wants you to have a sense of mystery about who this Jesus really is; he wants his readers to feel just as overwhelmed and confused
as Jesus’ first listeners no doubt felt.

So travel with me back in time and imagine that you are on your way not to church but to synagogue. You are going to hear the scribes talk. And it’s not bad; really, it’s not. It’s all you know. The scribes were the religious teachers of Jesus’ day; and they were religious authorities because they were learned men (I say men), well-schooled in the Jewish traditions of interpretation of the law. If you wanted to know about what a passage of the Torah meant, the scribes could give you the history of how the Jewish authorities interpreted the text. They could tell you what observant Jews should think about the text based on tradition.

But instead you get something different. A new guy is teaching today, and there’s just something different about him somehow. He doesn’t just rehash the same interpretations, but he speaks differently; he speaks somehow of an intense relationship with God that is not merely a tired religious thing but a daily reality for him. We know this because of the way that Mark says that Jesus speaks as one having authority. The Greek word translated authority here does not mean merely that Jesus had control over his audience. Instead, it means that Jesus was not simply rehashing what other people had said but he was speaking with independent authority. Rather than translating the authority of others, or the authority of tradition, Jesus spoke with his own authority. It appeared anyway that Jesus was speaking with a kind of authority that went beyond repeating what other people had said about God and was instead speaking about the depths of his experience with God.

It is enough to make you wonder what he said, isn’t it? Mark doesn’t tell us what Jesus said there in Capernaum. When Matthew uses this phrase to describe Jesus’ teaching, “as one having authority,” it is at the completion of the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount certainly demonstrates the kind of authority that we read about here. If you don’t remember the Sermon on the Mount, it is when Jesus gathers his listeners on a hillside and he speaks to them about various issues. And many times throughout the sermon on the mount, Jesus uses a formula: “You have heard it said…yada yada yada….but I say to you something different.” Here’s what the tradition says, but here’s what I say. For example in the part of the sermon on murder, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or a sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” Jesus here repeats the Old Testament commandment about murder, and talks about how they interpreted it way back then; and then he intensifies it. He talks about how the real sin in murder is not strictly the physical taking of someone’s life, but the whole attitude of anger behind it; the anger that starts in whispered curses and insults is the root that comes to blossom in murder. And time and again this is what Jesus does; he says, “Here is what you have heard;” but then intensifies it and gets to the root of the matter. Regarding adultery, he says, “You have heard it said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ but I tell you that whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The physical act of adultery is not the only concern because it has its roots in lust; if lust goes unchecked, it will manifest itself in some unhealthy way.

What is interesting to me is that we usually think of Jesus as relaxing the Old Testament laws; for example, he stopped a crowd from stoning a woman caught in adultery, though they had the legal right and precedent to do so. He pointed us to the truth that salvation and reconciliation with God was not a matter of keeping laws perfectly but in building a personal relationship with God. So we usually think of Jesus as relaxing the laws that the observant Jewish culture believed you had to follow. Yet throughout the sermon on the Mount, Jesus did not relax the laws, but he intensified them. Not only were you prohibited from strangling someone, you were prohibited from hating them in your heart. Not only were you prohibited from swearing falsely, you were prohibited from swearing at all; instead, you were to always speak the truth, even when you weren’t under oath.

In Jesus, we see that what God cared about was an attitude of the heart; this was not completely foreign to the religious teachers before him, but Jesus definitely took it to a new level. He reinterpreted the traditions of his day in a totally unique way, which he could do because he was, after all, God in the flesh. So this is what is meant by Jesus’ authority—he boldly claimed the right to supersede and intensify tradition. His audience listened spellbound because he did not just repeat the same old formulas but gave them a new and somewhat difficult path to follow.

Then Jesus does a miracle which further demonstrates his authority. A man in the gathering is afflicted with an evil spirit which makes him cry out at inappropriate times. And the evil spirit through the man, calls out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Now we don’t know precisely what the problem was with the man, but what is key is that the evil spirit recognized Jesus as a powerful spiritual force which was opposed to the evil work the spirit was doing. Just as the listeners had concluded that Jesus was different somehow, that he had unique authority in the situation, the evil spirit also concludes that Jesus is different than all these other scribes who had come before. Jesus was not like them; their traditions were powerless. But the spirit recognized that Jesus had power, had authority they did not have.

And Jesus then speaks to the spirit and says, “Be silent and come out of him,” and the evil spirit obliges. Jesus’ teaching style demonstrated his connection with God and that connection with God gives him tremendous power. Even the unclean spirits, even spirits that don’t want to obey him, have to obey him because of his self-evident connection with God. And the people are amazed because this miracle is further proof of his authority. It becomes quite obvious that this man is not a pretender, that he indeed does know something that the religious traditions have missed somehow, that he does indeed know God pretty well and so maybe it’s worth listening to what he has to say. They say, “What is this? A new kind of teaching—with authority!” And they spread the news about the new powerful teacher quickly, and his fame spreads all around the surrounding region of Galilee.

You can see that the word authority has two meanings in this text: Jesus has spiritual authority because he knows something about God that the religious leaders did not know. This spiritual authority translated to a certain royal authority over those he encountered; because he was in touch with God, to put it bluntly, he had the right to tell people and evil spirits what to do, and they would obey him.

The question of authority is one with which we struggle today. Very few public figures seem to be true and genuine heroes, real people of integrity. Those of you who follow the sports world know that there’s a book coming out on Tuesday called “The Yankee Years,” written by former Yankees manager Joe Torre with help from a sportswriter named Tom Verducci. The book promises to be a gossipy-style tell-all about what it was really like in the Yankees clubhouse from 1995-2007. Torre lets loose about pretty-boy star Alex Rodriguez and his rivalry with the team’s shortstop, Derek Jeter. He talks about the stars behind the scenes and their weaknesses and strengths as individuals. And we want to hear the juicy gossip—at least I kinda do. And you think to yourself, did any of the great Yankees of the past behave like this? Would we ever hear this kinda stuff about Joe DiMaggio? Lou Gehrig? Babe Ruth? They seemed so clean, so wholesome. I mean, you heard a few things about Babe Ruth’s womanizing, but you heard so little of it that you brushed it off easily. Baseball players don’t seem like real heroes today—they seem like us only richer and pettier.

Same with politicians. There was a time in this country, where, remarkable as this may seem, our president was able to hide a disability from the general public. President Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down and essentially wheelchair-bound in private. When he had to make a speech in public, a specially-constructed very solid lectern was used so that he could use it to support his weight, so that the American people would not see their leader looking weak—and so he could appear to be strong so he could run for re-election. Can you imagine that escaping the press today? We knew about every foible on the campaign trail, every note missed in a speech, every prejudice betrayed in a thoughtless remark. We know, for example, that our current president smokes and has failed in several attempts to quit; we knew that our previous president battled alcoholism.

Same, frankly, with preachers. I don’t know that preachers have gotten any more ill-behaved in the last few years, but I do know it seems that way; TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s affairs came to light, Pastor Ted Haggard was a major figure in the last couple years for soliciting male prostitutes; even the remarks Billy Graham made about Jewish people in the 1970s came to light recently, and tarnished the glow of these figures we once esteemed (and still do esteem in some cases).

There is precious little about our public figures that we do not know; and the result is a crisis of authority. Because we know about everyone’s mistakes, we don’t really know who to trust. Because we see glaring mistakes in people that we did not formerly see, we conclude that our public figures do not have authority in our lives—we conclude that they are bad examples to follow. Now this is not a bad thing—I don’t want my children growing up to be like these role models exactly. But we must recognize we have a crisis of authority—we do not recognize anyone as trustworthy and so we do not trust anyone to be reliable for us to pattern our lives after. The result is that at our worst we are a nation of rugged individuals, each of us doing what we think is best, trusting very few others and allowing very few others to guide our decision-making. Because we do not trust anyone to measure up, we do not allow them to guide our decision-making; and so we do not really have patterns, role models who we believe in deep down. This is a lonely way to live, but oddly enough we love it; we sometimes love not having role models because it often means not having accountability, and we like that. We love not having role models because it keeps us from having expectations of ourselves.

And so the church proposes another way; not with any one human being the ultimate authority, but recognizing Jesus as the authority. Pattern your life after him, because he will not let you down; do not hesitate to follow in his way, because he is the way and he leads to life both here and forever. I come to you as one without authority on my own, because all I can do is point you to the one who does have authority.

And I must close with these words: the true test of Jesus’ authority came with this encounter with the evil spirit. The crowd knew that Jesus had authority not because the evil spirit said it, but because the evil spirit obeyed. Just so in our lives—Jesus has authority not because we proclaim him but because we follow him, because we obey him. It is appropriate to end our service at this Table today because it too is a proclamation of our willingness to obey him; it is our proclamation that we follow a Savior with a broken body and shed blood. It is our remembrance that Jesus shed his blood and had his body broken once for us all on Calvary; and it is our pledge to each other to let our own bodies be broken and our own blood be shed, our own lives laid down, so that His will can be realized on earth. Here at this table, we do have a Pattern to follow, here at the Table is one having authority; and here at this table we begin to follow him; here at this table we start to obey.

Audio from Jan. 25

2009-01-25T20:08:00.001-05:00

Val Jenks reads the Scripture at the beginning. After the end of the sermon (25:25), we sang "It Is Well With My Soul." The benediction is tacked on to the end. For those of you who are seeing this on facebook, you can get audio at my blog, pastormikejordan.blogspot.com.

I'm back...and here's the sermon from Jan. 25

2009-01-25T20:06:00.001-05:00

Based on Mark 1:14-20.

I wasn’t sure what to think this week when I went on the website of an independent church in Indiana and read the section on becoming a Christian. Its title was “Becoming a Christian is as easy as ABC.” A: Admit you are a sinner. B: believe that Jesus Christ can save you. And C: Confess him as Lord of your life.” ABC: that’s what it takes.
Like I said, I wasn’t exactly sure what to think; on one hand, that’s true, that’s what it takes to become a Christian. But at the same time, I’m always wary of people who tell you how easy it is to become a Christian, that it’s just a matter of saying a certain something or praying a certain prayer. Again, there’s a sense in which that’s true, but there’s also a sense in which that is too simple. To become a Christian is simple, perhaps, but to live as a Christian is a terribly complex thing, one which demands the rigorous involvement of our minds, our bodies and our spirits.
At least that’s the way that Jesus talked about it when he made his initial pitch for followers. Jesus’ initial approach was not to tell people about how easy it was to follow him, but to stress how following him meant that everything would change. Jesus’ message seems simple: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Again, simple; just one sentence. But there’s an awful lot jammed into this sentence. When he says, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near,” Jesus is making an apocalyptic statement. Good Jews at the time of Jesus believed that the Day of the Lord would come at some point, and that that day would be an apocalyptic day, a day the whole world was shaken, a day everything was turned upside down. Most importantly, there would be political ramifications and Israel would be restored to a place of prominence, a powerful nation in the world. No longer would they be an insignificant people tucked away in an insignificant corner of the Roman Empire; no longer would they be a people conquered by the Assyrians, the Babylonians or the Romans; now they would be a powerful people, like they were in the days of King David and King Solomon. Jesus says, “That time has come; in me, the whole world is being turned upside down; in me, Israel is being glorified, but in a way you can scarcely imagine; in me, history is pivoting.” We heard that word being used a lot on Tuesday during the inauguration, how we were at a pivot point in American history with our first African-American President. And if that is truly a pivot point remains to be seen; you could argue that America will continue to struggle with racism just as much as ever regardless of who’s in the White House. But Jesus laid claim to being a real pivotal figure in history; he claimed that in him one age was passing away and another was beginning; in him the world was being turned upside down and history was turning on its head.
Thus, Jesus says, “repent and believe in the good news.” Repent is one of those words that has simply lost its meaning in our modern situation. It has come to mean something like, “having willpower to break a bad habit,” or “saying I’m sorry.” Repentance, though, is a far bigger concept than that; it has to do with the whole orientation of your life. Repentance is a complete turn-around from one way of living to another. In short, what Jesus is saying is, “I have come to change the whole game, the whole thing. Turn your life around to match what I am saying. What I am saying is at odds with the way the whole world thinks about things, and I want you to re-orient your life and live as if what I say is true, not the things you have always believed are true. I want you to reject the stories that the world tells you about how God works and choose to live as if my account for how God works is true. Repent, believe the good news: believe that the world is turning upside down, believe that you can trust me to show you what’s true, believe me, not what you have always believed, not just what your parents told you, but believe me. Believe me with your mind and spirit, and repent so that you live that belief out with your life. That is what Jesus is saying here; it is not simple or easy, not a matter of ABC, but re-think everything you know about the way the world works and follow me. Re-think reality and follow me.
Brian McLaren is a Christian author who sometimes infuriates me and sometimes inspires me. I think he has a very helpful way of thinking of this, though: he talks about framing stories, stories that define reality as we know it. The culture we live in has one framing story, about achievement, about conquest, about competition and winners and losers. In this framing story, the powerful ones are the ones who achieve the most or are the most beautiful or are the celebrities, those that climb the ladders well. Jesus has a whole different framing story: life is not about winning at all, but about laying yourself down. Jesus dares to say, “I am God come to earth, and I am demonstrating in my birth, in my life, in my death, that life is not about asserting yourself, but giving yourself away completely.” When Jesus says to repent, he is inviting us to change framing stories, to leave behind one way of thinking and looking at the world and to take on another. To leave behind one set of priorities and to take on another.
Jesus’ message is difficult and it doesn’t appeal to everybody. In fact, in some way, it doesn’t really appeal to very many people at all. Because you know what? Most of us don’t really want to re-think reality. That’s a whole lot of trouble to go to. And you don’t really want to go to that reality if you have a pretty nice life. I mean, I have a pretty nice life. Wonderful wife, two beautiful kids. I don’t live in a fabulous home, but it keeps me warm and there’s plenty of room for the four of us to live. I’ve got a couple of advanced degrees and another one on the way that should contribute to my ability to provide for myself and my family. I’ve got paid vacation and benefits. Who wants to re-think reality when that is your reality?
No doubt most of you have pretty nice realities too. Many of you have nice homes to live in, great families, rewarding jobs, a career path to follow...and all of this makes it difficult to re-think this reality. Who wants to re-think reality when your reality is so pleasant? Who wants to repent, to reorient their life, when their current life orientation is pretty nice? The world’s framing story is sweetly seductive in many ways, especially to those of us who are the winners many times. To the young, to the achievement-oriented, to the talented, the world’s framing story promises prosperity and success and love. It is difficult to leave behind that framing story for the framing story of Jesus.
This is part of the reason the gospel has always been so much more popular among the poor, part of the reason why the Bible consistently declares God’s love and favor upon the poor. The poor have no illusions about life, no illusions that their current reality is worth defending. When you have trouble getting food on the table, you don’t think reality is so great that you have to go around preserving it all the time. When you’re having trouble putting a roof over your family’s head, you’re willing to hope that this reality is not all there is, that there is a reality to which Jesus calls us and the burden of repentance is comparatively small to the good news that there is more than this.
But let’s be honest for a second and think about our mostly comparatively wealthy lives. Think for a moment about the collateral damage of the world’s framing story. Yes, the world’s framing story has gotten some of us a lot of wealth, but at what cost? At what cost spiritually? Jesus said it this way: “What does it profit a person if they gain the world but lose their soul?” What does it cost us to live with this framing story? Well, for one thing, this framing story pictures the world as constantly in competition with each other. Doesn’t that cost us something, to see ourselves as constantly in competition with those around us for jobs, for money, for love and affection? For another thing, this framing story values those who achieve. Doesn’t that cost us something when age or disability robs us of the ability to achieve? Doesn’t it cost us something spiritually to hold up actors and athletes as our heroes when 99% of us can never do what they do no matter how hard we work? The wealth this framing story gives us is appealing, but in the end we realize how much it costs us, how much it harms us, how much it robs us of the dignity with which we were created?
Jesus’ invitation to repent, to choose another way of life is still good news. It threatens us because it makes us rethink dogmas of the world that we hold dear. But it is good news because it invites us out of that deceptive way of life, that way we all live by but sucks our souls, into a new and life-giving framing story that says the heroes are not the rich and wealthy high achievers, but the heroes are those who have humbled themselves completely and given themselves to God totally. In Jesus the Kingdom of God has come near; it is up to us to believe that is so and repent, re-orient, re-prioritize everything in our lives.
I am fascinated by the following verses in this text. Four fishermen hear Jesus’ message and immediately follow him. A fisherman in that culture was not exactly the top of the social food chain, but it wasn’t exactly the bottom either. It was a respectable profession. Sure you smelled like fish all the time, but at least you could make a respectable amount of money and spend time with good friends out on the water. It wasn’t the kind of thing one gave up easily.
And yet Jesus sees Simon (who will later be called Peter) and his brother Andrew out on the water, casting a net out into the sea. They must have been somewhere close to shore, because Jesus sees them from the beach and calls out, “Follow me and I’ll make you fish for people.” While Jesus does not use the word “repent” with them, he’s asking nothing less of them. He’s saying, “Leave your life, leave everything you know, and follow me instead. Where are we going? I’m not gonna tell you that. Just follow me.” And as far as Simon and Andrew know, it’s just some stranger on the beach hollering to them. And we read that immediately they left their nets and followed him. Just like that—snap your fingers, they followed him.
And then he goes further on and he sees James and John, two sons of a man named Zebedee, and they’re all fishermen as well. They’re not out on the water, they’re engaged in the tedious task of mending the nets. And Jesus says to them, “Follow me.” And why James and John did, I’ll never know. Their father Zebedee had more sense than to follow a stranger away from the only life he knew. But that stranger—he didn’t even introduce himself!—that stranger had something about him that made men repent. There was something about him that made people throw away the lives they had loved to follow him into the great unknown. Simon, Andrew, James and John—these four—saw him and simply, instantly, decided to follow him and become, as he said, fishers of people.
What is it that makes grown men instantly re-evaluate everything about their lives? A fisherman is a realist, man. Fishermen are not wild-eyed dreamers; fishermen are cold, calculating, steely. You don’t wake up every morning before the fish by being a lazy type who works when the mood strikes. You don’t go out on the water and the sun and the wind and the dry air (all this 1900 years before chapstick) without being a realist about how hard life really is. What is it that makes grizzled fishermen go all soft? What is it that makes realists throw caution to the wind and dream again?
The answer is both simple and complex: it is the presence of God. When Simon and Andrew, James and John looked out on that shore, they did not see a simple teacher, they did not see an excellent moral example, they saw God. They saw God in the flesh; and if you see God in the flesh, no matter how much you like fishing, you realize, “It’s just fishing. An opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime, and only to the very, very lucky. I’ve gotta go and I’ve gotta go now.” Who knows why these four men could see God and Zebedee and the hired hands saw a mere man? Who knows why some could sense God and some could not?
So it is with us, who come to church this morning, some of us fresh from our own fishing boats, whatever they are. Each of us has made our peace with a certain routine, even if we hate it; we wake up in the morning, we brush our teeth, we look in the mirror with our tired eyes (if we have babies, anyway) and we do what we always do. We drive to work, make breakfast for the kids, we put in a full day’s hard work, we grab pizza on a break, we know what we do. We know the fabric of our lives, we know our own fishing boats, that routine that simultaneously gives us meaning and sucks us dry. All of it is mending our nets, or casting them into the sea.
Now here’s the secret: that same God is here, the God who called on Simon and Andrew, James and John. We asked him to be here when we prayed. That same God is present and that same call to repent, to turn everything upside down and follow him, that same God is speaking to you and to me on our own fishing boats. And likely most of us will miss it somehow; most of us will not sense the presence of God and will continue mending our nets or casting them into the sea. But maybe four of us, or fourteen of us, or forty of us, will encounter him today. Maybe four or fourteen or forty of us will hear his call to turn things upside down, to re-orient our lives. Maybe four or fourteen or forty of us will realize that his claim that the world is not what we think it is is really good news instead of a threat; maybe four or fourteen or forty of us will give our hearts to him today and follow him as did Simon and Andrew, James and John. Will you hear the call?

Advent Devotional for Christmas Day

2008-12-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Thursday, December 25 Luke 2:22-32
Jesus grants us healing both here and beyond.
Simeon served in the Temple and we read that he looked forward with steadfast heart to “the consolation of Israel.” He looked forward to the day when God would decisively break into the world on behalf of his people, and reconcile all people to Himself. When he saw Jesus, in the Spirit he knew that he was seeing the Messiah, the One he had waited to see all his life.
And he embraces this baby, this baby who has been the purpose of his whole life, and he essentially cries out to God, “I can now die happy. Because, God, I have seen your salvation; I have embraced and held him for myself, and I now know the consolation of your people both here and around the world has begun.”
Simeon had embraced God’s healing for himself and so he could face death happily, knowing that the very purpose of his life had been fulfilled, and that every dream he had had for his time on earth had come true. He had seen this baby, and it was enough; he had held this baby, and his soul was now at rest and ready for whatever comes next.
As for us, we have no idea what comes next. God has granted me thirty-one Christmases thus far, and I have no reason to doubt that I will live to see thirty-two. But who knows? Who knows where we will be next Christmas, and what the state of our body and lives will be? Who knows what will happen in the next year in America, in the world, in our families, lives and homes? We simply don’t know.
And so, before this Christmas passes you by, embrace the Baby. Take him into your arms; gaze into the eyes of salvation; remember that these baby hands were formed for your healing, worked for your healing, healed for your healing, bled for your healing, were pierced for your healing. Remember that embracing this Baby—for all that means—is the purpose of your life, the very reason you were put here. Remember that in a sense, his hands are now your hands, and that you are a healer as certainly as he was.
And once you have embraced him, enjoy the sweet communion with him that Simeon enjoyed, both as he held him on this side of the River Jordan, and as he knelt at his feet and worshiped him on the other side of that great river. May God grant you a sweet 2009 of communion with the Baby of Bethlehem.

Advent Devotional for Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, December 24 Luke 2:1-20
Jesus is healing.
We read these verses every year. Maybe we read them at the Christmas Eve service, or hear the pastor read them on the Sunday before or after Christmas. Maybe we read them when we are together as a family Christmas Eve night. Maybe we hear Linus read them in A Charlie Brown Christmas, with the lights dimmed, holding only his blanket and speaking with childlike innocent clarity.
The first seven verses are a remarkable retelling of the events, if only because it reminds us on one hand how ordinary Jesus’ birth was. An ordinary man, an ordinary woman, on ordinary business, give birth in an ordinary way. In fact, if there was anything exceptional about the birth itself, it had more to do with how humble the circumstances were; there was not even a room in a home or an inn for the baby to be born, so he was laid in a feeding trough.
Of course, the next few verses reveal that this is no ordinary baby boy. An angel appears and tells shepherds of his birth, that this one is a Savior, a Messiah, the Lord himself. Suddenly the angel is surrounded with an army of other angels, all rejoicing in the accomplishment of God in being Incarnate in human form. This is most unusual; not for every baby does the veil between heaven and earth tear so that mortals can see the rejoicing of angels.
The angels’ message, of course, is that Jesus is the long-awaited One, the Reconciler, the one who will save us from our sin and from ourselves, and the one who will offer us right relationship with God. It is, in short, a message about healing; it reveals that the brokenness that has permeated the world since Adam and Eve is on borrowed time; it reveals that the darkness that covers the earth is being pierced by one great light, and that Light is currently laying in a manger and longing for human touch.
Never forget this, not now, not ever. Never settle for the insipid brew that passes for Christmas in America, this idea that Christmas is about the innocence of childhood, or the joy that naturally occurs in our hearts, or the quiet comfort of family and friends. Christmas is this: our healing has come to us in a way we can see and touch and understand, in the baby Jesus. Our healing lays now in a manger, close to us, within our grasp, and cries out to be held and touched and embraced and owned. The question which confronts us always, but especially at Christmas, is whether we will in fact embrace this Baby who cries out for our arms.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 23

2008-12-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, December 23 John 11
Jesus brings healing even where it seems impossible.
The story of Lazarus is justly one of the most famous in Scripture. Jesus has just left Judea where people had been trying to arrest him, but now he wants to go back to visit his friend Lazarus, who is gravely ill. The disciples protest but Jesus insists, prompting a resigned Thomas to shrug, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” They do not arrive until Lazarus has been dead for three days. Jesus, though, tells Lazarus’s sister Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” She says, “I know, I know that there will be a day when the dead will be raised.” Jesus says, “No, I mean now…I am the resurrection.” He has them pull the stone away, despite the stench of death that should be present after three days of decomposition. He calls, “Lazarus, come forth!” and Lazarus does, alive again. He is embraced by his family and welcomed back.
There are times in our lives when our prospects for recovery seem, well, dead. We look at our situation in life and do not see any hope of recovery. Family relationships seem broken beyond repair. Addictions are too powerful, too strong to break. Marriages are too broken, suffering from years of neglect or misbehavior. The economic situation has simply laid us too low to ever be hopeful again.
Remember, in the midst of all this, that the One we worship is the One who raised Lazarus. He is the One who looked at a three-day-old corpse and saw not horrific stench but unrealized potential. He is the One who told his disciples and friends and anyone else who would listen that he has this power and is willing to use it on behalf of his followers. And he is the One who calls his followers to go to uncomfortable places (like Judea) and do uncomfortable things (like roll stones away) so that they can know his healing, and (amazing thought!) become healers themselves. Before you declare any situation in your life beyond redemption, remember that this is the God you worship.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 22

2008-12-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

Monday, December 22 Malachi 4:2
Jesus is the Sun of Righteousness, who brings healing.
“The sun of righteousness” looks forward to the coming of Jesus. In the verse before, Jesus is described as burning judgment against the arrogant and evildoers. But for those who revere the name of God, Jesus will come as a “sun of righteousness.” The sun, of course is a terribly hot burning ball that is capable of causing great harm but also is capable of bringing healing and life. Jesus is sort of like this; to those who oppose God, he is a burning fire, but to those who honor God, his heat can bring healing and new life.
Truth be told, the functions are not as different as they seem. Fire purifies and burns away impurities either way. In the same way, Jesus comes to reveal to us what we really are, to show us what parts of us need changing in order to become as God intended us to be. But to those who oppose God, Jesus’ fire seems as if it is cutting to the very core of their being; while those who honor and revere God recognize that God longs to see us purified and that even when Jesus’ fire burns us, it is for our good, to set us on a healthier path in our lives.
I love the image that ends this verse. When we revere God’s name, and allow Jesus’ work to purify rather than terrify us, we “shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.” The image is one of youth, of exuberance, of excitement. The picture is clear: when we revere God’s name and learn to live lives in his way, we will be given new life beyond what we can imagine.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 21

2008-12-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sunday, December 21 Acts 3:1-9
Healing is more important than money.
When going to the Temple to pray, Peter and John met a poor man seeking alms. In so doing, they faced the same temptation many of us seek when we encounter sickness or poverty: to throw money at it, to buy it off. But instinctively Peter and John knew that alms were not the deep desire of the man’s heart—healing was. And so healing is what they offer him, and it is this healing that causes the man to go walking and leaping and praising God.
We spend this time of year surrounded by charitable causes seeking money. Many of them may be worthy causes, and many of them may be good ways for you to touch the world with God’s love. But often we are overwhelmed by such requests and unsure about how to best steward the money God gives us; for every cause we give to there are literally thousands we do not give to. This story reminds us that as people of God, we have more than money to offer people. Money can be useful, but it is not always what people need, even when they think it is what they need. In reality, what we all need is healing, a sense of purpose and belonging, and a reconciliation with the One who created us and our world; and it is these things that we Christians are uniquely suited to bring to the world.
To give money to a problem, in the end, is often the easy way out: it feels good and makes us feel like we are part of the solution, but costs us very little in terms of time or personal investment. Healing, on the other hand, requires our whole being, requires that we enter into relationship with those who we seek to help. It is that kind of love that Christ extended us, and that kind of love we should offer to others.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 20

2008-12-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

Saturday, December 20 Mark 3:1-6
Healing is God’s first priority.
We often underrate laws. As modern Christians, we celebrate the triumph of grace over the law, that reconciliation with God is not achieved by perfectly keeping a series of ceremonial rules, but by God’s gracious action in Jesus. But the law was deeply important in Jewish culture, mostly because of its divine origin. Think of it this way: the law might seem a burden to us today because we have not considered the alternatives. The Israelites had just been released from Egypt after 430 years as slaves. Few if any of them were scholars or even educated people; who could possibly come up with a way for these new people to organize their society? Even the most advanced civilizations of that day had ruthless legal codes which mandated death for things like simple thievery or false witness. How could this fledgling people begin to organize themselves in the middle of the wilderness? The law was God’s answer to this; though “an eye for an eye” seems harsh today, it was a humane punishment at the time when there were many capital offenses. Jews revered the law because it was a sure way in which God had intervened in history for their benefit.
Jesus was a scandalous figure at times, in part because of his apparent disregard for the rules. But we should not read our modern rebellious tendencies onto him: Jesus did not set aside the law lightly. In fact, most often, he intensified rather than relaxed the laws. But here, he recognizes that the laws—or perhaps human interpretation of the laws—must be bent in order to heal. Because they revered the law so much, observant Jews not only sought to keep the law, but to “build a fence around it,” to prohibit all sorts of related activities so one would not accidentally break the law. So the Sabbath regulations were intensified from their original intent so that one could not even accidentally break a Sabbath law. Jesus recognizes that to silently acquiesce to this level of strictness is a decision with its own consequences; he asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” One could not look the other way in the interest of maintaining ritual purity when to do so mean that someone would die. In this story we get a glimpse of the one who went to a criminal’s death, becoming unclean on our behalf so that we could be reconciled to God.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 19

2008-12-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Friday, December 19 Luke 4:31-37
Even sicknesses testify to Jesus.
Jesus was a stunning teacher; his listeners were amazed listening to him, because he did not speak like other teachers, but “as one having authority.” By this, Luke means that the scribes and other teachers spoke like ones having second-hand knowledge of God, but Jesus spoke with a sort of first-hand power, a power borne of intimate knowledge of God and communion with the Father. This authority was further demonstrated in his healing. A demon-possessed man was listening to him teach, and during the sermon, the demon begins to cry out, “Let us alone! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth! Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Jesus rebukes the demon and makes him leave the man, a feat which only cemented his reputation as “one having authority.”
The interesting thing about this story, though, is that even the demon testifies to who God really is. The demon gets it, sees clearly who this Jesus is and what his design is—the destruction of evil and sicknesses of all sorts. Even the demons testify to Jesus—and this demon testified while he was still in the man, before he was cast out, which must have been shocking to all who saw it. Now the flip side to Jesus having authority over demons and sicknesses is that there apparently must be times where he allows them to exist. After all, we all die, don’t we? If Jesus has authority to cast them out, then it is only by his authority that they remain.
What sicknesses remain in you? All of us are sick in some ways. None of us are in perfect physical health, much less mental or emotional health. Whether you are healed of your sickness or not (and I pray you are), allow me to introduce the idea that even if you are not healed, your sickness can still bring glory to God and point people to Jesus. Even your handicap, even your shortcoming can cry out about the goodness of Jesus, and point to that great day when all God’s children will be healed because we will know him fully.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 18

2008-12-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

Thursday, December 18 Luke 7:11-17
Healing reminds us of God’s love.
As modern Christians, we often don’t know what to do with Jesus’ healings exactly. Why exactly does Scripture record Jesus’ healings and what are we supposed to make of them? His death and resurrection we more or less understand—in some mystical way, they reconcile us to God when we believe in him and make him our Lord. While his teachings are often cryptic, we basically understand why they are in the Scripture: to detail more fully for us the way to follow Him in our lives. But what do his healings mean? Are they examples for us to follow? Are they nice stories that prove Jesus’ good character? Are they meant to demonstrate Jesus’ power?
This story gives a bit of insight into what Jesus’ healings meant to the people who saw them. Jesus sees a woman weeping; she was a widow, and now her only son had died. Emotionally and economically, she was now alone in the world and did not know how she could go on. Moved, Jesus touches the bier on which the corpse lay, and the man regains his life. He begins to speak and Jesus gave him to her mother, a sign that she would have the one she loved back, who was also the one who provided for her. The response of the people is telling: they are afraid, and then they remark that Jesus is a prophet, and a sign that “God has looked favorably on his people!”
The eyewitnesses to Jesus (and the gospel writers who wrote and arranged these biographies) evidently understood that healing was a reminder that God has not forgotten us, that God still loves us. In one fell swoop, Jesus has given a man his life back, fixed a woman’s broken heart, and saved her from poverty. People see this and recognize that Jesus is a sign from God—a sign that God has kept his promise to his people. In the same way, so we should give thanks for the healings we see, because they keep alive the awareness that God still loves and watches over his people today.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 17

2008-12-17T06:00:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, December 17 Acts 28:1-6
Our healing serves as a testimony to others.
Often we Christians do not get to the end of the book of Acts; our comfort level in the New Testament is in the gospels or the theology of the epistles. This is a shame, because this gem of a story is often missed. Paul is bound for Rome as a prisoner to plead his case before the emperor when the ship wrecks. All reach shore safely on an unknown island, which they find out from the natives is named Malta. The natives show kindness to the strangers, building a fire for them. As Paul helps to gather wood for the fire, he is attacked by a viper, and the natives naturally presume that Paul is a murderer who is suffering divine punishment for his evil deeds. Remarkably, though, Paul flicks the viper off right into the fire, and doesn’t swell up or drop dead as the natives expected. Then the natives change their mind and decide that Paul is not a murderer, but instead a god.
“The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God,” wrote that same Paul some years earlier when he wrote to the church at Rome. I wonder if his own words flashed through his mind as he heard the natives talk. All creation is in bondage to decay and darkness, and waits for someone who is not in bondage to those things, someone who is truly free. All creation is hurting, he may have written, and waits for someone who knows how to be healed. All creation is sick and desperately seeking medicine. All creation is slowly dying and desperately seeking the secret to new life. When Paul shook that viper off into the fire, the natives knew they had met someone with that secret; they knew they had met a child of God. Just so, when we display healing in our lives, we testify to the reality of God. When we live whole lives in a fragmented world, when we demonstrate emotional wholeness in our spirits and share that with others, when we take our satisfaction not in our achievements but in who God has made us to be, then we show the world something of God’s character.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 16

2008-12-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, December 16 Acts 16:25-34
Sometimes we heal by laying down our rights.
To be a jailor was to take your life into your own hands in those days; if your prisoners escaped, especially high-level prisoners, you usually paid with your life. So imagine the jailor’s concern when an earthquake occurs and Paul and Silas, public enemies #1 and #1a, are your prisoners. In fact, when the jailor sees the prison doors wide open, he draws his sword and prepares to save the executioner some time and money when Paul yells out, “Stop! Don’t do it! We’re all here!” And they are. Paul and Silas had such an impact on their fellow prisoners that they managed to convince them not to escape when they had a chance to return to their homes, families and livelihoods. The jailor is moved beyond description, falling down before Paul and Silas and saying, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
What sort of power must a person have to willingly remain in prison, knowing that their inner freedom means that their outward captivity is immaterial? This is real power which cannot be touched by the false political constructs of the day. And the jailor wants that power, wants to be saved and touched by the same power which has overcome Paul and Silas, and so he begs the men for their secret. They tell him, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.” And he does, and he is.
We live in a culture obsessed with rights. Sometimes this is a very good thing, as Western civilization’s recognition of intrinsic human rights is the foundation of our society. But like all good desires, this can be warped, and we can become obsessed with maintaining, protecting and exercising our rights. Sometimes, though, the Gospel is best served by laying our rights down: maybe by moving into a neighborhood below your economic level to learn from folks the culture says are beneath you. Maybe by spending a week of rare and precious vacation building a home for someone who needs a home. Maybe by involving yourself in your church or community work when you want to be caring for yourself in some way. Often, we heal people when we willingly lay down that which is our right.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 15

2008-12-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

Monday, December 15 Acts 14:8-20
The world does not always understand Christian healing.
This passage perfectly illustrates what a confused world may do when a Christian acts boldly to touch the world with God’s love. In Lystra, Paul healed a man who had been crippled since birth. The crowds see this and are stunned at Paul’s amazing work. The town, which heretofore had believed in many gods, looked at Paul and Barnabas and declared that in them “The gods have come down to us in human form!” They went so far as to label Barnabas as Zeus incarnate, and Paul as Hermes, since Paul did all the talking. Paul and Barnabas will have none of it, of course, tearing their clothes and telling people to turn from their idle idols and worship the true God, but even so the crowds almost can’t restrain themselves from worshiping these two men and offering sacrifices to them. But, we read, naysayers come and win over the crowds, convincing them that Paul and Barnabas were not gods in the flesh, not even good people, but wicked people. And then the crowds who had just been worshiping Paul start to stone him, and he barely escapes with his life.
The world does not know what to make of a Christian acting boldly to heal the world. At times, the world will understand you, even laud you for the work you do. At times, the world will seek your end as surely as it sought your Savior’s end. Ask Dr. King. Largely forgotten now is his diminished popularity toward the end of his life, when he realized that in the grand scheme of things, getting laws passed was easy but changing people’s intransigent hearts was difficult. He mentioned this and literally got killed. As a Christian, you will at times have the good favor of the crowd and at times will be an outcast; but take heart, Christ has overcome the world.

Audio from Sunday, Dec. 14

2008-12-14T15:45:00.001-05:00

Based on Matthew 1:1-17 (yes, the boring genealogies!)

Advent Devotional for Dec. 14

2008-12-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sunday, December 14 Acts 9:36-43
Jesus’ disciples are healers too.
A beloved figure in the church in Joppa had just passed away, Tabitha (the unfortunate Greek translation of her name was Dorcas—you would probably go by Tabitha too). Tabitha was beloved because of her good works on behalf of the poor widows in Joppa. After she died, in fact, those poor widows surrounded her and showed off all the clothing that Tabitha had made for them when she was alive.
Peter came into the room and politely asked the women to leave, and then raised Tabitha up from the dead. A clever word play is seen here; when Jesus raises up Jairus’ daughter from the dead in Mark 5 (devotion from Dec. 3), he says to her “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up.” Peter says, “Tabitha cum,” meaning “Tabitha, get up.” From the similarities between the passages, the inference is obvious: Jesus’ disciples can heal in exactly the same way Jesus did.
I wish I could say with confidence what this means for us. Perhaps the ability to heal died with the disciples. Perhaps it means that we as Christians today do not know an ounce of the power that God has enabled us to live with. Perhaps the truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle: we as Christians are capable of far more than we know, far more than we dare to believe we are capable of.
I say this because there is a certain convenience in not being a healer. It gives us the right to throw up our hands in frustration at the world, to claim incompetence and enjoy the catharsis of a good old-fashioned complaint. If we are truly powerless, then we can gripe about the powers that be all we want, because we have no genuine power. If, though, on the other hand, God does gift his children to heal the world in some way (if not exactly the same as Peter), then we have no business complaining as though we had no power at all. If the Holy Spirit lends his strength to us and wants to use us to change the world, then we dare not complain about our inability to change it.
Peter spent long enough swinging his sword and blustering about the problems unbelievers caused in the world. Then he discovered that God gave him the power to heal, and it changed his life, from angry Peter to proactive Peter. Christian, what will happen when you discover you have that power too?

Advent Devotional for Dec. 13

2008-12-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

Saturday, December 13 Isaiah 53:1-6
Through His suffering we are healed.
This ancient prophecy has been connected with Christ since the days of the early church. Though it was written centuries before Jesus’ coming, early Christians saw in Jesus’ life and death a hint of this redemptive suffering: “…he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”
Modern Americans, even many Christians, instinctively shy away from language like this, as it sounds barbaric in a way—all the bruising, the crushing, the punishing. We wonder if it was all necessary, exactly—why did Jesus suffer? Did he have to? Did he choose to?
While there are a variety of ways that Scripture interprets the crucifixion, it is important that we recognize that there was something redemptive in Jesus’ suffering. As Jesus suffers, we see the depth of love God has for us—only one who loves suffers for another. As Jesus suffers, we see clearly the horrors of sin. What might seem to us a benign bad habit or a trivial fault takes on new weight when we see the severe love shown us in the crucifixion. As Jesus suffers, we see the audacity of the Gospel: that death is the way to new life, and that by going through the suffering that awaits anyone who dares follow this condemned criminal, we can know life everlasting.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 12

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Friday, December 12 Luke 17:11-19
Human gratefulness and divine healing.
Samaritans and Jews were famous for not getting along. Elsewhere in the Bible, John tells his readers that Jews and Samaritans would not even use the same utensils. I heard a local Methodist preacher point out that this region, between Samaria and Galilee, would have been particularly rife with ethnic tension as it was right on the border between the two ethnic groups.
But there was one place that those ethnic barriers did not apply—the leper colony. Lepers were outcasts, no matter what nationality they were, and lepers did not have the luxury of drawing social lines between themselves and other lepers. Lepers needed to stick together because no one else wanted anything to do with them.
What a provocative picture of the church—the leper colony! We live in a fragmented culture but the church strives to be the kind of place where those fragmenting boundary lines do not apply—and not because we are so great, but precisely because we recognize that we are sick. We see clearly that God has saved us, and that this is not of ourselves; and because of this, we know we are in no position to elevate ourselves above anyone else. We cannot afford to pretend we are better than anyone else, because we know how fallen we are.
Jesus himself has contact with the lepers, a shocking action in his culture. He heals ten of them, but only one returns to thank him—one of the Samaritan lepers. I’ve always wondered why the others didn’t return. Was it because they didn’t care who healed them, just so long as they were healed? Was it because they were just so overcome with joy that they didn’t think to do it? Is it possible they somehow deceived themselves into thinking that this healing had come by chance, that it was God’s reward to them for their own behavior?
To be truthful, I don’t know. But the story does illustrate a deep truth about human nature, and more pointedly, the church. When something good happens to us, we are able to be remarkably ungrateful, remarkably unconcerned about the Author of our good fortune. And this is not just true of society at large, but even in the leper colony of the church. Here, where we are acquainted with our soul-sickness, we should know better, we should know that we can’t change things on our own, we should know there is One who has touched us and should be thanked. But even here, in the leper colony, we forget to thank Him.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 11

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Thursday, December 11 Matthew 8:5-13
The power of Jesus’ word to heal.
The story reveals remarkable faith on the part of this Roman centurion. His servant was sick and this centurion—a Gentile and likely reviled by many of the more orthodox Jews—would have hated him. Yet he has faith like no one else. When his servant is sick, not only does he seek out the Jewish Jesus, foreign to him, but he also believes so strongly in Jesus that he simply urges him to speak a healing word, not even to bother coming to the house. Jesus is amazed at this level of belief and reminds his Jewish listeners that this foreigner gets it better than many of them do. In fact, he says, this centurion will eat with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in glory before many pious religious Jews will. And, almost as an aside, the servant is healed.
We often wonder today why we can’t see Jesus in the flesh, and we think we would gain great comfort if we could. Maybe we would be comforted in some ways. But do not underestimate the awesome power of Jesus’ word to heal, and this word is not tied to being able to see him.
We hear Jesus’ word in many ways; most obviously, we hear it in the Scripture, commonly called “the Word of God.” Scripture contains so much that points us to Jesus, helps us to see him clearly and thus be healed. We also can hear Jesus’ word in the words of our neighbors—this is part of what is meant when the church is called the body of Christ. We speak for Jesus too. It is a privilege and a boldness to preach and to think those words speak God’s truth and love to human hearts; but this is not a privilege reserved for the ordained. Christians all are able to speak the word of God to each other, to speak to each other with healing words, words that reflect God’s love and care to a person in need of these.
In what ways is Jesus trying to speak healing to you now? Are you listening? Do you want to be healed?

Advent Devotional for Dec. 10

2008-12-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, December 10 Matthew 20:29-34
Jesus has compassion on all those who desire healing.
We face a similar situation in this text as we did in yesterday’s. Two blind men sit by the roadside, and as Jesus passes by, they shout, “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” Though an angry crowd tried to hush them, they continued to shout, “Have mercy on us!” Jesus hears them and stops, and says, “What do you want me to do for you?”
This is similar to yesterday’s situation where Jesus wants to know what the heart situation of the sick people are. What do these men really want? Do they want Jesus to tell off the crowds who have been picking on them? Do they want Jesus to overturn the religious system that marginalizes the sick? Do they want money? The men, however, decide they want none of these things, but desire more than anything else to be healed. This request touches Jesus’ heart, and he heals the men.
Jesus is touched that healing—not revenge—is the deepest desire of their hearts. Jesus still demonstrates that deep compassion on those who desire healing today. It takes courage to desire healing today; in a therapeutic world that aims at self-acceptance, it takes courage to say, “There is something disordered about me, and I crave Jesus’ healing touch.” In a world that often values style over substance, it takes courage to confess that not everything is right within, and that we need healing more than an image makeover. Jesus respected such courage then, and respects that courage in his children now. If healing is what we desire, Jesus stands ready.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 9

2008-12-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, December 9 John 5
To be healed, we must first want to be healed.
Tradition held that the waters in the pool of Beth-zatha could heal if the sick person could only touch them. Verse 4 of this chapter is omitted from many modern translations of the Bible, but gives us an insight into this tradition: “…an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.” By the pool lay a man, blind, lame and paralyzed—he had been ill for 38 long years.
Jesus’ first question to the man may seem odd: “Do you want to be healed?” We think, well, yeah, why wouldn’t he want to be healed? But 38 years is a long time to live with an illness. One begins to make one’s peace with an illness over 38 years. One might not like being blind, lame and paralyzed, but at least after 38 years, the man has no doubt re-constructed his reality to account for the infirmity, and life has gone on as planned. If healing meant going through that process all over again, having to relearn how to live as a sighted person who could walk, would that person really want to be healed after all? Or would it be easier to keep on living with the malady?
I do not presume to judge whether the man should have wanted to be healed or not. (He did, incidentally, and he was.) But this is precisely the same dilemma we face. Living as we do in an imperfect world, we make our peace with its broken realities—sometimes we make our peace too easily. We begin to expect that we, too, will reflect its values. We begin to think that a bit of conspicuous consumption here, a degree of profanity there, a wandering and lustful eye here, a bit of sloth there, that all these things are normal, just part of being a person.
It is and it isn’t. It is normal, but it is far from the abundant life God has for us. And so Jesus asks us as well—“Do you want to be healed?” Or have we fallen so in love with our sickness, with our life as it is now, that we no longer want healing, but for a divine blessing on the status quo? Do we really want healing if that means re-constructing our realities, re-thinking everything? Would we rather remain sick or take on the work it will entail to be made whole?

Audio from Sunday, Dec. 7 Sermon

2008-12-08T10:16:00.002-05:00

Based on Acts 2:43-47. We had an extended time of sharing the peace of Christ in the middle of the sermon.

If you're looking for the Advent devotional, see the next post down...

Advent Devotional for Dec. 8

2008-12-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

Monday, December 8 Acts 9:10-18
Healers must be brave.
Ananias must have cursed his luck. God called him to go and visit Saul of Tarsus, Christianity’s public enemy #1, because Saul had apparently seen the light and met Jesus. In fact, he had seen Jesus so clearly that he had been blinded by the glory and God would use Ananias to heal him, and help him regain his sight. This all sounded fine except when you consider that at last sighting Saul was rounding up Christians and having them put to death. So Ananias didn’t want to go visit a guy who, last he knew, wanted to kill him. Would you?
Yet Ananias goes, and lays his hands on the murderer and says, “Brother Saul (how strange that must have sounded!), the Lord Jesus has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And Paul is healed; scales fall from his eyes and he receives the Holy Spirit and was baptized (presumably by Ananias). He goes on to be a great teacher, preacher and healer himself.
As disciples of Jesus we are called on to be not only healed, but to be healers. As such, we are called to some pretty scary places. We cannot stay by ourselves, holed up in our fortress-churches, lobbing angry words at the hostile world outside. Instead, we are called on to engage with the world even at its scariest. To be an Ananias means believing that there is truly no one beyond the reclamation of God. To be an Ananias means bringing healing to people, even when common sense tells us that these people are murderers, that they hate us, that they do not deserve healing at all.
What might the story of Ananias mean for you? Well, you might start by asking yourself who it is that you are most frightened of. Who threatens you? Is it a family member? A boss? An employee? A person of another race? Whoever it is, consider the prospect that God can actually use you to bring healing to that purpose. And consider the awesome truth that God may also use that person to bring healing to you.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 7

2008-12-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sunday, December 7 Mark 2:1-12
Healing proclaims God’s forgiveness.
This passage is a favorite with young children who love the image of a house so crowded that the paralytic’s friends carry him to the roof of the house, cut a hole in the roof, and lower the man so he is right in front of Jesus. Jesus’ immediate response, his first words? “Son, your sins are forgiven.” What a strange thing that would be to say in our culture! Imagine going to the doctor’s office, being examined and tested and being told, “Your sins are forgiven.” You’d think to yourself, “Time to get a real doctor” and back slowly toward the exit.
Yet Jesus’ response has a point. After he pronounces the man forgiven, the religious authorities begin to grumble and say, “Who is this guy who says he can forgive sins? Only God can forgive sin.” This is of course true, but they do not know that Jesus is God! Jesus, for his part, responds by saying, “Just so you can see I have the kind of power it takes to forgive sins, I’m going to heal this man’s paralysis as well, and the man begins to walk around. The crowd is stunned at this miracle of Jesus. The fact Jesus healed the man made his message that much more trustworthy—he really was God, and the healing proved it to people!
In the same way, our healing testifies to the world that Jesus is God. Our lives demonstrate God’s healing when we are kind, generous, peaceable (even in the midst of conflict), and open to His leading even when it means changing our lives. When Jesus’ followers live like this, the world learns to trust Jesus! Unfortunately, the flip side is that when his followers are vindictive, cruel, unforgiving and stingy, the world learns that Jesus is not the transformative agent he claims to be. When his followers are not healed, the world thinks Jesus is a liar. Let God heal you today—so that the world can see his love and power more clearly!

Advent Devotional for Dec. 6

2008-12-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

Saturday, December 6 Mark 9:14-29
Healing requires faith.
I have always enjoyed passages of the Bible that show Jesus’ human side, and this is certainly one such passage. Exasperated at his disciples’ inability to cast out a demon in a boy, Jesus says to them, “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me.” And Jesus looks at the boy, and Jesus asks his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” The father gives him the history and then says, “If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” And Jesus says in essence, “If you are able! Anything can be done with faith.” The father says, “I believe; help my unbelief.” And Jesus heals the boy.
Seems to me that the human side of this story still connects today. Still today Jesus’ followers feel incapable of actually healing, just like his disciples way back then. Who among us hasn’t looked at the world or just our town and felt totally incapable of bringing real healing? We see racial segregation struck down in the law books but still practiced in many communities. We see financial difficulties threatening many folks, and we think, “How can we be the Body of Christ in the midst of this? With our limitations and imperfections, how can we help to heal the world really?
And the disciples only worried that they couldn’t do it; like the father, we sometimes worry that not even Jesus can do anything about it. We lift these issues to Jesus sometimes as a catharsis for us, not daring to hope that he really will do anything about it. It just feels better to talk it out, like we would to a therapist or a friend. Yet the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus is more than a therapist, more than a friend. He heals—broken spirits, broken bodies, broken minds, broken relationships, broken communities, broken churches, broken nations. In fact it is when we are most broken that we can know Jesus the best.
But to believe all this takes faith; in a culture where even those friendly to Jesus hold him up as a personal self-help guru, or a champion of personal freedom, it takes faith to believe that he is more, that he is a healer. And this is where healing starts—in our faith.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 5

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Friday, December 5 James 5:13-18
Healing comes through prayer.
This little passage makes it sound so simple, doesn’t it? Is anyone sick? Just call for the elders of the church, anoint them with oil and pray in faith and they will be “raised up.” So we are to pray for one another that we might be healed, and we are promised that the prayer of the righteous is “powerful and effective.”
While we might not be comfortable using the word “contradiction” to describe the Bible, there is at least a sharp contrast between this passage and the one we read yesterday, where the righteous man Job cried out again and again for healing and God did not simply “raise him up.” If anyone’s prayer should have resulted in simple, easy healing, it was Job’s.
So what are we to make of this passage from James? Well, I wish I could say with certainty. I will simply note two things. First, the church is called on to offer a “prayer of faith,” not a “prayer of what seems reasonable to us.” Faith implies that we are letting go of our own agendas, and pursuing God’s agenda even when it doesn’t make sense to us. So a prayer of faith is one that acknowledges God’s supremacy and asks God that His will be done in a sick person’s life, even when that for some reason would result in that person’s not getting well. If we don’t understand it, well, that’s OK; it is a prayer of faith, not a prayer of reason. God will have healing in God’s way even if it does not look like healing to us.
The other thing we should see here is that we are to pray boldly. While we do not know God’s will for our lives completely, we can tell God what we believe is right, as long as we are prepared to accept whatever God does. Elijah boldly prayed that it would not rain, and it didn’t. We too can boldly pray for healing, and do not need to be afraid that God will reprimand us for telling Him what to do. So when we or those we love are sick, we do not need to hold back our feelings; we pray boldly for healing, but we pray in faith in God who is bigger than us and knows more than we do what we need.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 4

2008-12-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

Thursday, December 4 Job 42:1-6
Healing doesn’t look like we expect.
The story of Job is one of the most difficult in the Bible. Job lost his family, livelihood, wealth and health and was not sure why, so he cried out to God. He demanded a hearing about his suffering, demanded that God tell him why this was happening to him. Several friends came by to offer their theories, but Job rejected each of them. In the end, God finally shows up; but rather than explain himself, God essentially says, “Are you as big or as powerful as me, to demand that I show up? Are you as wise as I am that I should explain my ways to you?” In the end, in the passage from this morning, Job realizes that God is indeed bigger than he is, and that in his despair he has “uttered what [he] did not understand, things too wonderful for [him] which he did not know.” So Job repents and in the end decides that he just doesn’t need an answer.
Job had a very precise idea what healing meant for him: getting his family back, getting his flocks back, getting his money back, getting his health back. But God knew that Job was not healed in that state after all; Job can only be truly healed when he knows that God’s ways are beyond comprehension. This is where healing starts, that there are things that cannot be known, that we do not need to understand everything that happens, that God is not obliged to reveal every purpose of life to us.
Once we let go of the relentless need to question why things happen, we can begin our real task, which is to follow in faithfulness. This is a healed person, who is not caged by their circumstances and is truly free to follow and live their heart’s deep desire.

Advent Devotional for Dec. 3

2008-12-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, December 3 Mark 5:1-20
Healing often costs the community something.
The possessed man lived by himself, in the hills. There he lived alone with his demons (literally) who made him howl and bruise himself with stones. Such a man could not be permitted to live in the city, with the decent people; for one thing, he would be a constant reminder of brokenness. A modern youth-obsessed culture that regularly insulates itself from the elderly should understand this: we often don’t like to look at broken or frail people, because it reminds us of our own frailty.
So the community had an arrangement. This man would live by himself, away from others, out of sight; and the arrangement worked until Jesus boldly strode up to the outcast and cast out his demons. The demons begged to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs, and the minute the demons entered the pigs the pigs ran off a cliff and plunged into the sea below. The swineherds who were charged with taking care of the pigs ran to tell the pigs’ owners, anxious to show that the death of two thousand pigs was not their fault, and word quickly spread that the man was healed.
We might expect the townsfolk to be thrilled, but something quite different happens. Verse 17 says, “Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood.” You see, there was a lot of money tied up in those pigs; good Jews wouldn’t pay for them, but the Jews weren’t the ones with the money anyway. It was the Romans who made the money and the Romans who loved pork. Now their pork had tumbled into the Sea of Galilee and with it an awful lot of money. And people beg Jesus to leave before he causes another economic downturn. They would rather have their money than the man’s healing.
Let me suggest something radical to you: while the uncertain economic situation in our nation is scary, there is healing in it. Already there are signs that people are consuming less, that necessity is freeing them from addictions to stuff. Already there are signs that people are enjoying simpler things and treasuring relationships instead of consumer products. Already there are signs that God can use this economic disaster to heal our broken, addicted spirits.
Would we rather have money than this healing?

Advent Devotional for Dec. 2

2008-12-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, December 2 Acts 20:7-12
Healing helps us to be humble.
Pity poor Eutychus, the young teenager who had the misfortune of nodding off during the Apostle Paul’s lengthy midnight sermon while seated near a window. As he slept, he tumbled out of the window, down three stories and on to the ground below, where he was picked up dead. This is one of many reasons our church sanctuary is on the ground floor…Yet Paul took him up in his arms and said “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” And sure enough, when the Apostle touches him, the boy lives!
We pity Eutychus; how sheepish he must have felt. Yet there was a hidden gift in his embarrassment. You see, we have to be humbled before we are healed. If we spend our lives showing everybody how we have it all together, how we are doing just fine, how we are in no need of anybody, we can never know healing. Jesus said that he did not come for the well, but for the sick; and if our lives are about demonstrating our competence, we cannot ever be healed in the way we need. But when you hit a Eutychus moment, when you’re tumbling through the sky, heading for a crash, and worse, you know it’s all your fault: then you can be healed.
Perhaps you are in a Eutychus moment now, or perhaps you just fear you will be soon. You fear the lack of control; you fear the inability to manage your destiny. If this is where you are, take heart: it is when you fall like Eutychus that God can raise you up.

Audio from Sunday, Nov. 30

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E-mail me if you want the text...don't want to get too many posts in here...

Advent Devotional for Monday, Dec. 1

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For an post introducing the Advent Devotional, see four or five posts down...

Monday, Dec 1 2 Kings 5:1-14
Healing makes us re-think things.
In this story, Naaman comes down with leprosy and Elisha advises him to dip 7 times in the River Jordan. This is of course reprehensible to the sophisticated Naaman, but in the end, his servants convinced him to try what the man of God said. In the end, he does and he is healed.
What are your boundaries? We all have them, especially in suburbia. Our neat little houses have neat little fences which keep our neat little property away from our not-so-neat little neighbors. More than just physical boundaries, though, we often have a sense of what is beneath us. We see this perhaps most often in the way we practice our faith. Our erudite suburban faith sometimes boils down to what we will not do: handle snakes, raise our hands in worship, preach about hell, speak in tongues.
Naaman’s story profoundly challenges people like us, because it asks us to consider that part of following God might be doing things we consider beneath us. What if God asks you to move to a “lower” part of town? What if God speaks to you through a person more conservative or liberal than you are? What if you are forced to depend on someone you don’t find dependable or even likable? The story of Naaman reminds us that God uses all people and all sorts of ways of bringing healing, not just those we find palatable.
In your quest for healing, may you be willing to dip into a muddy river seven times—no matter what that means in your life.

Advent Devotional for Sunday, Nov. 30

2008-11-30T12:00:00.002-05:00

Wondering what the Advent devotional is? See the post below which introduces the concept...and check back each day for the devotional thought.

Sunday, Nov 30 Mark 5:21-43
Healing takes time.
This is one of my favorite stories in the Bible—or rather I should say two of my favorite stories. A man named Jairus comes looking for Jesus because his daughter is sick, at the point of death; obviously, he is a man of deep faith to come looking for Jesus. Jesus agrees to go with Jairus to his home to heal the girl. But on the way there is an interruption—a woman seeks Jesus’ healing from a hemorrhage which she has suffered with for twelve years. She believes that if she can just touch Jesus’ garment she will be made whole.
And she touches his garment and she is indeed made whole. Now Jesus could have kept moving, but he insists on stopping to see what has happened. “Who touched my clothes?” he said. The woman fesses up, and then proceeds to tell Jesus the whole drawn-out affair. Meanwhile, Jairus stands by, waiting, waiting, waiting, his daughter at the point of death. As Jesus responds to the woman, Jairus’ servant comes and informs him that his daughter has died. I have recurring bad dreams where I can’t get to a place on time and I’m moving as slow as molasses. Think how Jairus must have felt, his own daughter’s chance at healing snuffed out by another’s healing. Yet the story does not end here. Of course, Jesus goes and raises the girl from the dead after all, and Jairus’ faith is rewarded in the end.
Jairus’ story parallels our own as we await healing. Often, God’s healing does not happen in the time or way we expect. We watch as others receive healing and wonder why we cannot receive that same kind of healing quickly, instantly as that woman did. Why do we lay sick, why do our own children lay sick, even dying, when others are healed so quickly?
We don’t know. But we do know that in Jairus’ situation—and ours—Jesus knew the situation exactly. Jesus knew the girl would die, and knew he would raise her again for God’s greater glory. What humans could not see, Jesus could. And in our lives, in whatever need for healing we have at the moment, we can be assured that Jesus is in control of what is happening behind the scenes. That which we cannot see, he can; and he will deal with us in his way and in his time. We can know beyond doubting that this is the best way for us.

Intro to my Advent Devotional

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Hi all! This year, as every year, I write an Advent devotional for our church to use. I will be publishing them on my blog this year, as well as notes on facebook. My hope is to get some discussion going around the themes that are raised herein. Keep in mind when we discuss that the Internet is a big place, and I have friends of all theological stripes, from entrenched atheists to staunch conservatives to wild and flaming liberals (you know I love you guys...). So the potential exists for some really good discussions, and also for some really hurt feelings if we're not careful as we express ourselves. So please, keep a few things in mind when you post your comments:

1. Those who read your posts will not always share your theological positions. So if you want to represent your convictions well, be KIND!!
2. Provocative statements are welcome as they make us all think. Keep your thoughts provocative and not your language.
3. If someone says something that offends you, try to take it up with them privately. I can vouch for most of the people reading this blog, that they're pretty good people who are not intentionally trying to upset you.
4. Always be open to having your mind changed: all truth is God's truth, for God is One.

Below is the intro to the Advent devotional, entitled "Healing for Broken Hearts." It was inspired by the election this year.

I had great plans for this year’s Advent Devotional. I was going to write a booklet called “Preparing with the Prophets:” a series of reflections on getting our hearts ready for the coming of Jesus, just as the prophets prepared the way for him so long ago.
Still a good idea. Maybe I’ll do it some other year. Just not now.
Because when I woke up on November 5 and turned on the news, I saw a nation desperately in need of healing. I saw a people waking up after a long and polarizing dream to find out it was all true—that we really do see the world very differently.
I also noticed in this year’s election that the church revealed the same polarities as the rest of the world: many Christians were more excited by Obama than any Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. While it was great to have the voices balanced somewhat, the presence of the Christian Democratic voice also revealed deep divisions in the American church in a way never before seen so publicly. Indeed, when it became evident that Obama would win, one man at an American Baptist church categorized it as a “victory of faith over fear, grace over greed, and vision over violence,” and evidence that “God was still on the throne.” While that may in some sense be true, it also gave me pause when I thought about the good Christians I knew on the other side of the voting fence. Were they really fearful, greedy and violent? Of course not. But it revealed how starkly Christians are different from one another and it revealed the depth of division in the body of Christ. And that is what made my heart ache on November 5: the division in the church. Of course, the election only brought that division to the surface; it always has been there.
And so I ditched “Preparing with the Prophets,” and instead decided to write a devotional on healing. Our God heals. He has always healed. These divisions are nothing compared to what God has healed in the past, when He called people from all over the earth to be His own.
This makes perfect sense for Advent, because healing is precisely what Jesus promises. He promises to heal those who would be healed. His healing is not trite, never easy—there is always a cross to bear if you follow him. But, oh!—the healing he brings to his people, some of whom never suspect it. In this devotional, you will read stories from both the Old and the New Testament about God heals people. As you read, I ask that you think about three things:
• What does this story about healing have to do say to my own individual need for healing? All of us are in need of healing. Modern American lives are incredibly fragmented; we have so many goals to achieve, each one demanding high priority, that the best we can often do is to try to keep all of our plates spinning. We are desperately in need of integration in our lives, the sense that our lives are about something. Theologians talk about this as having our lives “ordered rightly.” When our priorities in order and we have a clear sense of what is truly important to us, we experience God’s healing! As you read the Biblical stories and reflections, think about the ways they correspond to your personal need for healing.
• What does this story have to say to Christians about our need for healing and unity? The body of Christ around the world, the universal church, is also in dire need of healing. But to be healed, one must first admit one’s brokenness. As you read the Biblical stories and reflections, reflect on the brokenness of the church and think about the ways that these stories invite the church to be healed.
• What does this story have to say to all humanity about being healed? While this election revealed deep fissures in the church, the fissures in the world are still deeper. Little trust exists between blue-staters and red-staters, even more so than four years ago. What can these stories say to a nation and a world desperately in need of healing?
May God use these writings to touch you and to start (or continue) a healing process in your life and in our life together.

Pastor Mike Jordan

Audio from Sun, Nov. 23

2008-11-23T18:16:00.001-05:00

Sermon from Sun, Nov. 23

2008-11-23T18:14:00.001-05:00

Based on Deuteronomy 8:7-20.

Thanksgiving is certainly an underrated holiday as far as Christians go. In recent years it has become interesting to me that there are no culture wars about Thanksgiving. The culture wars about Christmas have really escalated. In some places, you’re not supposed to say “merry Christmas,” but “Happy Holidays,” and that really ticks some people off, and then as a pastor, I get all this unsolicited e-mail from corporations that you should say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” and they try to sell you “Merry Christmas” buttons that you should wear so that people know that you’re a “Merry Christmas” person instead of a “Happy Holidays” person.
Now, I apologize to any of you who feel this issue to be important, but I just can’t get wound up over it. It has always just seemed like a kind thing to do in our culture where people have many different religions to say “Happy Holidays,” because I recognize that a stranger might have different holidays than I do. Besides, when the phrase “Happy Holidays” started, I think it was just referring to Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. So it’s difficult for me to get caught up in the culture wars surrounding Christmas.
But like I say, there are lots of culture wars surrounding Christmas, but not so many involving Thanksgiving. In fact, Thanksgiving seems to be beating a steady retreat to the background and declining in popularity as a holiday. Don’t believe me? Go over to the Giant across the street and see how they jumped straight from a Halloween display to a Christmas display. Thanksgiving is still there, in the background, but it hardly functions as its own holiday anymore. It has different functions: it is the unofficial holiday that bridges autumn and winter; it is the unofficial start to the Christmas shopping season; it is a day for watching football and falling asleep on couches, but for most people Thanksgiving is like my great home state of New Jersey: it is a place you go through on the way from one place to another. If you’re going from the cool city of Washington, DC to the cool city of New York, you have to pass through boring New Jersey and your only hope when you pass through New Jersey is that you don’t hit traffic and have to spend very long there. And likewise, Thanksgiving will get you from Halloween to Christmas, but you hardly notice it on the way.
If there is a push to keep Christ in Christmas, shouldn’t it be equally important to Christians that we keep the Thanks in Thanksgiving? I think so and I would turn to this passage as Exhibit A to prove the importance of giving thanks. And I say this for three reasons. Reason #1 is this obvious expression in this passage of what it’s like to live in a land of plenty. “The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.”
Most often when we talk about passages like this in America, we think not only of the Promised Land for God’s people in the Old Testament, we think about America as well. And perhaps others around the world think of their homelands as well—it’s natural for us to be fond of our homelands and to love them. And when I hear this passage, I can’t help but thinking about the land that I call home…that great state of New Jersey. Well, actually, I think about more than that, I think about America and what a privilege it is to live here. We live in this nation where we can freely travel to so many different places and climates…and all of it is home to us. I read a couple of months ago about a man from Berwyn who had traveled to every county in the United States, all 3,145 of them. And I thought, “Wow, can you imagine all that he’s seen? Mountains and tundra and orange groves and tropics and deserts and cities and country and just everything in between. America is this huge place where one can still believe that anything is possible and has these incredible natural resources.
So we can be grateful for living in a land that is so blessed with possibilities and resources. In fact, the Scripture warns the people of God about the need to thank God. “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes which I am commanding you today.” So the people are reminded that they need to thank God, that they need to remember God. And the way they do this: they keep his commandments and ordinances and his statutes. They thank God not only with their lips but they thank him with their lives. They show they are grateful to the one who gave them this plentiful land by honoring the precepts and laws of the one who gave them the plentiful land.
So this is reason #1 why I say that it should be important to keep the Thanks in Thanksgiving. God gave all that we have to us, and of course it extends far deeper than the physical land in which we live. It has to do with all the blessings we each know; each of our lives, in a sense, is “a land of vines and fig trees and pomegranates and olive trees and honey.” We have a responsibility to be people of thanks, and we do that by thanking God with our lips and with our lives.
There is another reason why I think it’s important to keep the thanks in thanksgiving. Reason #2 is because of the wilderness time. “When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.” Well, that sounds like a horrible time, doesn’t it? I don’t like snakes at all, much less poisonous ones; and when it comes to scorpions, well, let’s just be grateful that they live in the other corner of this great and expansive country. I don’t like them either. Doesn’t sound like a great time, really.
But look at what this passage says about that horrible time out in the wilderness. “God made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good.” I love that passage, because it essentially says, “Do you remember, in the middle of all the snakes and scorpions, do you remember all the miracles God did for you? He brought water out of a rock when you didn’t have enough to drink. He brought manna from the sky when you didn’t have enough bread to eat. And these times, these difficult times, God gave to you to humble you and to test you, and ultimately to do you good. Because in the wilderness, among the snakes and scorpions, you were fully aware that you did not have enough and there was no way that you could possibly make it on your own. You were fully aware that you could not make water where there was only a stone; you were fully aware that you could not make food where there was simply nothing to eat. And it was in that moment, where you were humbled and tested, that moment where you were fully aware of your own shortcomings, it was in that moment that you learned to trust me. In the end, those times became deeply important to you, and in the end you remembered those times as some of the best times of your lives, because it was in those times where you were in the closest communication with me.
We know this is true in our own lives, don’t we? Jill & I hear this a lot from people who are older than me, as she lugs two kids around the grocery store, or as I briefly excuse myself to go change the underwear of a certain 2-year-old girl who has somehow managed another accident. Often, just during the most trying times, we hear, “These years with young kids are just the best years of your life, aren’t they? They’re so sweet at that age!” And you know, sometime that rubs me the wrong way and I want to throw a diaper at them; but most of the time I’m able to reflect and realize that they’re right. These are great years. Our kids, for good and ill, are so dependent on us right now; they trust us implicitly; they need us for everything. And I’m sure that when our kids are teenagers and they roll their eyes at us, or when they are 30 and 40 and having kids of their own and not coming around as often as we like, then we too will look back and see what good years these years were. Jill and I often think if you could just take these years with young kids and kind of spread them out throughout our lives, we might be able to appreciate them more; but it’s just the fact that they keep on coming that makes them difficult.
Yes, these are great years, but they’re also years of testing for us. They are years when Jill and I are being changed; becoming a parent is sort of like going through a sausage factory, where you go in as one thing and you come out as another. For one thing, Jill and I aren’t as selfish as we used to be. Why? Because there are babies who need us sometimes and we don’t get to choose to just leave them. When you have to take care of other people, you wind up less selfish. They’re great years, and for Jill and I we need them because they are key to becoming who God wants us to be, but they’re difficult years too.
Which is kind of the point of this passage. Out there, among the snakes and the scorpions, you couldn’t see it, says God, but I was changing your heart. I was making you rely on me more fully so that you would be a different people at the end of your wilderness time than you were at the beginning of the wilderness time. I was testing you, humbling you, and when you look back, you will say, “Thank you for those times, and I miss them dearly, because it was then when my fingerprints were all over you even though those fingerprints hurt sometimes.”
This is reason #2 why we need to keep the thanks in thanksgiving: because God uses wilderness times. For whatever reason, you may be in a wilderness time right now. Maybe, like us, it’s something as simple as having young kids. Or maybe it’s having older kids who are not behaving. Or maybe it’s losing a bit of money—or a lot of money—in the recent economic situation. Or maybe it’s a physical sickness, or maybe it’s a lonely time—whatever it is, it’s important to remember that God is not only with us during the wonderful times when everything is abundant, but God is especially close to us when we are surrounded by the snakes and scorpions and everything seems to be going wrong. It is in those times when we can be most easily shaped into his image on behalf of this world he created. So we keep the thanks in thanksgiving not only because God gives us a lot, but because even when we don’t have as much, God still uses those times too and brings so much good out of them. So we give thanks!
Now, on to Reason #3 why we need to keep the thanks in Thanksgiving. And it comes from these ominous final two verses here: “If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord is destroying before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.”
We hear that and we cringe, it’s not a very respectable verse of the Bible to modern ears, and we wonder what on earth it could mean. Does it really mean that God will destroy people who forget him? Well, look closely at the verse and it will become clear that God does not threaten to destroy the people of Israel. He does say I’m going to clear out the other nations before you, to give you a home, and that is its own question which demands its own sermon. But it does not say, “people of Israel, do not forget God or God’s going to destroy you.” It does say, “people of Israel, do not forget God or you will be destroyed.” Now there is a world of difference in this: when we forget God, God does not destroy us; we destroy ourselves.
This whole speech is Moses talking to the people on the brink of crossing into the Promised Land. Moses knows that he won’t be able to go, that he is going to die before the people get there, and so he takes time to give them his last words, in a sense. And he says when you get there, that land that God is going to give you is going to be so lovely and beautiful and amazing. And when you get there, you’re going to live off the fat of the land, a luxurious life. But if you forget who gave you that luxurious life, you’re going to destroy yourself.
We know this is true, don’t we? We live, on the whole, luxurious lives; in America, most people live lives more comfortable than the rest of the world can imagine. But that comfort carries the seeds of our destruction. Because if we are not careful, we stop running our comfortable lives, and our comfortable lives start running us. Perhaps we are experiencing that in these difficult economic times, where we simply don’t know what we would do without the comforts to which we have become accustomed. What would we do without our cable TV? What would we do without our homes heated to 70 degrees in the winter and cooled to 70 degrees in the summer? What would we do without our Phillies tickets, Pastor Mike? What would we do if we had to give up meat with dinner one night a week, three nights a week, every night? What would we do without these things?
And perhaps more pointedly, who are we without those things? I think there is something deep down in our spirits not only enjoys our comforts, but identifies ourselves with our comforts. So often when we are called on to define ourselves, when someone asks who we are, we answer with our jobs—I’m a pastor. I’m a doctor. I’m an accountant. Whatever. Or we answer with the things we like or dislike: I’m a sucker for spicy food. I’m a professional sports nut. I’m a snappy dresser.
We don’t know who we would be if we lost our homes, if we lost our ability to buy things that define us and shape our perception of ourselves and express that to other people. If I lost my job and I lost my stuff, who exactly would I be? That is the question that haunts us at times like this. Maybe this gives us a little insight on what it means to be destroyed when we fail to be thankful. When we forget that this stuff is a gift from God, that it doesn’t define us, we run the risk of being destroyed when our stuff is destroyed. When we forget that this is not ours, that we can’t do a thing to earn it and when it comes right down to it, we can’t do a thing to keep it, then we run the risk of destroying ourselves when our stuff is lost.
So this is perhaps the most urgent reason to keep the thanks in thanksgiving. When we thank God for all we have, we remember that it might all one day be taken away. And if it is, we remember that God is still there, that the gifts might be gone but the Giver remains. This is what it means to keep the thanks in thanksgiving: to love the Giver rather than the gift. And the Giver does not disappoint and will never be destroyed, and those who love him and who identify themselves with the Giver will never be destroyed either.
Let us give thanks always—with our lips and with our lives.

Audio from Sun, Nov 16

2008-11-17T13:39:00.001-05:00

sermon from Sun, Nov. 16

2008-11-17T13:37:00.001-05:00

On Hosea 6:4-6 and Matthew 6:19-21.

Like the rest of you, I was stunned two and a half weeks ago when the Phillies won the world championship. A sports team that has lost 10,100 games in its largely miserable 126 year existence managed to win another championship, its 2nd in those 126 years. It didn’t surprise the rest of the baseball world—after all, the Phillies are a very talented baseball team—but it did manage to surprise us fans who constantly expect the worst. There was not a time when I actually expected them to win until the last strike was thrown and then I finally believed it. Still, even afterwards, I could hardly believe it—I could hardly believe that my baseball team was the champions. In fact, it still sounds silly coming out of my mouth, sort of like that first few months after you’re married and you can’t quite get over the fact you’re a husband now or you’re a wife now.
Anyway, I was rather amazed at the way in which baseball and religion seemed to overlap through the whole World Series and the aftermath. In a tight baseball game, it seems like one of the favorite things the TV networks like to do is to find a fan in the stand who is praying (or at least who looks like they’re praying)—hunched over, hands folded under their chin, their eyes just barely open, looking like they’re asking for God’s help in striking that batter out or getting a base hit. But what really opened my eyes was the very religious rhetoric about the parade after they won the World Series. Grace and I were there, and what everyone said was true—it was a remarkable event. And so many of the things people said were things I wish were true of Christianity in America today. One news station said, “It just brought people together. Everyone was one today; it didn’t matter what race you were, how much money you made, what neighborhood you were from, everyone was one.” You heard stories on the news of people visiting the graves of departed family members to put up Phillies flags; and I think I mentioned to you that I heard the beautiful weather on parade day described as a blessing from God, a sign that God approved of the Phillies’ championship, and even described as a benediction putting a beautiful stamp on a wonderful season.
Now many preachers want to hunker down at a time like this and get defensive. After all, when it looks like 2 million people are going to a parade with religious overtones and most of them aren’t going to church with religious overtones, sometimes you want to ask why. But instead of getting defensive, I wanted to ask “why?” What is it that makes a whole city wear red? What is it that makes the entire Philadelphia and suburban area, an area of the world that is so busy all the time, spontaneously unanimously and suddenly have nothing better to do one afternoon than skip work and go down to a parade? What is it that makes people who never feel they have enough money go down and buy $25 T-shirts and $60 hooded sweatshirts and spend $800 or so on tickets to see a baseball game? What is it that makes a whole mass of people—2 million by most estimates—get down to the city to watch a few guys drive down the street on trucks, while many many more wait at train stations and are unable to get down there? What makes that happen? What explains people behaving like that?
Well, I think it’s stewardship. I think a whole lot of people had a whole lot invested in the Phillies this year. I know I did. I had partial season tickets and spent a lot of money which had been given to me as gifts on those tickets. And beyond the financial investment, I had a real heart-investment too. Everyone remembers where they were when the Phillies won the world series. I remember where I was when they played their first game of the year, way back on March 31. They were playing the Washington Nationals, who were terrible last year and turned out to be terrible again this year. Everyone was looking forward to them getting out to a great start against this bad team, and what happened? Well, they fell behind. Significantly behind, as in 6-2. Then they battled back to tie it up 6-6 and then brought in Tom Gordon in the 9th inning; he gave up 5 runs and they lost 11-6. And I remember where I was for that game—I was in Houghton, NY, working on my dissertation and there was freezing rain outside. And I thought, “Oh, not another year of this with this team. I can’t handle this.” Then the next day they went out and promptly lost 1-0. And I thought, oh boy. Another year where one game they pitch well but can’t hit, and then one game they hit well but can’t pitch. Finally, they won the 3rd game of the year and they were off and rolling.
Point being almost every night of my life for the last six months, the Phillies have been on the radar. I’ve watched lots of games, I’ve listened to almost all those that I haven’t watched, because baseball is such a great radio sport. Those that I haven’t listened to or watched, I’ve paid attention to, getting score updates, or at least running down to the computer first thing in the morning to see what happened if I couldn’t stay up to watch them on the West Coast. After a while, you sort of feel a relationship with the team, like they’re an old friend; the Phillies played 175 games this year, not counting spring training, and I paid attention to all 175 of them; that’s almost half a year even without counting all the off days.
This is what I mean when I talk about stewardship of the heart. I had a lot invested emotionally with the Phillies which is why I was so pleased that they won. And of course as we know it wasn’t just me, but a lot of people had a lot invested emotionally with the Phillies, and so millions of people were glad they won, from the very young to the very old. To say it more romantically, a lot of people gave their hearts away to the Phillies, and for once in their long gray history the Phillies did not disappoint them.
So as we wind up our sermon series on stewardship today, let me remind you that God has given you many gifts, and we have talked about many of them: your spiritual gifts, your time, your families, your finances, your church. And we have asked how you are managing those gifts…how do you give away your spiritual gifts on behalf of the world and on behalf of the God who gave them to you? How do you give away your time? How do you manage your relationships? How do you give away your money? But it ultimately boils down to this question—how do you give away your heart? When push comes to shove, what are you most invested in in your life?
These two questions are the questions addressed in these two texts this morning. In the first passage, Hosea is a prophet of God and here he shares God’s message with God’s people: “What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah? Your love is like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears.” What a powerful image—your heart-stewardship is failing. When push comes to shove, you do not really love me. Your love comes and goes—the thing about the morning mist and the dew is that it’s consistently inconsistent. It’s always just around the corner, it’s always coming back, but it’s only actually there for a little bit of time. The prophet compares this to Israel’s love for God—yes, you can be counted on to show up every so often, but there is nothing that lasts in it.
And so, Hosea has some incredibly harsh words: “therefore I cut you in pieces with my prophets; I killed you with the words of my mouth; my judgments flashed like lightning upon you.” There are consequences, says God, to this sort of stewardship of the heart. Essentially, when the deep desire of your heart is for something besides God, God will give that deep desire to you—even though it is not the best for you.
And Hosea closes this section by saying, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice; and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” When Hosea is talking about sacrifice and burnt-offerings, he is talking about weekly worship. He’s saying, I don’t want you to show up every so often, whether it’s once a week for worship and sacrifice, or whether it’s once a day like the morning mist and the morning dew. I want your hearts always to be focused rightly; I want your heart to always be mine; I want you to be invested in me and what I’m doing in the world; I want you to be a steward of your heart all the time.
So we leave this passage from hosea this morning and we are left with a strong challenge: steward your hearts. All the times. Not like the mist, not like the dew, but always. Strong challenge. So we are left with an important question: how do we do that? Did you ever try to make yourself fall in love? How’d that work? Can’t do it, can you. Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night and worry about something? Maybe it’s just me. I worry about things sometimes. And you know what makes it worse—I begin to feel like I shouldn’t be worrying—and then I worry about worrying. Then I worry that I’m worrying about worrying. Or to take a more serious example, if you know a teen with an eating disorder, then you know that you can’t make them feel better about themselves. Tell them they’re thin and they can’t see it; tell them they’re beautiful and they can’t choose to feel beautiful.
Now, I just say this to say that we don’t really have direct control over what our heart is doing. We can’t make ourselves feel a certain way about ourselves or about anything. So how in good conscience can God demand our hearts? How do we give our hearts to him? How do we positively predispose ourselves to God’s actions every minute when we don’t usually have control over what our hearts do?
To see this, look at what Jesus says. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Just because we cannot directly control how our hearts feel does not mean that we have no control over them. It just means we cannot directly control them. I’ve used this illustration before, but it’s kind of like you’re putting together a piece of furniture and you have to use a screw to attach two pieces together. And you think, “Man, I’d really like to use this screw but I can’t do it. No matter how hard I push with my finger, no matter how hard I try to turn this screw with my hand, I just can’t do it!” Well of course you can’t turn a screw with your hand; it requires a tool. Use the right tool—a screwdriver—and you can certainly do what you need to do. You can’t accomplish the task directly, but you can accomplish the task indirectly, with the help of a tool.
In the same way, we cannot change our hearts directly. But we can with the help of a tool. This is what Jesus is saying: where your treasure is, your heart will be. Become a good steward of the other gifts you have, and you will learn to be a good steward of your heart as well. Learn to manage your time, your money, your spiritual gifts, your family rightly, and you will learn to love God rightly too. This is the paradox which we live with as Christians. On one hand, we say that what God really wants from us is to love him and to love other people. He doesn’t care so much that we do everything perfectly, that we never make a mistake, so long as we mean well, so long as we intend the right thing. And that’s true! 100% true. God does care about the intentions of our hearts—he wants us to love him completely, that’s what stewardship of our hearts means. But we only can become truly good stewards of our hearts as we become good stewards of the rest of our lives as well. Put another way, God cares about our intentions more than our actions. He wants us to have good intentions. But we only can be sure we truly have good intentions if we’re following His way. And it becomes a cycle—we follow His way, and so our hearts are changed to look more like Him. The more our hearts are changed to be like his, the more we follow in his way, which changes our hearts still more. The more we follow Him, the more we love him, the more we love him, the more we follow him; the more we follow him, the more we love him.
And so at the end of this series on stewardship, it’s my urging that you would give your heart to God. And how will you know you have given your heart to God? You will know because you’ve given him the rest of you too—your time, your spiritual gifts, your finances, your family, your whole life. All things come from him—and all we give back was his to start.

Audio from Sunday, Nov. 2

2008-11-03T09:27:00.002-05:00

Just a note: I will not be preaching next week, Sunday, Nov. 9, so there will not be any updates to this blog until Nov. 17! I'll be away working on a dissertation hoping to close in on finishing a rough draft soon...

Anyway, here is the audio from yesterday.

Sermon from Sunday, Nov. 2

2008-11-03T09:26:00.001-05:00

Throughout this series on stewardship, I’ve been reminding you that stewardship is about more than our money; it is about our whole lives, our spiritual gifts, our church families, our biological families. A steward is someone who uses the master’s goods on the master’s behalf, making wise decisions with the things that have been entrusted to them; and so if we are God’s stewards, we recognize that everything is God’s and it is up to us to use it wisely to bless the world as God wants to bless the world and not simply use those things for things that make sense to us.
Like I’ve said throughout, stewardship is not simply about our money. Yet we should not deny that stewardship is in part about our money. Churches tend to either talk too much about money or not enough. Some churches blather on and on about money mostly because they want yours. Those churches do a lot of damage. But there is another way to do damage as a church and that is to never talk about money at all. Money enslaves so many people in our culture; I cannot stress enough the danger that money poses to us spiritually. Not because it’s money, but because in our culture money is power; and anytime we have power we are tempted not to use it for God’s purposes but for our own.
I know this because we tend to be extremely private about our money. Someone has observed that money is the only thing we’re private about in our culture anymore; in a world where the religion of the presidential candidates is a hotly debated topic, religion is now on the table. In a world where the gossip pages are filled with the sexual orientations, identities and escapades of various celebrities, sex is now on the table; but money is definitely not on the table. If you want to kill a conversation with someone, ask them how much they make and how they spend what they make. You might end up killing not only a conversation but a friendship!
So I want to try to split the difference between an overemphasis on money and an underemphasis on money, and I want to be countercultural this morning and break the silence our culture has on money, and to do that I want to say that the way you spend your money is one strong indicator of what kind of steward you are. It is not the only indicator, it is not make-or-break, but it is in fact one important indicator that tells you what kind of steward you are. As I have said before, your checkbook is the only theological book most people ever right—it reveals clearly how you understand God and who your God truly is. So let’s turn our mind to the stewardship of money this morning and see what may be there for us to learn in a new way. As we do, I want to be clear that I am not specifically talking about how much money you give to our church; that question is important but it is not my concern for today. I know that tithing, giving 10%, is an excellent benchmark, but my objective this morning is not to get 10% of your money out of your pockets, but to make you think about what you are doing with 100% of your money, and to make changes there if you think that’s important.
I chose sort of an odd passage for this idea this morning. It is taking place just before David dies, and he is about to yield the throne to his son Solomon. David wanted to build a Temple for God in his lifetime; up until this time, the Israelites had made God’s symbolic home in a Tabernacle, a traveling tent that could be picked up and moved when the Israelites had to move, thus emphasizing God’s presence with them as wanderers and strangers in the world. But now Israel had a permanent home—they were in the Promised Land and they were at the peak of their power as a nation, and David wanted to build a grand Temple for God, a fitting place for the God of a powerful nation. But in 1 Chronicles 22, God essentially says to David, “Thank you for thinking of me, I appreciate the effort, but I don’t want you to do it.” David was a warrior, and God said he wanted his house to be built by somebody whose hands were not bloody with the work of war. So David’s son Solomon would be the one to build the Temple.
Still, before David died, he took a lot of time to make preparations to help Solomon with this task. As Solomon would soon be king, he would have enough on his plate without worrying about planning and building a Temple too. So though David’s heart was heavy because he could not be the one to build the Temple, he prepared the way. He hired stonecutters to cut stones to be ready to build into the Temple. He called the priests together and gave them the jobs that they were supposed to do when the temple was built. He provided a hundred tons of gold and two hundred tons of silver for the walls of the house, and led the leaders of the tribes to bring in still more of these precious metals and bronze and iron as well. And then in a formal ceremony, he gave the plans to Solomon and charged him to build the temple according to plan, but more than that, to lead the people in obeying God’s plan for their lives. And then to close the ceremony, David offers up this prayer to God to close the proceedings. It is a deeply moving prayer and to me expresses very well a good way to understand how we should steward our finances. There are 4 important points in the prayer that I wish to touch on.
The first thing I want to look at is David’s recognition that everything comes from God. “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory and the majesty,” says David; “for all that is in heavens, and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might; and it is in your hand to make great and to give strength to all…For all things come from you, and of your own have we given to you.” This is a healthy place to begin as a Christian steward. So often we have difficulty being a steward because we believe that our lives are our own. When you are quite sure that you have earned everything you have, it becomes very hard to let anyone else use it but you. After all, if you’ve earned it, you deserve to have it and use it in ways you see fit! But when you start realizing that all of life is a gift, including the ability to make money or anything else, then we share it much more freely. Consider that King David realized this as a rich man, a man who was able to give tons of gold to the work of the temple; here was a man if anyone felt that they had earned it, he had earned it. But quite the opposite—he realizes it’s not his, and that the only reason we can give is because he has given to us. David’s attitude is humble and beautiful. His attitude can serve as an inspiration for us in our greedy world; we live in a place where people cling so stubbornly to their property and become something ugly in the process. When we realize that it’s a gift, we don’t have to cling so closely. Incidentally, this point is also important I think given the current economic situation. When we talk about financial stewardship, the big elephant in the room is the downturn in the stock markets and the economy. This realization that all things come from God is important especially now when so many of us are nervous about our various accounts. It doesn’t make the situation simple or easy, but it lends us dignity to know that God is the one who provides for us and will not be thwarted no matter what is happening. Yes, that may look different than we had anticipated, but it is no less real or important. It also makes us realize the depth of slavery that people can have to their money; people took on loans to buy things they couldn’t afford because the allure of the things was so great. When we are always striving after things, we are never satisfied—that satisfaction can only come when we accept God’s gifts.
The second thing that I want to look at is David’s profound joy at being God’s partner. Because God is so great and can do anything on his own, David is proud and humbled that God is using him to do something great. Listen to what he says: “But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to make this freewill offering?....We are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors…” Look at this great temple, about to be built, the huge pile of cut stones over here, the heavy metals for building over here, the people preparing themselves spiritually and physically for the task of building over here, and not building just anything, but building a house for God--and it just hits David—who are we to be doing this? How come you don’t send angels to build your house, God? Even they would not be worthy of this, much less us! As David is now an old man, it hits him that not everyone gets to do something meaningful in their lives. Some people spend their whole lives chasing after things which will expire when they expire. Some people spend their whole lives clinging to things which do not satisfy and wonder why they spend their whole lives dissatisfied. And yet, here is David surrounded with the raw materials to do something great, and he says, “Thank you, God. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of something great. Thank you for allowing my people to be a part of your great plans in the world. We have nothing of our own to give you, and yet you have chosen us anyway. Thank you.”
Yet at the same time as he recognizes his human limitations, he also is proud of what he has been able to accomplish. He says, “I know, my God, that you search the heart, and take pleasure in uprightness; and in the uprightness of my heart I have freely offered all these things, and now I see your people offering freely and joyously to you as well.” David is able to look at the way people are giving to this important task of building the Temple and he is proud—he’s proud of himself and he’s proud of his people because they have finally got their priorities straight. This also is something we realize when we are stewarding our lives—and our finances—rightly. When we can look at our lives and our checkbooks and realize that the way we are living is helping the Kingdom of God come in, not hurting it, we’re allowed a measure of pride at that! We’re allowed the privilege of knowing that God is using us and we’re allowed all the pride that comes with that. Now of course we recognize as David did at the end of his life that it all came from God and we don’t do it on our own—but still, we can be proud.
The third thing I noticed when looking at this passage was David’s sense of melancholy at not being able to give completely. If you look at David throughout his life, you’ll notice he was kind of a mixed bag. He wasn’t always on the right side of things; he had an adulterous affair and then had the woman’s husband killed. Another time, God told him not take a census of the people, because he was doing it to serve his own ego and pride. David did it anyway, because he liked his way better than God’s. So anyway, all this is to say that David was not a saint by any stretch; he was messed up like the rest of us; and ultimately all the blood that he shed ended up costing him the chance to build a temple for God.
And you can read the melancholy all over David’s words. “We are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no hope.” I’m not a psychologist, but you can read regret all over these words. David will not get to see his work come to fruition, and he is aware that it is his own fault; God has graciously given him the chance to do meaningful work, and because he spent so much time pursuing his own agenda, he has missed the chance to finish the meaningful job, the one that would have meant the most in the end. Certainly, he is pleased that he has been able to play a big role in the Temple, but he’s also aware that he’s missed his chance to finish the job and live out his true aspirations in life. Here David is reduced to wondering what might have been, which is a question no one likes to ask.
As an old man, David has learned a lesson we have the chance to learn before we get to our deathbed: that being able to give to God’s work is the greatest goal to which we can aspire. We can chase our little dreams but how much better to let our little dreams go and choose God’s big dreams for us instead? When you are having your David moment, when you are able to look all around you as an old person, just this side of the River Jordan, what will you see all around you? Will you see piles of things you have enjoyed and will remain on this shore while you cross that great river? Or will you see piles of stones and iron, bronze, gold and silver, materials you have left behind from your life so that the next generation can take your legacy and do something great and lasting for the God you love, something you can be proud of? This is the question which, if we are wise, we begin to think about before we approach the end of our lives. It is a question which colors our relationships throughout our lives as stewards; have we used our wealth for ourselves or to do something real and lasting? David was so pleased and proud that God has used him to do something amazing, and God can use each of you to do something amazing too, something which will give you pride and not regret as you examine your life.
Finally, I noticed in this prayer the way that David anticipates the future with hope. David did this wonderful thing for his son Solomon. The way he stewarded his riches set his son up for life. But not financially—he didn’t bother setting him up financially for life, although Solomon always had plenty. Look at David’s passionate prayer for his son: “O Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, our ancestors, keep forever such purposes and thoughts in the hearts of your people, and direct their hearts toward you. Grant to my son Solomon that with single mind he may keep your commandments, your decrees, and your statutes, performing all of them, and that he may build the temple for which I have made provision.” David’s good stewardship of his wealth set the stage not for his son to be rich, but for his son to be faithful. Because he did the right thing with his wealth, the people he loved were more inclined toward faithful living.
We may forget sometimes that our stewardship of our money is not just about us. Yes, when we practice good financial stewardship, it can help us to realize that everything is from God; yes, when we practice good financial stewardship, it can make us feel very rewarded and humbled to be part of what God is doing; yes, when we practice good financial stewardship, it can help us to feel proud of ourselves rather than disappointed in ourselves. But in the end financial stewardship is not simply about us, it is about other people.
We learn what is normal from our parents. This is of some concern to me now that I’m raising children. When I sit down with Gracie and Jack and sing “Love Shack” except I sing “Love Jack,” I get worried that she thinks that’s normal. When I heard her say the other day, “Get up offa that thing and dance til you feel better,” I thought, “This kid doesn’t have a chance—because she thinks I’m normal!” Now of course, I’m just kidding—but what I’m trying to point out is that we learn what’s normal in our lives by watching our parents.
In my life, that meant tithing. I watched my parents tithe when they had little and tithe when they had a lot. I thought that was normal. I thought that everybody in church did it. That fact predisposed me positively to tithing in my own life—and I can say without hesitation that tithing is the spiritual practice that has most changed my life. I understand that taking a portion of my money and making it untouchable makes me realize that the other 90% is His too. I commend the practice to you not because we need the money, but because it changed my life. And it changed my life because my parents modeled it for me.
You may have children in your life now who are watching you exercise stewardship. Or you may not—your children may be grown, or not born yet, or you may not have children. Yet parents are not the only ones who teach their children—because we are members of a church family. When you practice good financial stewardship, and even more when you are willing to be transparent about it, others learn from you. Others see the peace in your life and want it in theirs. Others see the joy and contentment you have from living like your life is a gift and want to know where it came from. When we practice financial stewardship, like David, our actions go far beyond ourselves and touch the world with the life of liberty God wants to give us freely.
When I look at David, I see a man who despite his foibles was a man of solid financial stewardship, who gave away tons of gold and silver and stone and bronze in order to build a house for God. And it changed his life and the lives of those around him. In the same way, may our generosity be useful to God, a comfort to us and an inspiration to others.

Sermon from Sunday, Oct 27

2008-10-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

On Ephesians 5:21-6:4.

By the way, sorry--no audio this week. Forgot to hook it up as I got home late Saturday night after the Phillies' glorious World series win!

In this sermon series on stewardship, we spent a lot of time talking about spiritual gifts. God gives us each gifts which we are supposed to use to serve others, and we are supposed to exercise responsible stewardship of those gifts. Last week, we talked a great deal about our time; we talked about how our time also is a gift from God and we are responsible for managing it well on behalf of the world. So we make time for work and time for play, and in all things we don’t let our time dominate us, but we execute dominion over our time, because it is God’s gift to us.
This week I want to talk about something a bit different and it might be sort of surprising—our families. You might at first wonder about the idea of stewarding our families, just because our families are not things, they are other people. We don’t often think positively of managing other people. Yet I want you to think a little bit outside the box with this. For one thing, stewardship is always about a gift from God. Stewardship is always about gifts that God gives us that we are supposed to use in a certain way. Who would deny that our families are gifts from God? This is not to say that they are perfect—none of our families are. Yet our families are a way of connecting us to each other, a way to relieve the loneliness of the human condition, God’s way of putting others in our lives that we deeply care about. So if families are a gift from God, and I think they are, then they can be stewarded—God’s gifts can.
Consider also that all the things we steward can be used in such a way that they bring blessing or curse. Money is a gift from God—if you manage your money in a certain way, it can bring blessing to the world. If you manage your money in another way, it can bring a curse to the world. If you manage your time in a certain way, it can bring a blessing to yourself and to the world. If you manage it in a different way, it will bring a curse to yourself in the world. Stewardship means that the gifts God gives us are not unilaterally good things, but instead have the potential for good or for bad depending on how we manage it. Consider your spiritual gifts. Suppose for a second you have the gift of intelligence; you can use that gift either to bless the world or curse the world. And I don’t know what each of your gifts is, but the flip side to your greatest gift is often your greatest fault. Those of you whose gift is generosity might be tempted to run another person’s life for them. Those of you whose gift is mercy might never hold anyone accountable. The way we steward our gifts determine whether our gifts will bring us blessing or curse.
All this talk of potential for great blessings and great curses—doesn’t this sound like families? Who can make us so happy as our families? The holidays are coming up and who among us doesn’t want to celebrate with our families? Families can bring us incredible blessings, bringing us closer to God and closer together. Of course, at the same time, who can make us so devastated as our families? Who can hurt us so much as a parent or a child can hurt us? Who can hurt us worth by withholding their love? No one. Families, like other gifts of God, can crush us or lift us up all based on how they are stewarded.
So let’s turn our minds to this text of Scripture and see what advice it has about how we should steward our families. This text contains some of Scripture’s most famous verses—or its most infamous verses, depending on your point of view. They are verses that we hear every so often at weddings, verses which make us profoundly uncomfortable in our culture, especially as “enlightened people.” “Wives, submit (or be subject) to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Saviour. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.”
Wow. Next time you’re at a Bible study and people want to know your favorite verse of the Bible, say that and just watch people squirm. Watch the room grow quiet, as that verse just sits there in the middle of the room like a bit old nasty bag of smelly laundry. It does make us squirm, doesn’t it? How do verses like this play in a modern society? How are we supposed to view it as Christians? Well, I know what most enlightened Christians do with it—they pretend it doesn’t exist. Honestly. I spend a lot of my life wishing these verses of Scripture away. Many other preachers do too. In fact, there’s a document out there called the Revised Common Lectionary. It’s a sort of preaching schedule which many churches abide by. I’ve told you about it before—if you go to a Catholic or Lutheran Church and some other churches, they follow the lectionary each week; the churches agree that all the churches will talk about these Scriptures each week. Some American Baptist churches use the Lectionary exclusively (maybe 5%); some, like ours, use it sometimes but not all the time. Anyway, over the summer, the lectionary usually stays in one book for a long time, so that preachers will talk about the overall themes of the book throughout the summer. One summer, it goes through Ephesians—so many passages from this book—but it just skips right over this passage. Why? Because nobody really likes to talk about it. Preachers don’t want to talk about it—in churches with bishops, bishops don’t want their priests talking about it—everyone just wishes it wasn’t there.
Let me say as clearly as I can that when I am backed into a corner, I will admit it—I believe this passage. I believe wives are to submit to their husbands. It is Holy Scripture and so as counterintuitive as it is to me, I believe this. Some of you are uncomfortable. I’m not a prophet, but I know that.
But let me encourage you before you get too nervous about me to read what comes after this part of the passage, and then what comes before this part of the passage. First, look at what comes after this: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” Hmmm. Let’s think about this for a second. What’s this verse saying? Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church…and just like Jesus, give her orders from on high. No—what we read is that husbands are supposed to love their wives like Jesus loves humanity—giving themselves up for their spouse. What word would you choose for “giving yourself up for someone else?” I might choose “submission.” After all, isn’t that the essence of Jesus’ love for us? That he submitted to the human experience even when it cost him his life? That he submitted to persecution and torment and eventually crucifixion? Jesus’ mission was lots of things but you could define it basically by talking about submission; Jesus submitted. Husbands, if you want to love your wives like Jesus loved the church, you will give yourselves up, and you will submit too. So do I believe that wives should submit to their husbands? Yes. But I also believe that husbands should submit to their wives, just as Jesus submitted.
And this is the thing about the Christian family that you see when you look at the very first verse in this passage. “Submit to each other out of reverence for Christ.” Because you honor Christ, the Submissive One, you too need to submit. Whether you are a wife or whether you are a husband, no matter what your position is in the family, you need to have a mindset of submission toward the other. Whether you are the traditionally dominant one, the husband, or the traditionally submissive one, the wife, you need to be a person of submission. Since we are people who follow Christ, it means having a submissive attitude toward the world.
In fact, what Paul is doing here is classic preaching. He says, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” and you can almost see the self-satisfied husbands nodding their heads. And they elbow their wife in the ribs and they say—hey, I like this guy, this guy’s right, he’s got something to say…and then he flips the script on them and then he says, “Oh, by the way, you husbands need to love your wives too.” And the husbands still nod, and then he says, “Love them like Jesus…” and the men realize that he means to submit, even to die for them. Paul’s tactic is to make spouses realize that in the Christian home, everything is turned upside down. A Christian family is not a place where the strong dominate the weak and trample on them to get their way. A Christian family is instead a place where spouses are concerned not with manipulating each other to get their own way, but seeking the best for each other and giving themselves up for each other, submitting to each other. Yes, wives submit to your husbands, but husbands submit to your wives as well.
As if to prove the point, then Paul moves on to the issues of parents and children. Parents in ancient Mediterranean societies—especially fathers—were dominant figures, not cuddly involved parents who coach soccer and participate in fundraisers. They were almost godlike and what they say goes. And so Paul first gives this predictable counsel to children: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Not because of what you get out of it, but just because it’s right. Paul then reminds us that this is the first commandment with a promise. If you look at the 10 Commandments, you’ll see Paul is right: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God has given you.” I think I’ve mentioned before that this was my punishment when I would talk back excessively to my parents: I’d have to write this verse 50 or 100 times. I never liked this verse…but it does have a promise. Honor your father and your mother and you will be blessed with long life. So Paul says you should obey your parents just because it’s right, but it also benefits you in the end.
And again, as the church would read this letter from Paul, you can almost see the fathers in the room sitting up a little straighter, a little prouder. “Yes! Honor your father! That’s me! God made me your father and you need to obey me. And if you do, it will be well for you! There you go, right there, it’s scriptural…do my bidding!” But then again, Paul flips the script, Paul turns it upside-down and he says, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger.” In other words, fathers, don’t torment your children. You don’t have any right to torment them without cause. Instead, says Paul, “Bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.” That is, don’t admonish them to get your way, but admonish them in order that God’s will be done in their lives. You don’t have the right to make your children do whatever you feel like; you have the obligation to help your children become more like Jesus.
Paul’s writing here really has a great challenge for us in stewarding our families. The overall picture we get when we look at Paul’s picture of the family is upside down. In an ancient world where husbands and fathers were the dominant figures, the Bible challenges them to submission and kindness instead of dominance. And Paul’s picture of the family is just as upside down in today’s world; in fact, it may be even more upside down in today’s world. Because in today’s world, no one is expected to be submissive. It’s not just men who are expected to be dominant, strong individuals today, it is both men and women who are encouraged to stand up for themselves, be strong individuals, seek their happiness and fulfillment first. We live in a world where the self is king, where what matters primarily is our own happiness and success. Paul’s counsel to families could not seem stranger to a world like this—everyone submit? Do not dominate each other? Even if you see a way in which you can get what you want, don’t take it but seek the good of the others? How strange! How foreign! And of course, it should be said, how refreshing. How life-giving. How different. How unique. Nobody does this anymore, and perhaps not coincidentally, no one is happy anymore.
Again, what Paul is saying is that a Christian family is upside down from the cultural rules that govern families. The culture says that the family is one thing, but the gospel totally subverts what seems logical in the culture and turns it on its head. Not only wives submit but husbands also submit; not only children honor their parents, but parents honor their children. Upside-down.
So what would it look like if families were to be upside-down like Paul wants them to be upside down? For one, we would begin to see the image of God in each other. Children would be able to see and respect the image of God in their parents, and so when they get frustrated with their parents as children often do, they would know that even though parents can be frustrating, they still intend well for them as God intends well for them. Likewise, parents would see the image of God in their children; as such they would take pains to bring that image to full flower by teaching their children the ways of God. They also would remember that when their children make them want to pull their hair out, that their children were creatures of sacred worth, made by God and bearing His image. IN an upside-down family, spouses would respect and honor and submit to each other, laying themselves and their own desires down for each other’s good.
Now the last thing I want to ask is why the Gospel wants us to order our lives this way. Well, it’s not just so we can have a certain kind of home; it’s not just so we can be happy. As Christian families practice this stewardship, something amazing can happen. As families mature and grow together in Christ, they also become places of deep harmony. When you can go to bed at night and rest easy that you don’t have to pursue your own agenda because your family has your back, your home can become a place of deep harmony. And you can use that deep harmony to touch the world. When your family is a blessing rather than a curse, when you’re stewarding it rightly, you don’t have to take all of this energy tending to family affairs; and you become more free to serve God and others as a family. It’s my prayer that this is the type of family that typifies our church—whether it is a traditional family, a blended family, or a single-parent family—families that no matter what they are are upside down and thus places where God can be seen.

Sermon from Sunday, October 12

2008-10-13T11:05:00.001-04:00

Based on 1 Thess 5:1-11 and Gen 2:2-3.

Audio from Sunday, Sept. 21

2008-09-23T11:55:00.000-04:00

Sermon from Sunday, Sept. 21

2008-09-23T11:54:00.002-04:00

Abbreviated sermon this week--Sue Hegarty (ECBC member and ABC-USA missionary to Cuba) helped me to speak on how the church helps us to find our calling. My portion of the remarks are below--for Sue's portions, listen to the audio (above)!

Based on the last few verses of Ephesians 2, that grand picture of the church.

Last week, in talking about the stewardship of our spiritual gifts, we talked about a way to begin to discern where God has called us. Now this is not just something I’m blathering on about—it’s very important to our church and it’s very important to us finding a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives. If we want to be happy, and if we want our church to reflect the Kingdom of God to the world, it depends on us knowing and living out our calling.
So to begin to get a handle on that, we talked about finding your calling where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet. Where that thing that makes you feel uniquely fulfilled meets the deep needs of the world—that is where God has called you.
Today, I want to talk about something related to this, and that is the idea of the church. After all, if life is just about each of us individually running around and finding our calling, then there’s no real need for the church, is there? I mean, you can find your calling and I can find my calling and we can just all do that on our own. But to think that way sells the church short. God’s plans for the church are really quite grand; we are not just a bunch of people who get together and sing and preach and serve. Listen to the text that Val read this morning from Ephesians 2: “…you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” The idea is that we’re not just a bunch of scattered individuals, but we are members of a community called the church that transcends geography, that transcends time, and that all together, the church is God’s house. God lives in his people, over all times and all places, and each time we come together to worship, we show that God to the world in the way we live together. Think about that next time you want to skip church! Seriously, the idea is that we don’t come together because we have to, or even because we experience something special, but we come together because we are being built together into God’s house.
So the church is very important in God’s mind, and should be important to us. And many people who have found their calling will tell you that the church is very important in helping to clarify their calling. After all, if God speaks through his church, then we need to be listening to each other to find our calling. Today, I want to talk a little bit about two different ways that this works in my life, and I want to thank Sue Hegarty for joining me to talk about how she has seen the church help discern her calling as well.
The first way in which I believe the church is helpful in finding our calling might seem kind of funny, but it is that church is a safe place to fail. Now you may wonder what I mean by that; after all, when we take on act of service for God through the church, we want to succeed and do a truly excellent job. That’s true—it’s important to me that sermons don’t come out half-baked, that when my job calls for listening, that I’m actually listening—we want to do a good job.
Yet the church is always a silent reminder that God gives us a safe place to fail. Why? Because it is made up of people who get together every week to, among other things, remind each other that we fail, that there is a God who redeems us even though we are failures. Each week we look at the cross and we remember that we have failed but that God is good and has saved us when we could not save ourselves.
So that means that we should not be afraid to fail. When we are trying to learn our calling, trying to figure out what place of service is best for us, we can try things out and not be afraid to fail. Why? Because in the end, the mission of our church—to reach out and touch the world with the love of God—depends on God, not solely on us. Yes, God wants to use us to do His will, but when we fail in trying, he is good and very good at making the difference. I’ve asked Sue Hegarty to talk a little bit about this in her experience in Cuba…
(Sue talks 5-7 minutes)
Thanks, Sue. The other way that the church can be helpful in determining our calling is through stretching us. Last week I mentioned that we don’t know ourselves perfectly—we can’t see ourselves as others see us. Being in relationship with other people is an important piece in knowing your calling. We all need to know people who see talents in us that we can’t see, that say, “You know what, Mike? You’re really good at x.” And at the same time, we need people who will be honest with us and kindly tell us when we’re messing up! Church can be a great place to connect with people who will help us in finding our calling by stretching our ideas of what we can do, by making us realize we are capable of far more than we think sometimes. I’ll ask Sue to share a couple stories about this, from her time in Cuba and also her time in Exton.
(Sue talks 5-7 minutes)
All Christians thank God sometimes for their churches. Yes, sometimes they can be hassles, but all of us have known the privilege of having a people who will pick you up and care for you when you are going through a difficult time. It is my prayer that our church will not only provide that sort of comfort, but also will provide a challenge: it is my prayer that in our life together we will begin to help each other live up to the potential God has given us. We are not merely a group of people who get together on Sunday; we are being built into a living house in which the world can see God. I invite you now to join us in the Fellowship hall for our ministry fair, where you will have a chance to learn more about your calling at the tables that talk about our churches’ many ministries. You also will have a chance to take a personality inventory and talk with Pastor Mike and Pastor Herbert about where God may be calling you to serve Him in the world today. Thanks to Sue Hegarty for sharing so much about Cuba this morning during the Sunday School hour and for sharing so much of your heart with us here in morning worship. May God use you to follow his call and to lead others to follow his call too.

Audio from Sunday, Sept. 14

2008-09-14T15:35:00.001-04:00

Sermon from Sunday, Sept. 14

2008-09-14T15:33:00.001-04:00

Referencing Jeremiah 20:7-18, Jeremiah's jeremiad against God.

You may remember that last week we started talking about stewardship. As you’ll recall, we talked about how being a steward means managing all the gifts that God gives us. God expects us to use all the gifts he gives us for his good and the good of all of his creation---whether those be material gifts, or financial gifts, or emotional gifts, or spiritual gifts. No matter what the gift is that God gives us, we are called on to be stewards of those gifts. And so over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about various different kinds of gifts and talking about ways in which we can be good stewards of those gifts. The first kind of gift we want to look at is spiritual gifts, those gifts for ministry that God gives us. Today, I’m going to start by giving us a bit of insight into how to know your spiritual gifts; and next week, our own Sue Hegarty and I are going to do a sermon together, and Sue will talk a little bit about how she came to understand God’s call on her life to go into mission work. Also, next Sunday after church will be our church’s ministry fair, a chance for you to come and explore your spiritual gifts as well as the different ministries of our church, so you can find a way to use those gifts here, for your good and for the good of this community.
So today and next week I want to focus in on one particular part of stewardship—our spiritual gifts. To be honest, I started to talk about these things last week, when we talked about the manifold grace of God; if you remember, “manifold” means something like “multifaceted,” like a diamond where each of us sees a different sparkle at a different angle. Each of us sees God’s goodness from a different angle, which means that each of us appreciates something different about God—and the things that we appreciate about God can give us a clue as to what we’ve been called to do. Each of us understands God a little bit differently, and so each of us has our own unique way of serving God.
That being said, it’s a lot of nice talk, but how do we know what exactly that is that we’ve been called to do? This is a question that is not exactly addressed in Scripture. At least the Scripture doesn’t give us any easy answers; it’s not as if you can turn to Hezekiah 3:14 and find out ten easy steps for knowing your spiritual gifts. Our calling is a delicate thing and seems to resist easy answers like that. At the same time, God does give us some tools for knowing what our calling is. But instead of getting recipes, what we get are stories. Throughout Scripture, we have stories of people who are undeniably doing the will of God; and through the stories of how they were called, we might learn a little bit about how God calls people.
The first person we should probably look at is Jesus—after all, Jesus is sort of the center of what we do here. The closest thing we see to Jesus getting a calling was when he was baptized. John baptizes Jesus, and do you remember what happens immediately afterward? A dove descends upon him and a voice comes from heaven and says “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Now, I don’t know about you, but were I Jesus, I would have liked a fuller description of what this meant. I guess I mean I would have liked some marching orders! I would have liked to know precisely what I was supposed to do. #1. You are going to heal people. #2. You are going to set an example for people over all places and times for how they are supposed to live. #3. You will not sin ever. #4. You will die a redemptive death. #5. You will have a triumphant resurrection.
But Jesus gets none of that—he simply hears that he is God’s Son. What exactly that means the world does not totally understand, although in hindsight we understand it at least a little bit better. All that is said, though, is that Jesus is God’s Son. Jesus’ calling was less about specific tasks that were to be accomplished and more about the kind of person he was made to be. That is not to say that the tasks Jesus did weren’t important—but it is to say that his calling was about his character first, his tasks second.
It can be difficult to draw too much from Jesus’ example, since Jesus was both God and human. So look at another character, Peter. In Matthew 16, Peter finally gets it, he finally gets that Jesus is the Son of God and so he tells Jesus this. And Jesus looks back at Peter, and he says, “You are Peter (translated Rock), and upon this Rock I will build my church. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” I always like this passage in part because it’s incredibly confusing. Peter has just basically had the light click on, and now he hears that he’s going to be a Rock, and that he has keys to this kingdom and he can bind things and loose things and you can just see him in your mind’s eye looking so confused, and thinking, “Well, this is great, Jesus, but what do I need to do now? What do I need to do next week? Am I going to be preaching and if so, what exactly am I going to preach? Am I going to be martyred? What exactly is my calling?”
And Jesus, of course, would say your calling is “Rock.” No matter where you are, no matter what you’re called on to do, whatever position you are in, you are the Rock. You approach every situation as my Rock. And as Peter’s life unfolded, it became obvious what being the Rock meant: it became obvious that being a Rock meant being the leader of the early church. It became obvious that being a Rock meant preaching a strong, unyielding message about who Jesus was; it became obvious that being a Rock meant being a foundation of the church, a touchstone for the fledgling Christian movement all over the world.
From Peter and Jesus we learn that God does not often assign jobs, he points us to our true character. Before Jesus does anything, Jesus is the Son of God; before Peter does anything, Peter is the Rock. Likewise, I think it behooves us to remember that our calling is not so much to specific tasks—it is to look at ourselves with God’s eyes and to see who we really are. If we know who we are, if we know who God created us to be, our decisions will begin to flow out of that. If you know that God created you to be generous, if generosity is your spiritual gift, then you should find ways to serve God that let you be generous—and exercise that gift God gave you. And steer clear of ways to serve God that try to get you to be something that you’re not. If your gift is generosity, not teaching, don’t say yes if they ask you to teach Sunday School. If your gift is administration, not empathy, don’t say yes to being on the lay pastoral team. If your gift is teaching, not baking yummy goodies, please don’t try to bake yummy goodies and bring them to church functions: trying to use gifts that you don’t have is just counterproductive. If we know who we are, we can act in harmony with our identity.
Now this of course should make us ask the question, “How do we know who we are?” If God gives us names, how do we find out those names? If God points us to our true character, how do we know our true character? I mean, we’re not like Jesus—we don’t have doves coming down and voices from heaven saying this is who we are. We’re not even like Peter—we don’t have Jesus here telling us that we are Rocks. How do we know who we are? Please don’t assume that you know who you are; none of us knows ourselves perfectly. We are mysteries to ourselves. I don’t know myself perfectly—in order to know myself better, I need to do two things: 1) I need to be in relationship with other people who can help me to see who I am, and 2) I need to constantly be reflecting on this question: who did God make me to be?
In a sense that question is never fully answered—we must always leave it at least a little bit open-ended. But there is a way to begin to get some insight into this question, and it is from a wonderful writer named Frederick Buechner, and it’s printed in your bulletin this week. He said that your calling is where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet. Now that, if you take it seriously, can be really helpful in seeing who God made you to be. Think of it this way: there are all kinds of things in the world that make us happy. I feel happy when I watch football, when I enjoy a second cup of coffee on a fall Friday morning reading the newspaper on our deck. But there is a difference between happiness and deep happiness. I feel deeply happy when I crawl into bed at night and say, “I partnered with God to make a difference in the world today. What I did made a difference, whether it was listening to other people in the midst of difficulties, or changing diapers, or preparing a new Sunday School class, or working on my dissertation…I made a difference.” That’s deep happiness, deep joy.
The other side of the equation is the world’s deep hunger. The world is hungry for lots of things. The world wants lots of things; it wants fun experiences, it wants fine dining, it wants professional sports and it wants cheap gas. But there are things they want more deeply than that: there are deep longings written in every human heart for the things of the Kingdom of God: there are deep longings in our hearts for a simple, sustainable lives marked by meaningful work, actual leisure enjoying the gifts God has given us, and hearts regularly (and always) turned toward God in worship. This is the deep hunger of the world—the Kingdom of God—and even if the world is blindly groping for it, it is groping for the Kingdom of God nonetheless.
So with this in mind, we say that your calling is where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet. When you go to bed at night saying, “I was God’s partner today,” what did you do that made you feel that way? What did you do that you saw bore fruit for God’s Kingdom? If what people really want is the Kingdom, at what times in your life have you known the deep joy of giving people what they deeply long for? Now—I want you to know that this is not only “holy” things like preaching or leading worship. The drive for the Kingdom of God encompasses every part of our being; I remember once hearing a sermon when I was in college, and Jill and I were dating, and a professor of mine was talking, and he was lamenting that few of the “best and the brightest” go into ministry, and so he was pushing for more majors in the Christian ministry department. And he said something to the tune of, “Don’t you want to be part of a life that will change the world?” And I’m sitting there, nodding my head, but it made Jill mad. Why? Because she saw the talent she had in mathematics, and she wanted to take that talent, get all the education she could, so she could use that to further God’s Kingdom too. Wouldn’t it be better for her to do what she was gifted to do rather than sit through classes that would be so boring for her about how to become a pastor?
She was, of course, right. The Kingdom is not something that only happens here in church—it happens all over this world God has given us. The Kingdom of God needs mathematicians every bit as much as it needs ministers; and it needs mechanics and bakers and accountants and actors and theologians and novelists, each who do what they do because they see God acting through them when they do it and they feel deep joy in seeing it done. Where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet—there is your calling.
Now, I must say something here: this sounds all fine and good. But how does it work out in real life? If you’re going to give people advice on how to find their calling, it has to pass what I call the prophet test. In Scripture, probably the people we think about having a calling the most are the prophets. And yet the prophets’ lives were often very difficult. Consider Jeremiah, who wrote the passage Val read this morning. That was a cheery little passage, wasn’t it? “Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed;” in essence, he’s saying “God, you tricked me into this life, and I stupidly let myself be tricked.” He describes his experience as one of being compelled by God to speak his word; if he doesn’t speak God’s word, if he doesn’t let it out, he feels the word burning him up from within, forcing him to speak, forcing him to vent it out if he wants to live. In the end, he says, “Cursed be the day I was born!” I wish I had died before I was born; I wish my mother’s body had become my grave so that I wouldn’t have to experience this miserable life.
And we hear this, and we say, “Is the calling of God really about our deep joy and the world’s deep hunger? Really? Because Jeremiah just doesn’t seem very happy, really.” Yet look at this text altogether. There are two things I want you to see here: the first is the deep and abiding sense of God’s presence that Jeremiah had, even in the midst of all his problems. Even as he is talking about how the whole world is against him, he says “but the Lord is with me like a dread warrior. Therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail.” Even though the whole world is against me, they will not defeat me, says Jeremiah, because God is with me and God’s presence is enough. Those of you who have been joyous know what I’m talking about—God’s presence brings joy in a way nothing else can. You can be going through a miserable, difficult time, but if you can look and say, “God is here, with me, now, and nothing can take that away” and even in the middle of the torment you can feel joy and you can feel peace. It is important when we are looking for our deep joy in the world that we don’t just look for happiness; God’s call isn’t always going to make you happy but it can bring you joy, joy because you know he’s there, joy because you know that you are where he wants you.
The other thing we have to notice in this passage from Jeremiah is in this odd little verse: “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.” This of course sounds like standard issue, boilerplate kind of Bible verse—the Bible has a million verses like this. But consider where this verse is—it is smack in the middle of this incredible lament. One minute, he is essentially accusing God of spiritual trickery, almost of rape—he is saying that he wishes he had never been born, that God had just killed him inside his mother. But it’s almost as if in the middle of this tirade, he gets perspective and he realizes, “Oh yeah. Things are not as bad as they seem—even when I feel terribly alone, as if God is against me, still in the middle of this, I can find the strength to praise him, to honor him, to remember that yes, he is good.
So I can say to you with confidence, “Find your calling. Seek that place where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I can say it to you because Jeremiah knew the joy of God’s presence even amid terrible persecution. I can say it to you because Peter knew the joy of being a Rock even when facing martyrdom, rejoicing that he was found worthy of suffering. I can say it to you because even Jesus was able to endure the difficulty of his cruciform calling because of the joy set before him. Like these three men, following your calling may not be easy, and it may not make you happy, but it will bring you joy to live your life in this way.

Hmmmm....

2008-09-08T12:39:00.002-04:00

My sermon from Sep. 7 seems not to have recorded on my computer! Curses! Foiled again! It is in print below, based on 1 Peter 4:10-11...

What is a steward? Over the next couple of months, we are going to be looking together at the topic of stewardship…even more than that, we are going to be challenged to be stewards. So it seemed good to me to start this time by asking the question, “What is a steward?” After all, if I am going to convince you that you are a steward and encourage you to be a good steward, it’s only fair to talk about what a steward is.
These days “steward” and “stewardship” have very Christian connotations. Go on your computer and search the internet for the word stewardship and you will find Christian resources more than any others. And yet the concept of stewardship is not just a biblical or religious one—it is one that was widely understood in the ancient world. A steward in that day was a person who was left in charge of the important affairs of an important person. If a rich man had to be traveling on business or for pleasure, a steward was put in charge of the estate. A steward is more than a simple servant; a simple servant goes around and does whatever the master says; but the steward is different: the steward is in charge. The steward has the master’s power and authority while the master is away and might be called on to make decisions with the master’s money; he could hire or fire servants; a steward could oversee all the estate so that when the master returned things, he would find that things had functioned well in his absence and it would be as if nothing had happened, no bump in the road at all.
Many times the Bible depicts our human existence as one of stewards of God’s gifts. Sometimes, as in the passage we read this morning, it spells it right out and actually calls us stewards. More often, though, it tells stories that place us in the position of stewards. Probably the most famous one is the one Herbert preached on last week, the story of creation. Over the first 5 days of the creation story, God creates light and darkness, and the dry land, and the sun and the moon, and the creatures of the sea and sky, and finally the animals of the land. And then on the sixth day, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” That little phrase—let them have dominion—is important because it means that we are stewards, not just servants. Our lives are not simply about listening for orders and mundanely following them; instead, our lives are to be actively discharging the power that God gave us in the world. As stewards, we are here to manage the world in the physical absence of God. Our job is not merely passive, but active; God gave us dominion, God allows us to exercise our power in the world today. This is a stewardship passage.
Another example is the story I used in the children’s sermon a couple of weeks back: the parable of the talents. As you’ll recall, Jesus tells this story where the master goes away and he goes to his three stewards and he entrusts them each with some money. To one, he leaves 5 talents (which equates to 75 years’ wages!); to another he leaves 2 talents (30 years’ wages); and to another he leaves 1 talent (15 years’ wages). And he goes away and while they’re away the stewards scramble with what they are to do with this enormous sum of money they’ve been left. And the one with five talents and the one with two talents go out and invest it and double their money; while the one with one talent is afraid of losing it and goes and buries his money in the ground. When the master returns he is thrilled with the two servants who have made money; but he is not so pleased with the third servant. HE says, “You wicked and lazy slave! You ought to have invested my money with the bankers and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest! So take the talent from him and give it to the first steward.” And then, in strong language, “As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Now, again, the point of this is not to say exactly what Jesus means by this, but the point is to say that this parable points out an important fact: God expects us to do something with what he’s given us. We are not mere servants, waiting on a skywriter to spell out in the clouds, “Go and do this.” We are stewards, charged with making wise and savvy decisions with the raw materials God has given us.
And so it is with the passage we have read this morning. “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” First I’m struck with that word “manifold,” which is a word we don’t use so much anymore. Manifold means something like “multifaceted.” A cut diamond is multifaceted—it has many surfaces, many faces; that means that your perspective when you look at a diamond you see something different depending on the angle you take. It looks different when the lighting is different; it looks different when your perspective is different. When Peter talks about the grace of God being “manifold,” he means that the grace of God is something like that. It looks different to each of us—some people see sparkles in one place, some in another, and much of what you see depends on your angle.
The grace of God challenges me to seek the truth and speak the truth; it challenges me to grow as a preacher and a teacher, because those are my gifts. It might seem strange to say that the grace of God challenges me; after all, isn’t grace a gift, not a challenge? Yes, in a sense. But what I mean is my perspective, my personality, and my life experiences, all of these things make me understand God in a certain way. And I believe the way that we understand God shapes our perceptions of what He has called us to do. Many things can be said about God’s goodness—he is loving, he is kind, he is the truth, he is generous, he is faithful, he is wise, he is forgiving, he offers us a new life. And you could list many more things! Now because of my God-given personality and emotional makeup, and because of my situation in life that God has ordained, I am naturally drawn to a few of those things especially. Some of those good things about God jump out at me more than others and they seem especially good about God. You know that I’m a compulsive student, both in and out of the classroom. I’m always seeking truth. The fact that God is revealed in Scripture as the truth is important to me, it’s precious to me; it’s an aspect of God that I care about deeply. All around me, I see people who are comfortable living a life without seeking deep truth; and to me, from my perspective, I can’t understand it. I can’t understand people living life that way. I resonate with a God who is the truth; that facet of God’s multi-faceted, manifold grace is especially important to me.
Because that aspect of God jumps out at me, it challenges me. I have to live my life in response to it. Because God is like that, I’m challenged to be like that too. We call this a spiritual gift; it is my special insight into God’s character that speaks to me and forces me to live my life in response to it. Now here is the thing: it’s not only pastors that have spiritual gifts (at least not as Baptists understand it). Each of you has your own unique special insight into God’s character that speaks to you and invites you to live your life in response to it. Because of your God-given personality, and because of your God-given emotional makeup, and yes, because of the life situations that have happened to you, the good and the bad, you have a unique perspective on God that no one else has. Maybe the way you have understood God as a friend when no one else would be your friend; that probably has something to do with your spiritual gift—you are probably being called to be a friend to others. Or maybe you have known God as a healer and so your gift is healing, whether spiritual or emotional healing. Or maybe you have known God as a generous giver, when you look at your life, you are just so thankful for the gifts that God has given you in your life; and so your gift is generosity. Your understanding of the manifold grace of God—that special, unique perspective on how God has been good to you—shapes your understanding of your spiritual gift, how you should be the hands and feet of God in the world.
The passage here challenges us then, to be good stewards of those gifts. That is, if you have seen in your own special way how God has been good, if you have seen the diamond sparkle from one angle, if you have thus been given gifts for service in some way, you need to use those gifts. The verse says that you are now a steward of those gifts—because it is a unique perspective to you, you are the one who needs to use them. You are the manager of those precious gifts. If you do not exercise your gifts, they will not be used. And so we must use them. And the passage says interestingly that we are to use those gifts to “serve one another.” Again, this is sort of an interesting passage to me because you would expect the passage to say, “Serve the world.” After all, these days we’re hearing a lot these days about the need for churches to reach out. Which is of course true, there are far too many churches that are inward-focused while the rest of the world is suffering and hurting.
Yet the vision of this particular passage is that we are called on to use those unique gifts to serve each other, to strengthen the congregation. Why might he say that? Well, I think it’s because congregations are communities, not just collections of individuals; and a church like ours can only do our best job at reaching out to the rest of the world when we are strong as a people. So without apology I do challenge you as a pastor to find your gifts and use them, and not just using them indiscriminately, but to use them here. We need more than just one person’s perspective on God to function as a church; if we really want to show this community God’s love, we need to do it together, because we have so many different perspectives on the manifold grace of God, and so many spiritual gifts as a result. People will see God in us together much easier than they will see him in us individually. So that being said, I encourage you not only to seek out your gifts but to use them here; we need you to use them here in order to show people the fullness of what God is like in our community.
Now here is the amazing thing about stewardship. In the old days, when a master would leave a steward in charge, that steward was generally given the right to completely run the master’s business while the master was out of town. A steward could essentially sign the master’s name and be a stand-in for the master for as long as he was away; not a subordinate to the master but like he was the master himself. Now we certainly can’t do that, can we? Yet look at verse 11: “Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ.” Now let that sink in for a moment. When you have this unique perspective on God, which becomes your spiritual gift—when you use this spiritual gift, you act with the hands and the feet of God. Not just good people doing nice things here and there. Not just random acts of kindness. Not just living at peace with everyone around you and with all of creation, but the supernatural God himself acting through you.
This is an awesome responsibility, one which I’m aware of whenever I’m discharging my spiritual gifts. I understand my spiritual gifts to be teaching and preaching. So out of all the things that a pastor is called to do—some of them really match my spiritual gifts and some don’t—but out of all things that my position calls me to do, I cannot neglect these. I believe that when I preach or when I teach, the possibility opens for people to see and hear and experience God in a new way. Does everyone see and hear and experience God every time? No. Of course not. I’m not perfect at using the gifts God gave me, and there are any number of reasons why people might not experience God through what I’m preaching and teaching. Does that sound boastful to say that people hear God when I preach and teach? I don’t mean it that way. Because first, it is all God’s doing, and because second, the same can be said of you as well! You have a way to reach out and touch the world where when you do it, it is not just you doing it, it is God doing it. I see glimmers and glimpses of it here. Two members of our church go to Mississippi to help build a house for a woman who has lived in inadequate housing since Katrina hit three years ago. Do you think that was anything less than an act of God for that person? No, that was God’s way of touching her life.
Or a youth leader reaches out to the teenagers in our church, mentoring them and being there for them during some of life’s most difficult years. Do you know how many twentysomethings are so grateful they had godly mentors during their teenage years? They weren’t just mentors, they were the hands and feet and face of God to them during that difficult time. Or a person opens their home up, inviting visitors to church over on a Sunday afternoon, extending warm and godly hospitality to strangers. Doesn’t the visitor experience the face of God and the generous heart of God through this gift too? You have a way to speak with the very voice of God, to operate with the very hands of God, to offer the very shoulder of God to the grief-stricken.
This is what it means, then, to be a steward—to manage what the Master has given you so that people don’t just see you, they see the Master when you use those gifts. Perhaps you have never thought about your life in this way before. Most of us don’t, to be honest. We live in a world that calls us consumers, that calls us voters, that calls us workers, that calls us producers, that calls us Americans, that calls us black and white and every other color in between, but never ever calls us ordinary creatures who can do extraordinary things empowered by God’s spirit. If you are willing to re-orient your life around your spiritual gifts, around that special way that you see God and that special way God uses you, then you can show the face of God to the world. If you are willing to give up all your other identities to become a steward, you can act with the voice and hands and feet of God in the world. If not, you will have to settle for a second-best kind of life, where you can be everything the world promises, but nothing worth living. I encourage you to join us over the next few weeks as we talk through what it means to be a steward, because it is the only life worth living.
And I encourage you not only to come here to worship and listen, but also to enter into the dialogue a little bit deeper. Two big ways to do this: the first is a ministry fair. Two weeks from today after church, we’re going to be holding a ministry fair in the fellowship hall. Here, you will be able to see in one place all the different ministries of our church; the Scripture we read today talked about using our gifts to strengthen each other, and that’s what that ministry fair is all about, to find out about all the ministries here. In addition, you will have a chance at the ministry fair to explore your spiritual gifts. We will have spiritual gift inventories that you can take, kind of like personality profiles, that might help you know what ministry teams would be good for you to join; if you’re more right-brain than that, if you want to explore this but don’t like inventories, there also will be a chance to hold a sacred conversation, to talk with a pastor about how you feel God is calling you to serve. So this is a chance to explore stewardship in a deeper way.
The other big way that we’re trying to talk about stewardship this fall is through the formation of small groups to look at stewardship in our own lives. These groups will be studying a book by our own Dick Rusbuldt, A Workbook on Biblical Stewardship. We’ll be hosting these in three different homes: Dawn & Dustin Flay will host one where Dick will lead the discussion; Fred & Marie Jones will be hosting one in their home; and Jill & I will host one in our home. There are details on this in your bulletin, and there are signup sheets out on the table if you’d like to sign up. We want this to be a chance for you to go deeper, to wrestle with this stuff like you never have before so that you can wind up a better steward on Thanksgiving Day than you are today.

sermon from Sunday, August 17

2008-08-18T08:32:00.002-04:00

Based on Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats and "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."

Apologies...

2008-08-11T12:35:00.002-04:00

I've managed to leave my laptop at home the last two Sundays and so haven't recorded the sermons. (I'll conveniently blame it on my son Jack, who is making me a bit more bleary-eyed than usual.)

Here's the sermon from this past Sunday, Aug 10. Based on “Give us this day our daily bread" and the parable of the sheep and the goats...

This morning, we are going to look at the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” And we will look at it through the lens of this passage that Val has read in Luke 12. Unlike the past few weeks, though, I do want to look at the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, in-depth, word for word.
I want to start with the very first word: Give. We don’t really talk about this word very much because it seems so self-evident, but let me ask you an honest question: how many of us really live, day-to-day, with a sense that the only reason we have food on our table and lights on in our home is because God gives it to us? I don’t want to presume, but I don’t think any of us do that perfectly. I know I sure don’t! I generally have the sense that if I want food on my table and lights in my house, I better get my fanny to work to stay gainfully employed. There are days I love it, days I don’t love it, just like any job, but regardless, you gotta work. It’s even biblical, really—you can see it in the book of 2 Thessalonians 3. In the book of 1 Thessalonians, Paul warns his readers that Jesus is coming back, and so you need to be prepared. Well, it seems like people took him to heart—they quit their jobs and started loafing about, hanging out together, and looking up to the sky. And so he has to write back to them in the book known as 2 Thessalonians, and says, “You need to be working! And if there are able-bodied people among you who aren’t working, the church shouldn’t be feeding them so they can be idle all day.”
And so I want to affirm the value of work. Yet at the same time, we should be aware that there is a strong current running through the Scripture—not least of which is in this piece of the Lord’s Prayer—that our livelihood does not depend on our earning it, but on God giving it to us. Think, for instance, of Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber…The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.” There, very clearly we see that we do not keep our own life, but God keeps it for us.
It may sound like I’m splitting hairs, arguing that God gives it and we don’t earn it, but we still have to work for it. But the real difference between the two is in your mindset, in your heart. We all know people who feel like they have to earn everything. People like this are difficult to be around, because you want to do nice things for them, and they always want to pay you back. They don’t want to be in your debt, they don’t want to owe anybody anything, they want to earn it. It may seem noble, but often it covers up this deep insecurity and anxiety that they shouldn’t have anything they don’t earn. And so they work and they work and they work. They work at their employment, they work at their relationships, they work and work and work.
And at the same time, we all know people who are not so worried about earning everything, but are confident that God is going to provide for them if they simply seek to follow Him. People like this can be refreshing because they are not always worried about earning their way through their relationships and life and everything else. They can be unnerving, because they don’t necessarily play by the same rules that others play by; but they are sure that they are not taking care of themselves, God is taking care of them. That kind of confidence is what the word “Give” implies—we don’t earn it, God gives it.
This is the picture that Jesus fills out in the passage that Val read. Jesus tells his listeners “do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will wear.” By this he does not mean do not make provisions for such things. After all, it’s not like you just go about your spiritual business and then look outside and find food and clothes magically dropped on your doorstep. When Jesus says, “Do not worry,” he means “do not be anxious.” Why? Because you have a deep and abiding realization that getting the things you need to live does not only depend on you, it doesn’t even mostly depend on you, it depends on God giving them to you. When we come to realize that it is God’s giving and not our earning, we become far less anxious people.
The next word is “us.” Now this might sound a bit like a word we don’t really need to look at. But I will draw your attention to the fact that the Lord’s Prayer is written in the plural. Jesus does not say, “My Father who art in heaven…Give me this day my daily bread.” There are two ways we can understand this, and probably both have an element of truth in this. The first is that Jesus is talking specifically to his disciples here, and encouraging his disciples to pray this prayer together, so that “we” and “us” refer specifically to other Christians. The other way to look at it is that Jesus is praying on behalf of the whole human race, talking about God as our One Father and asking that all people everywhere have enough food to eat, forgiveness, etc. Now I confess that these waters are a little murky, so I’m not exactly sure what Jesus was referring to; I think it’s probably honestly a little bit of both ideas. There is something in the Lord’s Prayer that seems to presuppose Christians are the ones praying it; Jesus says, “THine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” in other words, “Everything is yours, God.” Christians would more easily pray this than others. Yet it may also be talking about everybody, too—it’s not entirely clear.
I think the most important thing to take from this is that the Lord’s Prayer—and prayer in general—is something meant to be done together, not separately. In our very individualized culture, we often assume that Christianity is entirely an individual affair, a matter of what I believe and what I do. In fact, sometimes our Baptist tendency to not honor tradition makes us more prone to this. The great distinction of the Baptist faith is that we assume you can think for yourself. My job as a minister is not to be accountable to God for decisions you make, but to set an example as best I can for how to live the Christian life, and to advise you in it, comfort you in it, wherever helpful. But the living it is up to you. That of course is true.
But sometimes our focus on that blinds us to the fact that even though we all are individually accountable, the Christian life is not meant to be an individual adventure. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we talked about Christianity not just being an individual transaction, about getting my needs met and getting into heaven, but joining a Kingdom. The church makes no sense if it’s just about individuals getting their needs met. If that’s what it is, believing a few things, signing on the line, giving your heart to Jesus and getting eternal life back, why go to church? Maybe it’s nice to learn, maybe it’s nice to hang out with other Christians, maybe it’s nice to find good ways to cope with the pains of life; but there’s nothing mandatory about it. But if Christianity really is about joining the Kingdom of God, the church makes a lot more sense. Because you just can’t do a Kingdom alone—we have to be together, we have to be a community, for the Kingdom to make sense. So we go to church not primarily to learn, to hang out with Christians, or for emotional support. We go to church because we are a sign of the Kingdom to the world; and if we are a bunch of me’s running around, instead of an “us,” we are not really showing the world the Kingdom, are we? People see God—or don’t see God—not only in what we believe, but in the kind of community we are. People sense what God is like by how his representatives live with each other and treat each other. Give “us”—your people here—our daily bread.
The next couple words I want to focus on are “this day.” What could this mean for us? Another way to think about these words is to say, “Just for today, give us what we need, just for today.” Why might Jesus say this in prayer? Remember, the Lord’s Prayer functions as a model for all Christian prayer. So what might he be saying about prayer here? Well, Christians have interpreted it in different ways. Some Christians have thought that such a phrase means, “Don’t be greedy.” Now, I’m quite sure Jesus doesn’t want us to be greedy, but I’m not sure that’s what these words imply. Instead, I think most of what Jesus is trying to say here is that it’s essential for us to live one day at a time.
One of the things we are very grateful as parents of infants is that the science of infant sleep has really progressed a lot in the last few years. A lot of literature is out there now on helping your baby to sleep well. Now, as you can imagine, there are different schools of thought about what’s right and wrong, but the advice we took with Grace and we plan on taking with Jack is from a book called “Solve your Child’s Sleep Problems.” Essentially, what the author argues is that babies need to develop methods of soothing themselves to sleep and not relying on their parents to soothe them. Kids need to develop the skill on their own. So you put them down to sleep, and they may cry at first, so you go in after 5 minutes, and soothe them a little bit; you leave, and they cry, so you go back in after 10 minutes, and soothe them again, let them know you still love them; and then 15 minutes, then 20 minutes, then every 20 minutes for however long it takes for them to go to sleep. Now, the first night, maybe the second night, maybe even the third night can be tough. But by the fourth night, the babies learn to calm themselves and fall asleep, and usually sleep quite well. I know that for us it was rather like a miracle! This technique was developed by a Dr. Bruce Ferber, and so it’s known as “Ferberizing” your little one. Now here’s the catch with Ferberizing—you can’t do it until your baby reaches a certain age. Until your baby is four months old, your baby doesn’t really have the mental capacity to soothe herself or himself—they need someone to soothe them. When they hit four months, they have developed to the point where they can do it.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, when you know that a full night of sleep will be coming soon when the baby hits four months, you have a tendency to have that date circled on your calendar. November 12. It seems so far away. I know that I really thought of it in terms of those 123 days even the day Jack was born. You think, OK, if I can get through these 123 days, then I’ll get my sleep back. But I’ve been realizing how toxic that viewpoint really is. You know why? I know that there are many people here who would give an awful lot of money to have those 123 days with a baby back. To look into his eyes, even at 3:45 in the morning, is a precious things. I wouldn’t want to do it my whole life, but the fact is, I get these four months only once with Jack; only for four months of his life can I go and hold him and give him whatever he wants and not worry that I’m spoiling him. I have these four months for God to rip out our old family wiring, and re-wire my heart and open it up to more love than I ever knew I could have before. This is a tremendously privileged time in my life, but I cannot enjoy it if I’m always thinking about 3 months down the road.
Now the same principle in my life holds in your life as well. Each of us is in a life-world that is just dripping with God’s presence, if we are aware and sensitive enough to see it. And yet so much of our lives is spent waiting for the next thing, and not enjoying the stage of life that we’re in. This is what Jesus is talking about when he talks about giving us this day our daily bread. It’s Jesus’ way of saying, “Live in the moment. Do not worry about what you will need for tomorrow, do not focus on what tomorrow’s problems will be, focus on today. God, give us what we need for today. Give me what I need for the moment that I’m in. And then tomorrow, I will be in another moment, and I pray you will give me what I need for that moment.”
Now I’m aware that different people hear this different ways. Some personalities hear this and rejoice—some people live in the moment quite easily. Some people hear it and panic, because they are the type who always are preparing for the next thing down the road, and they like to have a few months of provisions around the house, always prepared for any eventuality. To these people, it’s sort of a threat to focus on the moment they live in, because there’s a certain security in always preparing for the future. If you’re an active kind of person who loves to solve problems, then you probably like to focus on the future, because the future always has problems you can solve, or at least work on if you can’t exactly solve them. There’s always more to do to prepare for the future; it’s like a total vacuum that always is happy to take your physical, spiritual and emotional energy if you’re wanting to spend it. Whether it is your strength or not, all of us can learn a bit from Jesus requesting just the help we need for this day. Because if we can learn to live day by day, something strange can happen—as we are assured we will have what we need for each day, we learn to be thankful for little things we missed before when we were always three steps ahead, worrying about what comes next. We learn to love our lives when we learn to spend our lives living instead of anticipating them.
Finally, let’s close by looking at “our daily bread.” Bread is a simple food. Every culture has bread in some form, a staple food, a food of the masses. In our culture, having bread to eat is a way of talking about a person not having enough—subsisting on bread and water is not enough for anybody! But in other cultures, having only bread might be a feast.
Why does Jesus refer to bread? Well, I think it’s in part because Jesus wants us to live simply. We do not ask Jesus for a daily feast, a daily balanced meal, even a daily vegetable. Just bread. Again, some people see greed in this, that Jesus is saying we shouldn’t be greedy. I see it a little differently, and I see it as about simplicity. Maybe that’s two sides of the same coin, but I think it’s not so much about Jesus berating us not to want more, not to be so greedy. I think it’s much more about us learning to enjoy the simple things. Remember, Jesus liked to feast with the best of them—his first miracle, in fact, was turning ordinary water into wine! And he was liberal enough about his feasting to have people think he feasted too much. But Jesus knows what happens to people who feast too much—they’re never happy unless they’re feasting more. Witness our culture—more wealth than was imaginable even 50 years ago and also incredibly depressed and worried. Why? Because we don’t know how to love simple things, the earthy stuff of life; and so when that’s all we have, we get depressed.
Jesus wants us to have our daily bread, not because he hates us having better things, but because he wants us to live happy lives. And we can only be happy once we learn to love simple things, because sometimes those things are all we have. So Jesus asks God that we might have them, that we might have enough, so that we can learn to love the simple things. Then, if we learn to love the simple things, we will love those feasts in our lives even more!
I think what this phrase calls for is a corporate, simple dependence. We are called on to be simple people, enjoying the simple things of life without demanding to have our future all worked out in the present. And we are called not to earn them but to receive them from God. And finally, we are called on to do this together, not alone; our community should be characterized by this simple dependence together.

Oops--Audio from July 13

2008-07-21T20:21:00.001-04:00

In the baby hubbub, never posted this sermon here! E-mail me for the text...

Sermon from Sunday, July 20

2008-07-21T13:15:00.001-04:00

Sorry to be late with all this--Jill and I welcomed our new baby Jack on Sat, Jul 12 so life has been hectic. In addition, didn't get to record this week's sermon, but here it is in written form, based on Acts 3:1-10, the healing of the lame man by Peter and John at the temple.

This morning finds us at our second sermon in our summer series on the Lord’s Prayer. Last week, we looked at the opening phrase, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and we explored the way in which those names both give us a picture of God as intimate and distant. He is our Father—he is close to us in good times and bad, he provides for us—and yet there is a very real sense in which he is distant and very different from us. Both of these ideas—God’s closeness and God’s distance—are very important in getting a picture in who God really is, and both of these ideas are very important in the way that we pray. Yes, we approach God intimately, like a friend, but we dare not forget the fact that he is other than us.
Today, we move on to the next phrase, “Hallowed be Thy name.” Hallowed is kind of a funny word, which we don’t really use much anymore. You probably have heard the word “hallowed” in the last week if you’re a baseball fan. The All-Star game was held up at Yankee Stadium this past Tuesday night; those of you who follow baseball know that Yankee Stadium is going to be torn down after this year. I regret never having gone there to see a game; last summer I was in northern New Jersey for a few days and thought about going up to the Stadium to see a game, but I decided not to. Tough choice, and I sort of wish I had gone. Yankee Stadium is one of those places which I feel like I should have seen; the place where the giants of the past and present played the game: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle . Yankee Stadium is one of those few places that for baseball fans is “hallowed ground.” That word—“Hallowed”—is one we reserve for venerable, old places or concepts. Perhaps the concept of hallowed is best described as “especially honored.” We speak of that “hallowed ground” of Yankee Stadium because the great ones played there; we speak of the “hallowed halls” of our alma mater because we honor the schools where we grew up and learned. Those places are especially honored.
And so in the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “May your name, O Lord, be especially honored.” It is a strange prayer, because in some ways, it seems totally obvious. I mean, we sometimes feel like “May your name be honored” can just be sorta understood. I mean, the very fact you’re praying to God seems like it suggests that you’re the kind of person who honors God’s name. If you didn’t, you’d be off drinking or gambling or robbing banks, but probably not praying. It especially seems that way in the Lord’s Prayer; one of the features of the Lord’s Prayer is that it doesn’t waste words. Jesus even says as much; when he’s introducing the Lord’s Prayer, he says, “When you pray, don’t do like the pagans do and heap up empty words on each other.” Instead, pray like this: and then he gives us the Lord’s Prayer, this short prayer that’s really to the point. And yet here it is, this seemingly extraneous phrase, tucked in there: “May your name, O Lord, be especially honored.”
Why would Jesus include these words here? He must have had a reason—the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t have any wasted words. I think what Jesus wants us to see here is that God’s name being honored is at the heart of it all. All that will be said in the prayer: May your Kingdom Come, may your will be done—will come naturally if we are honoring God’s name rightly. All that we ask in the prayer—our daily bread, forgiveness for sins—will be granted to us if we are honoring God’s name rightly. Honoring God is at the heart of what we seek and at the heart of what we ask.
What does it mean for us to especially honor God’s name? After all, this is not just a request we make with our lips but an intention we state with our lives. After all, just a few weeks ago, we talked about the way that all creation honors God in moos and barks and squeaks and cries. Just by being the animals and the plants God created them to be, creation honors God. We can choose whether or not to honor God, but when we do, it is the highest honor because it is a conscious decision to honor him. And so when we say, “Hallowed be thy name,” we are not just asking God to do something, but also pledging ourselves to honor God’s name, because we can give him the highest honor. So the question we need to ask is “How do we hallow God’s name? How do we especially honor the name of God?”
I wanted to look at this phrase through the lens of the text at the beginning of Acts chapter 3. This is one of the most important stories in all of Scripture, because it is the first time we see the disciples performing a physical healing after Jesus has gone to heaven. Before Jesus goes to heaven, remember, he promises the disciples the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit which gave him his power. But the disciples don’t really know what that means—will they be able to heal people?—until they run into this man outside the Temple. I want to suggest that there are three ways that God’s name is given special honor in this story, two ways in which his name is hallowed. I believe these three ways can give us insight into how to hallow God’s name.
The first way that I see God’s name being hallowed is right there in the first verse, the verse most of us skip over. “One day Peter and John were going up to the Temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon.” Peter and John, being good Jews, were continuing the practice of fixed-hour prayer. In those days, Jews had formal prayer at 6 AM, 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, and 6 PM. That was a no-matter-what kind of thing; if you were off by yourself, you would say the prayers on your own, or if you were near a synagogue or ideally, the Temple in Jerusalem, you could join with other Jews in praying there. This is the case with Peter and John; now keep in mind that these two men have seen Jesus risen from the dead, and have preached with power, but still they are retaining this ancient spiritual practice, praying five times a day.
Now this sort of prayer may be a bit different than the kind of prayer we often practice today. It was not so much giving a monologue to God, or coming up with something meaningful to say. It wasn’t so much asking for specific prayer concerns, or praying for missionaries. It was getting together, and reading the psalms; as the practice was adapted by Christians, it started including the Lord’s Prayer. In short, it was more or less a time for the people to pause from their day, read a Scripture, ponder it and offer themselves to God before returning to the busy-ness of their day.
I think the time has come for Christians to practice this sort of prayer again. After all, if we truly want to see God’s name honored, then speaking honor to God is a natural way to start doing it. Consider all the noise that we hear each day; so little of it honors God. If we are serious about giving special honor to God, part of it will have to do with intentionally setting aside time in our lives to shut out other noises and to lift our voices and our hearts in honor to God. You may tell me that in your life, it would be impossible for you to practice this kind of prayer: it would be impossible to take even five minutes out of your work schedule to go and pray, to re-center and re-orient yourself and your life around God. That may well be true, and I can’t be the judge of your life, what you can and can’t do. Yet I would encourage you to find creative ways to sneak in a moment just to read a psalm and to be silent before God and pray. I think it shows God that we choose his easy burden rather than our heavy burden; I think it shows God great honor, and I think it hallows his name when we choose to take time with him.
The second way I see God’s name being hallowed was in the brave response of Peter and John. A lame man was carried to the entrance of the Temple, where he would ask people for money. It’s always a good time to hit people up for money, when they’re on their way to pray. On their way into pray, they might figure it never hurts to give a little bit to the poor. And you never know, on the way out they might just feel good enough that they’d give a little bit more to him. It was a good place for him to sit and it enabled him to make enough to live on.
This was a scene played out again and again around the Jewish world, and I’m sure in other religious peoples in the Roman Empire. Judaism required giving alms to the poor, and the poor needed alms to get by. It was a good system, because the religious folk got to do their giving and the poor folk got to do their receiving.
Now I don’t mean to be disrespectful to this person, because they were only doing what came naturally. But you know what I’ve always wondered? I’ve wondered, “What if a poor person wanted to be religious?” The system set up at the time more or less assumed the religious folks were the well-off ones, while the poor might get money from religious folks, but they were never really assumed to be equals with the religious folk. They were merely objects of charity; if you want to be really cynical about it, they were pawns of the religious folks. The rich would throw a few coins at the poor; it relieved their guilt, and they thought it might give them a special in with God. But you know there comes a time in every person’s life where they don’t want to be a pawn in a rich man’s game; where they don’t want to be mere objects of charity, but they want to be treated as equals, on a level playing field.
This man sits at the Temple, begging for money, hoping that the guilt of the religious folks will put bread on his table that night. Peter and John look at him and I’m sure they were tempted to drop a few coins into his bucket; after all, it did make them feel better to be helping out. But instead they do something courageous and brave. They said, “You know what? No. We’re not giving you this money. We know you think you want it, and part of us wants to give it to you too. But there’s a man named Jesus, and he didn’t come so you so that we could continue this cycle that keeps you in poverty and keeps us one step ahead of guilt. He came so you could have healing. In his name, stand up and walk!”
I believe that the second part of us giving special honor to God’s name is in healing people in Jesus’ name. Some of you are getting very nervous. You have seen faith healers on TV, charlatans who stand up and swat someone on the head in the name of Jeeeeeee-zus and then they fall over and claim to be healed. And so you think to yourself, “I’m wary. I don’t think God still heals the sick and the poor today.”
Let me start by saying that you may be right. I don’t know. But let me ask this: how do you know? We see the tremendous spiritual power that the disciples had, power that they could speak to illness and lameness and defeat those ailments with words. Just because we do not see that, here, in America, today, how do you know that it doesn’t happen? Perhaps the reason we do not see spiritually powerful actions like this is the fact that we are a spiritually weak people. After all, I could build a pretty convincing case that none of us here has a spiritual life like the spiritual life of Peter and John. Few if any of us pray like Peter and John did; the fact that they gathered in the Temple five times a day to pray and re-orient themselves, to remind themselves that they were God’s children—this practice was key to their spiritual lives. This practice helped them to grow spiritually and have great spiritual strength! Why would we be surprised that they could do things we can’t?
Also, to be brutally honest about the state of American Christianity, far too many of us are involved with throwing money at people rather than allowing God to use us as instruments in solving the problems of others. It is very tempting for those of us who have some wealth to assume that what people need is money. We hear about problems in inner-city schools and the response of most suburban Christians is, “The government should really do something about that. We support higher taxes to give money to the problem” rather than actually encountering those problems first-hand. It never even occurs to most of us that we could leave our current lives and move to the inner-city and get involved in a neighborhood there. Yet that would certainly have occurred to Jesus, who opted to come live on earth when he could have thrown money at us from heaven. And we see here that John and Peter have the same mindset—when this weak man asked for money, Peter and John were wise enough to say, “Money isn’t the issue. Healing is the issue.” Did you notice in the text how Peter and John insisted on seeing the man’s face? They said, “Look at us.” In essence, they said, “You are not a project to throw money at, you are a person, and if God touches you like he touched us, you can be more than a project, you can be on equal footing with us.”
What I am saying is this. Our mindset is nothing like Peter’s and John’s. We—most of us, anyway—don’t practice the spiritual disciplines they practiced. We generally fall victim to throwing money at people rather than seeing them as people. Since our mindset and our practices are nothing like Peter’s and John’s, why should we be surprised that we don’t get the results they get? Why should we be surprised when we can’t heal people when we don’t do what they did to get the spiritual strength to heal people? It’s a little like me claiming that I can’t bake a cake when I have no intention of following the recipe! Of course I can bake a cake if I am willing to follow a recipe—but if I leave out ingredients, I shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t wind up with cake but a sticky mess!
The healing of this lame man gave special honor to God. It hallowed his name. I don’t know if we can heal people like this, to be honest. But I do think we have an obligation to be spiritually prepared like Peter and John were spiritually prepared. Their practice of regular prayer prepared them spiritually for the tasks they faced. And that practice also gave them wisdom to discern that this person didn’t really need what he thought he needed. I believe that if we are spiritually prepared like Peter and John were spiritually prepared, we will be agents of healing. Will it be physical? I don’t know. But try a practice of praying regularly—I dare you to do it—and see if you aren’t better equipped to heal in whatever way God wants you to heal the world. See if you aren’t better equipped to discern what the real needs of the world are. See if you aren’t more ready to see people and not projects.
And then—miraculously—once you have helped in healing another—watch as that person walks and leaps and praises God. Watch as that person honors God’s name. Watch as that new person hallows God’s name, because of the spiritual strength and healing they saw in you.

Audio from Sunday, July 6

2008-07-07T13:09:00.000-04:00

Audio from June 8

2008-06-27T10:21:00.001-04:00

At long last...sorry for the wait. Will be posting June 29's sermon on Sunday or Monday.

Having trouble with the audio--

2008-06-08T17:06:00.001-04:00

For the sermon from June 8. Will try to re-post Monday AM; sermon text is below.

MJ