Hope Words and Why We Believe Them (Eph 1:15-23)

Subways: underground trains in big cities.  In places like Washington DC and New York the underground system is immense.  The subways in Moscow are ornately decorated and quite beautiful.  But a lot of subways are not so pretty.  The platform is grimy, trash strewn, without benefit of sunshine (obviously), and overall quite drab.  Subway riders are harried, tired; thousands of people rushing to and from work where they will, in a high-pressure environment, give 10-11 hours of their lives, 50-75 hours a week. 

            The work, the rush, the gray, depressed environment; the underground metro is not a place of spiritual inspiration. 

Except …

            There’s that young woman.  Look at her down in this cave, dancing!  All we hear is the shuffle of tired feet, the screech of the trains coming down the line.  In those earbuds, what does she hear?  What music induces such beautiful body movement?  Poetry in motion. 

All we see are heads down, glum eyes set straight ahead.  Must get to work.  Must do the work.  Must get home.  Must not go crazy.  Must not slug anyone as I slog through this commute.  The subway iPod dancer’s eyes are closed.  As we muddle along in the shadows, what light does she see, she with her closed eyes, her smiling face, her dancing body?[i]

            She is Christianity.  Wait.  What?

            Where the world sees death, a Christian, one who follows Christ, one whose life is lived in Christ sees laughter.  We don’t mock the pain death brings.  We are sympathetic.  But, we know death is an enemy that has been defeated, and in Christ we have eternal life.  God gives beauty for our ashes, strength for fear; God gives us deep laughter and takes our grief.  We will be called “oaks of righteousness” … to display God’s glory.[ii]  In the Spirit, God is with us now and always, comforting us, emboldening us, filling us, and empowering us.  As we live in awareness of God-in-us loving us, we hear music others cannot hear.  We smile at happiness others do now know, cannot know.  We can’t help it.  We must dance.

            Look at her, so frivolous as she sprinkles beauty and grace all about this bleak subterranean world.  Look at us, witnesses to eternal joy and indefatigable hope – hope that cannot be broken or made weary.

            Except …

            We know too many people cut off from this joy and this hope, cut off from God and caught up in pain. 

            Twitter is the ultimate safe space because you can create any name you want as your user name.  You can put any picture in as your ID.  You can exist in the Twitter totally anonymously.  You can also follow whomever else is on Twitter.

            My Twitter handle is ‘revtennant.’  The picture is a photo of my wife Candy and me.  On my profile page is a picture of me on one of our church trips to Ethiopia.  My bio tells exactly who I am. 

            Occasionally, I will tweet scripture verses or quotes from authors like Eugene Peterson.  My simple aim is to get positive words flowing into the raging torrent of social media.  Tweets and Facebook posts can be impossibly negative, divisive, and provocative.  I too try to provoke.  I try to take words from the Bible to provoke people to hope, or at least to consider that hope might be possible.

            Most of the people who see my Tweets are church members, friends, family.  But, remember; on Twitter anyone can follow you.  Someone called “Atheist C Cat.”  Has reacted to one of my Christ-proclaiming tweets.  Atheist C Cat could be anyone – maybe someone from this church or formally of this church.  A-Cat’s bio says, “Skeptic.  Atheist.  Ex-Christian.  Cat lover.”  That’s it.

            A-Cat’s initial response to me was a low grade jab at God.  I posted a quote – “Everything God does is woven into the plot for your salvation.”[iii]  “Maybe the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect, loving deity should have created a perfect world where salvation isn’t needed.”

            I didn’t take the bait.  God doesn’t need me to defend God.  God’s reputation is intact.  Instead, I tried to pick up on A-Cat’s words and engage in a conversation.  I asked. “What would a perfect world look like?”

            “Different than the one we’re in.”

            “Couldn’t Christians and Atheists and Muslims and Jews” work together for good?

            And A-Cat responded and we went on this way.  I kept trying to guide the conversation toward a hopeful place and A-Cat kept going back to the inevitability of death and destruction.  I hope the conversation will continue, but where he or she last left it, was with this.  “I choose to live in reality as much as possible, even though it does appear bleak.  But the evidence leads the way.”

            Pay close attention to this anonymous atheist Tweeter who depicts him/herself as an ex-Christian and trolls Christian pastors with impotent barbs aimed at God.  She declares that reality is death and destruction.  Anything else – faith, hope, love – is fantasy.  Reality is humans will always be evil and malicious toward each other.  And evidence, the supreme standard for truth, leads to this fatalistic conclusion. 

            Two thought for A-Cat; first, I suspect many people feel just like her.  Many see the world and see death and try to make the best of a situation that inevitably leads to chaos and misery.  Second, in a world without God, A-Cat is right.  All people sin.  Sin is seen in real time in the way we hurt each other.  And sin up on sin, across the oceans across the span of centuries leads to a world that is spiraling to death.  A-Cat is correct.

            Except … subway iPod dancer seems oblivious, dancing, spilling color and light and music out all over A-Cat’s gray dying world. 

So the tension is clear.  Without God, without life in Christ, we exist as Darwinian animals whose only purpose is to survive and pass on our genes.  Eat, produce young, and then die, either a lonely death or a violent one.  Either way, there is no hope because this life is all there is and death is the end.  With God, living life in Christ, we stand in the midst of a decaying world bound for destruction.  Each one of us, each church, big or small, each individual Christian, stands amid the chaos and insists there is another story, a better story to be told and being told.  In Jesus Christ, God has come near.  In Jesus Christ, the Kingdom has come.  In Jesus Christ, we can have life, abundant, eternal life.  I’ll take that subway iPod dancer’s vision over A-Cat’s fatalism any day.  I want to dance like no one is watching.

Except … many people in the church, people who speak words of faith live lives that suggest they are find A-Cat’s argument more convincing.  A lot of Christians are beleaguered by doubt and or burdened by responsibility or immobilized by depression.  Some in the church live joyless lives that suggest whatever good we can hope for from God is coming much, much later.  We drag ourselves through our days with an aura of defeat.  Ignatius of Loyola defined sin as “refusing to believe that God wants my happiness and fulfillment.”[iv]

Questions; do we believe God wants us happy and fulfilled?  Do we believe God is able to help us be happy and be fulfilled?  Can God help with this?  If we say yes, God wants us happy, and if we say, yes, God can help with this, then here’s the biggie.  Is God willing to help?  But there’s even a bigger question than that.  Assuming God is willing to help, will we know it when God does help?  When God gives happiness and fulfillment, we recognize it? 

Or are we caught in smaller things?  God gives a good marriage, full of commitment and grace – a happiness that starts now and lasts to old age.  But, we miss the gift because we have misguided notion what a marriage should be and we spin our wheels trying to achieve something that will produce limited happiness that quickly runs out.  God gives honest work, but we miss the gift because we think we should be distinguished, accomplished, and respected.  We never stop to consider the burdens that come with prestige. 

I am not saying don’t strive for excellence.  I am saying don’t wait to be grateful.  See what God is doing in life right now and trust that God has good in store for you tomorrow.  If today, you carry pain, don’t let the pain define whether or not today is good.  Bring the pain into worship, into community of fellow Christ-followers.  Bring the hurt to the cross and see God standing with you in the pain and let God define what today is.

Philip Yancey references a survey in which Americans are asked what words they would like most to hear.  Three answers top the list.  You’ll guess the first one.  What is the number 1 answer to the question, ‘what words do you want to hear?’  It is “I love you.”  What’s number 2?  It is “I forgive you.”  Let’s see if you can guess number 2? 

“Supper is ready.”

Where do most people eat supper?  I think at home.  But some live alone, so supper is quiet unless the TV is on.  Others are in families, but the despair of the world had invaded the family.  So, with family around, the TV is still on.  No one is talking to each other.  Everyone sits zombie-like, letting the evening news or the 7 o’clock game show define reality.  Or the family is fragmented.  Some sit down to dinner, but others are at practice or at meetings.  Why is sister’s chair empty?  O she has soccer.  Why isn’t dad eating with us?  Had to work late.  Or the dinner table is the arena in which the family fights are battled out.  At least once a week, dinner ends with someone slamming down silverware and someone else leaving the table in tears.

            In the Kingdom of God, dinner is different.  It is with family no matter your age or marital status.  In the Kingdom, dinner is an affair where you are surrounded by people who love you and pay attention to you, and no one is in a hurry and no one is missing.  God, Ephesians 1:5 tells us, “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ.”  The Kingdom is family.  Verse 11, “in Christ we have an inheritance.”  And that inheritance is eternal life.  We say this with certainty because we know Jesus lived, no one, atheists or otherwise deny that he was crucified, and we are positively certain he was resurrected on the third day.  Ephesians 2:20 – “God … raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.”

            We believe these hope words because the strongest historical evidence is that the resurrection happened.  But evidence is not the only standard by which we assess truth.  We also look at experience.  We have experienced the love of God.  Through our lived relationship with God, we know God is here and God is good.  What I pray I could show Atheist Cat but also show my brothers and sisters in Christ who are overcome with negativity and disappointment is that God, as we know God in Jesus Christ, is Lord.  Jesus is Lord now, here.  And Lord wants us to receive love and forgiveness.  And the Lord has a place set for us at His table. 

            Those of us who have received the forgiveness and eaten at the table of the Father who’s adopted us are so full of love, we are free to dance like no one is watching.  We have music to share in the monotonous drone of godless life.  We have good news. 

            If you have known this good news but the hardness of life has driven it deep into the recesses of your heart, this morning, pray.  Ask God open the ears of your soul so you can truly hear Him say, “I love you.”

            If all you can see are your own failures they threaten to overrun you, ask God to open your heart so you can hear Him say, “I forgive you.”  And when you hear it, believe it.  Receive it.  You are a new creation, a child of God.

            If you know you are loved and you are forgiven, then you also know people who haven’t walked with Jesus.  You have people like Atheist Cat in your life.  Go to one of them and with grace say, “Your place at the table is set and ready for you.  Please come home to father.  Supper is ready.  ”

AMEN

---

[i] Philip Yancey (2014).  Vanishing Grace, Zondervan (Grand Rapids).  In this message, I refer to several stories Yancey shares in this book including the iPod dancer, the references to Tim Keller and Ignatius of Loyola, the words people want to hear most.  These stories are found in chapter 4 (p.69-88).

[ii] Isaiah 61:3.

[iii] Eugene Peterson (

[iv] Yancey, p.79.  

Gospel Acceleration

You and a friend are talking.  Your friend is not really involved with Christianity in any way.  She doesn’t go to church.  As far as you know she really has no religious practice.  Faith is not something the two of you discuss, but she does know church is big part of your life.

            It is an occasion where the two of you are talking over lunch as you sometimes do.  She mentions she has wants to go to baseball game but she can’t find someone who will go with her.  She asks if you would go and you say, sure.  She pulls out her phone and pulls up the Bulls’ schedule.  She suggests a game that’s coming in the next week.  You start to say yes, but you realize that is the same day that something the church is hosting the chili cook-off.    

            In fact, you’ve want to invite this friend to this church event.  It will be fun and you hope it will be a springboard to discuss matters of faith with this friend because you are pretty sure she doesn’t really believe in anything.  You suggest that the two of you go to a game on a different day and then you ask if she would come to church to laugh and eat chili.

You’ve made the invitation and you look into her eyes.  There’s no spark.  In fact, her expression has gone blank.  You instantly know she is searching for a reason to turn down your invitation.  It is clear she wants no part of coming to church, discussing faith, or having this even come again.  Before you know it, lunch is over; you have no plans for a baseball game, you kind of feel like your friend is mad at you or at least annoyed. 

What happened?  Why is it so hard to talk about following Jesus with this friend or with a lot of people we know who are not in church?  Why does talking about our faith in the day-to-day conversations of life feel so weird? 

            This friend is interested in many things that you are also like.  There’s baseball.  You have worked together and are roughly the same age.  You have a lot of common ground and discussion with her is easy – unless it is about God or religion or faith.  Then, she slams the door shut. 

The Gospel has no ground. 

That is one example.  In countless others, we see how impossibly challenging it is to hope that we could share the news that in Jesus, God has come.  In Jesus’ death, God has taken away the sins of all who turn to him in faith.  In Jesus’ resurrection, God gives eternal life to all who give themselves to Him.  We are adopted as sons and daughters of God.  Disseminating that word, spreading that Good News, is why we are here. 

            However, in the secular workplace, coworkers, friends, bosses – they don’t want to hear us talk about Jesus, not most of the time.  Disinterest is an obstacle to the spread of the gospel. 

Our culture’s love individualism, tolerance, and relativism can be barriers.  Your religion is OK for you.  Mine is OK for me.  All religions are basically the same.  We tolerate all except for the religions that claim to be absolutely true.  If we’re all the same, there is no need for conversion.  And popular sentiment in our country is that the wrong thing is to try to say that there is anything wrong.  The Bible says the world is fallen – all have sinned.  That doesn’t really stick in today’s cultural climate.

            Another bump in evangelism road comes in our friendships with people as committed to their religious beliefs as we are to ours.  We have friends who are Muslims and Mormons, Jews and Buddhists and like in the example, we have friends who have no religion.  We love our friends.  But the differences act as obstacles.

            Make no mistake about it.  The Gospel is to be spread throughout the world.  Acts 1:8 – Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses.”  “Gospel” comes from a Greek word which means “good news.”  The only way news is actually news is if people hear it.  In our imagined encounter with friend who expresses no religion and might an atheist, is anyone hearing anything at all? 

            The first Christians did not know they were Christians.  The term had not been coined.  They knew they were followers of Jesus whom they had seen on the cross.  They saw him die and knew he was buried.  Then, they met him, resurrected.  Everything they ever knew was turned over.  Their worldviews were completely upended, but it did not stop there. 

            After the resurrection and after he ascended to the Father, they were seemingly left without much help in a world that was hostile to their cause.  The temple leaders rejected Jesus as the Messiah.  The Romans were not monotheists.  In religion, the Romans thought they were insane.  The Greeks did too.  In politics, the Romans held the power and at moment could enslave the people of Jerusalem including the original community of Jesus followers. 

How could these people, most of them poor and undereducated, obey Jesus’ command to tell of the good news of the salvation God gives in Him?  They were powerless.  They were directionless.  They were kind of in shock.

Then the Holy Spirit came in full force destroying every wall that would stand between the salvation God offers in Jesus and the people who need it.  They had been praying in that same upper room where Jesus shared the bread and the wine.  The Holy Spirit shook the house and they worshipped in song and prayer, prophecy and Heavenly tongues.

Jerusalem teemed with Jews who had come from all over for Passover and the Pentecost.  Many heard the commotion and rushed to the house as the disciples, now Spirit-filled, spilled out into the street.  One by one, the disciple testified.  The gathering crowd was amazed.

Everyone looked around and saw as clear day that this was a gathering of people from everywhere – yet all clearly understood.  The obstacle of language was overcome and the Gospel advanced.  They saw that these were fishermen, not educated folks.  And they came from Galilees, not a place known to produce people of sophistication or scholarship.  More obstacle are obliterated – socioeconomic divisions; education; and the Gospel moves forward from the disciples mouths into the ears, minds, and hearts of the people in the crowd. 

Some critics accused the disciples of drinking too much.  I struggle with the logic.  I never thought getting smashed would enable me to speak Amharic or Karen.  Alcohol doesn’t have affect.  And the crowd did not buy this lame explanation from those who would oppose the Gospel.  They listened as Peter spoke and the story of Jesus was proclaimed. 

He told of the crucifixion and that would be a problem.  People did not continue following a would-be Messiah after he died.  They went and found a new Messiah.  But here was Peter still holding on, claiming Jesus had been raised.  No one, I mean no one, believed the Messiah would be resurrected ahead of an end-time resurrection at which point all people would be raised for judgment.  Peter’s message that Jesus was the carrier of God’s salvation and had been raised by God was totally unexpected.  Expectations and the idea of death stood to block the advance of the Gospel.  Empowered by the Spirit, Peter preached through these blockers.

When the Spirit poured out on the community of faith in Acts 2, they shared the Gospel, spread the good news of life in Jesus in spite of insurmountable opposition.  This event launched the movement of the Christians who carried salvation throughout the world.  The rest of the book of Acts follows Peter and John, Philip, and Paul and Barnabas and then Paul, Timothy, Silas, and Luke along with Priscilla and Aquila as they tell all who will listen that Jesus is Lord.

Many, like our friend in the opening story I imagined, have no part in it.  Many do not want to hear about Jesus.  But some do.  And even when we hear, “No thanks, let’s just go to a baseball game,” we don’t give up.  We pray for that person.  Maybe our invitation planted a seed that someone else will harvest down the line. 

The Holy Spirit is as active now as was the case in Acts 2.  The Gospel accelerated across Israel, through Turkey, through Greece, to Rome.  It continues today.  We have the word.  We stand in the encouragement of the church community – praying for each other, building up each other.  We have the history of our faith and the Christians who have gone before us to inspire us.  Finally, we have God – the Holy Spirit – in us. 

Our culture shows indifference or a penchant for pluralism.  In China, there are the persistent attempts of the government to control everything.  In Western Europe, many buy into the myth that religion has died.  In parts of Africa, Christianity is so infused with traditional religions it is hardly recognizable.  In North Korea, open Christian expression can land you in jail.  In Syria and Egypt, proclaiming faith in Jesus as the Son of God can get you killed. 

Everywhere, there are challenges and it appears the easiest thing to do is go underground, worship in secret, and keep to ourselves.  But a fire burns; the fire of Holy Spirit sizzles.  We can’t put it out and we should not try.  We stand it in it so the light of Jesus shines through us.  The Gospel is going to continue to fill the world.  We play our part by worship, by prayer, and by setting ourselves so we are attuned to the Spirit. 

I have a friend.  More often than not, when we try to get together, life gets in the way.  When do find time to grab a sandwich, our conversation is mostly about our kids or college basketball or the weather – not especially deep or spiritual topics.  He knows my work and my life and I think he’s most comfortable at the surface.

But last year, he showed up here at church – just once.  I’ve known him for almost 9 years and he finally came.  The Gospel is on the move around the world and into my friends’ heart.  To me what happened at Pentecost was a miracle.  When the Spirit filled those first disciples, it was amazing.  To me, when my friend comes back to church and when our conversation moves from debates about who should start at Small Forward to questions about what it really means to be a follower of Jesus that will be a miracle too.  They will be as important an advance of God’s Kingdom as any I can imagine. 

Evangelism and the work of the Holy Spirit are interchangeable.  I am sure this is true in your life and your friendships too.  The gospel is rushing forward.  Pray that you as an individual and we as church can be part of it.

AMEN

A Life of Intensity, Urgency, and Meaning

I begin 2014 reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  She is my peer, born just 3 months before me.  She has lived a life vastly different than mine.  A Somali, she made it out of that Muslim country and out of Islam altogether.  I was surprised to see that the forward to her story was written by noted author and celebrate atheist Christopher Hitchens.  I did not realize her escape from oppression had led her to atheism, but someone not likely associate with the late Hitchens unless she was an atheist herself.

I checked out Ali on google.  The summary describes her as “a Somali-born American feminist and atheist activist.”  Her blog confirms this http://give.theahafoundation.org/blog-0/.  From the posts I skimmed, it seems clear that her main subject matter is the abuse of women in Muslim cultures.  I am only a few pages into her book, and I will read it all the way through.  It is a powerful story.  I say that even as I am male and an avowed religionist.

OK, I would never refer to myself as a ‘religionist,’ but Hitchens was consistent in his contempt for religion – Christianity, Islam, it did not matter.  He was not simply a nonbeliever.  He was aggressively opposed to believers.  I have watched You Tube videos of his debates with William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath.   In those instances, Hitchens displayed a quick wit and a thoroughly unconvincing case for atheism.  I took away from both events a great admiration for the gracious patience of both Craig and McGrath.

Reading Hitchens’ forward in Ali’s book got me thinking about him again and thanks to Google and my daughter waking at 2:45AM (with a fever which always makes her talk in her sleep and insist on sleeping with mommy), I am at my kitchen table with time and reading material.  I am particularly interested in a 2011 Huffington Post column by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush.  He is an American Baptist minister and was the dean of religious life and the chapel at Princeton University. 

Raushenbush’s column is titled “When an Atheist dies.”  But in it, he writes “When an atheist dies it is wrong to wonder what is happening to them now that they are dead.”  My question is why?  Why is it wrong for Christians who believe in eternal life to wonder about the eternity of someone who assaulted (through literature, not violence) Christianity?  Christianity is all about proclaiming that Jesus is Lord.  Raushenbush, a Christian minister, was the director of religious life (a life lived under the lordship of Jesus) at Princeton University.  Why would he say it is wrong to wonder about the eternity of Hitchens, a man who rejected the lordship of Jesus?

I am not saying Christians ought to rejoice at Hitchens’ death.  We should not.  I do not definitively declare Hitchens hell-bound.  God did not consult with me on eternal judgment for Christopher Hitchens or myself or anyone else.  But, I am a pastor and have presided over numerous funerals and have spoken to people about God and life and eternity.  I have had these conversations over and over in my 20+ years in ministry.  People want to know about life after death.  People read.  People know when a famous nonbeliever dies and they ask.  I don’t understand Raushenbush’s assertion that it is wrong to wonder about the atheist’s eternal fate.

I also don’t understand the dichotomy Raushenbush draws between focusing on living in the present and longing for eternity in the Kingdom of God.  He quotes a lengthy passage from Ayaan Hirsi Ali which ends with a John Lennonesque notion that death replaces the “siren song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. … There is nothing more [than this life.] But I want nothing more.”  Reflecting on this passage, Raushenbush writes that concentrating on this life “fills these precious moments that we have on earth with intensity, urgency and inherent meaning.”

To be fair, Raushenbush is specifically writing about atheists and afterlife.  He might write something different were he talking about Christians and afterlife.  So, I have to ask, does one’s beliefs determine one’s eternal reality?  I think it does not.  I think God is real – more real than what I can perceive with my five senses.  God is Lord.  God will not just let me fade into oblivion if I choose not to believe in him.  When I die, if I die as an unbeliever and as a God-rejecter, I will be judged by the God I rejected. 

And as for living intensely, I really believe Raushenbush has it completely backwards.  The most alive moments of my life came when I was acutely aware of the reality of and presence of Heaven.  In Ethiopia, with a mission group, I fed a plate of supper to a handicapped street woman and her child.  Both were clad in rags.  All that they owned was on their backs.  Maybe sharing supper with the poor doesn’t qualify as living intensely for Mr. Raushenbush.  For me, it was invigorating.  I was blessed beyond words.  I would never have been there if not for my belief in God.  No, I do not understand how atheism fills the present with “intensity, urgency and inherent meaning.”

I cannot imagine a more preposterous notion.  I get what Raushenbush is saying.  The atheist has nothing more, so he has to get the most out of “the now.”  Surely Raushenbush would acknowledge that Hitchens is an exception and that there are plenty of atheists who waste their lives on trivial things and hollow materialistic pursuits.  There are plenty of Christians who do the same, by the way.  Hitchens did not have intensity, urgency, and meaning because he was an atheist.  His life had those qualities because he was a crusader for atheism.  His mission was to defeat religion and because he was a talented writer, he garnered the admiration of Christians like Raushenbush.  In fact, Raushenbush, again I emphasize, a Christian minister – ordained to lead others in following Jesus, lauded the life of someone whose fame came at least in part for this creative and articulate rejection of Jesus.  Hitchens said terrible things.  But, he said them well.  So we must acknowledge that he lives well.

I am grateful for all three – Ali, Hitchens, and Raushenbush.  I am grateful to Ali for sharing her story.  I pray for women who are harmed and mutilated in cultures that do not honor their humanity.  I am grateful to Hitchens for raising the bar and forcing brilliant Christians like McGrath and Craig to articulate reasonable defenses of Christianity.  And I am grateful for the way Raushenbush’s article forces me to think about these things.  I pray in 2014, I will focus on the Kingdom of God.  I pray I will see it. I pray that in seeing it, I will live with intensity, urgency and meaning.

The Joining of Heaven and Earth

The Joining Together of Heaven and Earth (Revelation 21:9-11)

Sunday, May 12, 2013

           

            As I thought about ways for us to hear and understand Revelation 21-22 and to do so in a way that might build us up as we follow Christ and represent him in the world, the idea of reversal stuck out in my mind.  Specifically, I appreciated the way several Bible scholars developed the theme of reversal relating to Genesis 11 and Revelation 21:2, 9-10. 

            As I reread Revelation these verses, 2 and 9-1o, pay very close to the direction of the movement.  Who is initiating things?  Who is the giver and who is the receiver?

“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

           

            Hold in your mind these verses.  If you have your Bible, keep Revelation 21 marked. 

            Now, look at Genesis 11:1-9:

            ‘Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

3 They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’  They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

           

            In both the Genesis and Revelation accounts, we’re paying special attention to who initiates the actions.  We’re watching to see the direction and the motivation.

            In Genesis, the people have stopped migrating and settled down in the plains of Shinar where the begin work on a tower that will reach to the Heavens.  They plan to build a city.  “Come, they say, let us build for ourselves a city … so that we may make a name for ourselves” (v.4).

            Building is a good thing.  We were created to be creative.  Made in the image of God, the ultimate creator, we are made to make things.  However, God had a method and the new city the people were growing at Shinar was directly the opposite of God’s instructions.

            Genesis 9, right after the flood, God tells Noah’s family to be fruitful and multiply and increase in number on the earth (v. 1a, 7).  The instructions given immediately after Noah comes out of the ark permanently re-establish humans God’s special creation who may rule over the earth and eat animals for food and exist in a relationship with God.  God sets it up all the while knowing humans will continue to sin (Gen. 8:21).  At the end of the Noah saga, we see that his descendants have indeed “spread out over the earth” (10:32).

            However, the next move, the gathering and building at Shinar, shows a group of people who were in direct opposition to God.  He said, spread out.  They said, let us build ‘otherwise, we will be scattered.’  The direction of the action was upward.  Humanity wanted to become God, or like God, through human achievement.  We think this is all new because we live in the computer age.  Genesis 1-11 is the recounting of stories told orally for centuries before they we written.  This comes from prehistoric times.  Even then, they thought they could achieve the things God wanted to give.  They would blatantly disobey God if need be.  The absolutely would not live in faithful dependence.  Nothing has changed from the very dawn of civilization until now.

            The initiative was on the human side, rejecting the plan of God.  The action was done by humans reaching up when God said the spread out.  The motivation was to be self-sufficient and independent of God instead of living in faith and living in relationship with God. 

            Atheism – the notion that there is no god – is a worldview that permeates every thought in someone’s life.  There is no innocent concluding that God does not exist and thus I will strive to be a good person.  People do that.   I am friends with a lot of people who take this approach in life.  It does not work for two reasons.  One God does exist. 

            There is a lot of evidence, but the best is the resurrection.  Historians who specialize in studies of Israel from 30BC-100AD have to deal with the invention of the church.  Some of these scholars are committed naturalists who have determined that the dead do not rise.  But even those most insistent that Jesus did not rise still, assessing the available data, acknowledge with certainty that the very first Christians believed to the point of death that the resurrection happened.  If they believed this, then why? 

Why believe something that was completely unexpected and completely without precedent?  What could cause so many to give their lives to a movement that was so thoroughly different from their own previous worldview?  Historians have scrambled to explain this phenomenon, often just ignoring Occam’s Razor and taking the most obvious route.  The church was born because the Resurrection of Jesus really did happen.  Any other explanation for the rise of Christianity requires the historian to throw out probability and to make ridiculous statements about mass hallucinations that sustained to the point that people accepted the cross rather than reject Jesus. 

The resurrection happened.  Who but God could do that?  If God then, is real and has called the world to himself through Jesus, his own appearing in human form, then any worldview that denies God is not just opting for indifference.  God is God and thus has claim on us.  To reject that claim is to be in rebellion. 

For that reason, a second reason that atheism fails as a worldview is that it is a worldview in direct opposition to God.  The builders of the tower of Babel thought they could achieve the things only God can do.  They failed because God exists and to act as if God does not exist is to be against Him.  There is no sideline in this.  God is real.  God chose to come to the world through Israel and then through Israel God came in person, in Jesus.  Either one is a Christ-follower, or one is alienated from God and destined for frustration.

How does Revelation 21 show God’s undoing of the tower of Babel rebellion.  In Revelation 21, God is the actor.  John is in Heaven because God has summoned him.  John had gone to prison because he had been trying to obey God by spreading the Gospel throughout the Roman Empire.  He try to reach up to Heaven.  He reached out to the world in Jesus’ name.  He only went to Heaven when God initiated that action. 

He’s experiencing things that exceed our sensory abilities.  Words like “up” and “down” may or may not accurately describe the spatial considerations of Heaven and Earth when seen from God’s perspective.  But those are the words John had and his descriptions do help us understand our own standing and what is appropriate and good for humans in relating to God. 

Unlike the humans rejecting God and acting on their own initiative, John and his friends in the early church lived at God’s initiative.  He was in prison and then in a vision he went to Heaven by God’s power.  He does not see humans going “up to Heaven,” as we so often see.  Look again at Revelations 21:2 and 10.  The holy city came down. 

The New Jerusalem was the bride of Christ.  We won’t spend significant time deeply exploring all the imagery John used to depict the holy city in these last two chapters of the Bible.   Worthwhile as that would be, it requires a whole additional talk. 

Know this.  John intends his readers – us – to see our future, our eternity.  We will be together with all who have followed Jesus in a place where there is no grief.  No fear.  No injury.  No death.  The city’s gates are always open.  God is present bodily.  I love my relationship with God the Spirit, but I long for the closeness of the Father and the Son.  And that is what we are promised.  As sure as Jesus rose from the grave and Christianity is the way to God – he did and it is – the promises of Revelation 21-22 will come to fruition.

It is a city and a garden.  It is worship and vocation.  It is joy and it is unending.

Recall that the people who built Babel incited their rebellion against God for two reasons.  They aspired to exalt themselves and they feared isolation.  “Let us build or else we will be scattered.”  Their efforts resulted in them being brought low and forcefully scattered. 

Now Revelation 21:  “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

All that has been scattered is gathered in Jesus’ city and all people are one people in His name.  The kings of the nations come, forgetting their own glory and giving all glory to the Lord.  And we are there too. 

Until the day comes when we are called there, we live here.  We catch a glimpse of the gathering of that holy city whenever we let God be God.  We let God determine who’s in and who’s out. We do our best to love everyone as much as Jesus loves them.  And we go out in His name.  Spreading out, we see Him over and over in the people we meet in the world.  And we carry the good news of His salvation to those who have not heard.  We’ll be finally gathered when God decides it is time to bring Heaven to Earth. 

            His timing is perfect and our lives are blessed when we do things his way.

AMEN

Turn to Jesus

            Mark Galli, managing editor of Christianity Today magazine, discusses a question millions of people wonder about: how can I trust that there is a God and that this God is good?  The wondering comes out in a sentence repeated countless times daily.  “I could never believe in a God who would _____” and you fill in the blank.[i]

            “I could never believe in a God who would allow children to die.”  We know children die by the hundreds of thousands every day. 

            “I could never believe in a God who creates gay people then declares gay relationships a sin.”  Every one of us knows someone, probably someone we love, who is gay.  I recently in a sermon offered what I think are two Biblically sanctioned forms of holy sexuality – a heterosexual marriage and celibacy.

            “I could never believe in a God who stands by idly while innocent people suffer.”  We know from Hurricane Katrina to the Indian Ocean Tsunami to the Haiti Earthquake to Japan where there was an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown that suffering hits people with full force – people who did nothing to deserve such suffering.

            You could make your own version of the sentence: “I could never believe in a God who ______” and you name an injustice of particular interest to you.  Galli in the Christianity Today article points out the obvious.  God’s existence is not dependent on us believing.  Nor is God’s existence on our sense of justice. 

            So, the children die, people have urges and impulses and deep desires that lead to lifestyles the Bible says are sinful, and the innocent suffer through no fault of their own.  The follow-up proclamation is “well, I’d rather spend an eternity in Hell than worship a God who stands with his hands in his pockets while children die or  a God who imposes misery by not letting people marry who they want to marry or who a God does nothing while innocents suffer.”  It’s another version of the same frustration.  “I’d rather go to Hell than worship the God who does that” whatever “that” is. 

            Really?

            It sounds tough when Han Solo or Dirty Harry or one of the X-men brazenly says to his foe, “I’ll see you in Hell.”  I can just hear Charlton Heston saying, “They can take my gun when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.”  I remember the t-shirt from my basic training days.  “God said, ‘Let there be infantry,’ and the gates of Hell opened.

            Really?  It sounds fine from Charles Bronson or the Rock or the Marlboro man, but let’s be thinking people for a moment.  If we don’t like what God does, we’ll just do without him?  If we get mad at God and say, “to Hell with you,” it’s an exclamation.  If he says back, “To Hell with you,” well, then we’ve got a problem. 

            We either believe in God or we don’t, I don’t think goodness is a sufficient reason to believe in God and I don’t think pain is a sufficient argument to reject the notion of God.  Do we believe there is a God?  If yes, what do we believe about that God?

            In his magisterial work Institutes, the great 16^th century reformer John Calvin writes, “God has sown a seed of religion in all men.”  Furthermore writes Calvin, God has “revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe.”[ii]  The way God made us, we are inherently disposed to belief in Him.  So any atheism is a direct rebellion in how we were created.  We’re made to believe in God.

            Because of the Fall – Adam and Eve’s original disobedience and fall from innocence – we do rebel against God’s creative intentions.  But even when we do, Calvin says that because God is so clearly seen in nature, “[we] cannot open [our] eyes without being compelled to see Him.”  This point comes from the New Testament, Romans chapter 1.  “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made” (v.20).  We are created to believe in God’s existence.  The creation around us is evidence of God’s existence.

            Some continue to hold to atheism, that there is no God, but if we accept that God exists then we still have to deal with some painful truths.  Children starve to death.  Disasters happen and millions suffer, including good people.  Young adults in their prime come down with cancer and other deadly diseases.  Cruel dictators inflict persecution and death on people in their own nations and other nations. 

Mark Galli points out that such non sequiturs, horrible happenings occurring in a world ruled by an all-powerful, all-good God lead to the Gospel of Job.  This is the opposite of “I’d rather go to Hell than worship a God who allows ___ suffering of some kind.”  In Job’s gospel, Job, the virtuous man of the Old Testament suffers tremendously and unjustly.  If anyone had reason to gripe to God, it was Job.  He loses his kids and is afflicted with disease and he did nothing to deserve such misfortune. 

So, he expresses every emotion under the sun.  He complains, wishes for death, wishes he was never born, and then demands an audience with God.  God finally grants that meeting, but in it, Job never speaks.  He meekly listens as God recounts his creative, omnipotent, omnipresent glory.  That means God can do whatever God must do, and Job is too small to understand. 

Job accepts that conclusion.  Even though Job suffered unjustly, after God speaks, Job says, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6).  Many who go through the paces of (a) belief in God, (b) refusal to believe because of evil and suffering in the world, and then (c) resolution to reject God because God is bad.  Of those who go through these steps of faith, many end up here.  We end up where Job is.  “I cannot understand things, so I just blindly worship God and say that God is good and God is love.”  If I look around and see pain and see suffering, I stop looking around because God is good and God is love and I have to hold to that no matter how much the reality of the world demands another story.  I’ll deny that reality so I can God is good and God is love.

Fortunately, there is more to the story because that blind faith is a sure fire way to drive unbelievers away from God in droves.  It’s not that the Gospel of Job is not true.  It is true that people sometimes – often? – suffer unjustly.  It is true that next to God, each one of us is impossibly small and cannot understand God’s ways.  But, this story, by itself, is not Gospel.  Gospel means good news.  This isn’t good news.  It’s fatalism.  It’s resignation.  It’s the surrender that says, we just want to survive this world, as bad as it can be. Survive and make it to Heaven.

What’s missing?  Jesus!  Jesus is the completion of Job’s gospel.  Job’s defeated submission before God is not good news until we read the Gospel of Jesus Christ – God come earth in human flesh.  Galli points that “I could never believe in a God who ____” is a sentence missing something.  So too is “God is good and God is love and I’ll believe that and ignore any evidence that suggests the world is falling apart.”  Both sentences talk of God, but neither mentions Jesus, and Galli feels and I agree that Jesus is the key.

First John 5:5 – “Who is that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”  The very next verse states that Jesus came by water and blood.  It makes me think of His baptism.  Like all people who want to trust in God, he was immersed in the water.  But he’s the only who, when he came up from the water, elicited a remark from Heaven.  “You are my son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).  God spoke when Jesus was baptized.  God was there, a proud father honoring His son.

To say Jesus came by water and blood also calls to mind communion.  When we take the juice and are reminded that he said, “My blood that is poured out is the blood of the New Covenant.  Take and drink.”  Water and blood – Jesus truly is God, and he came for us.  In Jesus, God came for all people. 

At the same time, 1^st John’s declaration that Jesus came by water and blood is a declaration of Jesus’ 100% humanity.  When he died on the cross, one of the Roman soldiers thrust  spear into him, and water and blood gushed from his side (John 19:34).  This was a human being nailed to a real cross on a specific day in history, dying a real death.  In 1^st John, the confidence of this telling depends on the witness of the Holy Spirit.  Verse 9, hearkening to Jesus’ baptism and the other moments when God spoke in the gospels adds that God the Father also testifies to that Jesus is the Beloved Son and the Anointed one.  The flow reaches a climax in verse 12.  “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”

It’s all about Jesus.  When children die, we turn to Jesus.  When we feel we are imprisoned in a life that isn’t fair and imposes on us impossible expectations, we turn to Jesus.  When disaster strikes, evil lurks, pain rises, and we feel like hope is quickly running out, in prayer, with other believers, in scripture, and in a panicked cry from the depths of our hearts, we turn to Jesus. 

This is not another version of simplistic surrender to fate.  “I just hope Jesus gets me to Heaven.”  Of course we hope Jesus paves the way for us after death.  In fact, we don’t hope that; we confidently declare that he will go and prepare a place for us as he has promised.  But this mantra, turn to Jesus, is for living today.  First John says, “Whoever has the Son has life.” 

In turning to Him, we see the cross, the flow of water and blood, and we see that he has suffered.  He was betrayed.  He was mocked and abandoned.  Physically, he was tortured and killed.  He knows suffering.

His love is perfect and His vision is expansive.  We read statistic that so many thousands of children die of preventable causes.  In turning to Jesus, we discover he knows every one of those children by name.  He knows which ones are good soccer player.  He know which ones laugh loudly, which are talented musicians, and which have scientific genius that would have made discoveries for the good of all humankind had they not succumbed to malnutrition.  We lament the fate of the children.  Jesus eternally weeps with a sadness deeper than we could realize, but we see it when we turn to Jesus. 

When someone is stuck in life, we recall people Jesus met – the woman with the blood flow; blind Bartimaeus; Zaccheus the tax collector; the woman by the well.  These people turned to Jesus and their lives were unstuck.  In turning to Him, we come into a life of joy, laughter, and fulfillment that completes us the way nothing else possibly could.

And there are still unanswered questions.  Why did the tornado hit my house?  And sometimes God still overwhelms people from the whirlwind as he did Job.  But’s that not the only way God speaks.  In Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, God brings grace, mercy, peace, hope, and love to all of us.  When a question is unanswered, we look to the character of Jesus.  That has not changed.  His character was loving and merciful and it still is.  He loved children, weak people, fragile people, the rejected, and the lost.  He still does.  We can cite all kinds of rules about who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell, but a better approach is to turn to Jesus.  We trust His character and His wisdom about the afterlife.  We turn to Him today because we have to make it through today and we don’t want to do that alone. 

Pain guts us – Jesus help me with this.

Injustice frustrates – Jesus, what I do?

Loss devastates us – Jesus, I need you.  And he’s there.  We ask Him to walk with us, and He does!

My whole case here rests on Jesus’ character.  First John is the same way.  The letter’s entire argument rests on the belief Jesus really is the Son of God, really loves us, and really can and will help and be with us.  Life is only truly lived when Jesus is at the center of it. 

As we conclude five weeks in 1^st John, each of us is welcomed to bring our lives right to the Word, right to the cross of water and blood, and right to God’s throne room.  All our hopes, all our disappointments, our frustrations and anxieties – we bring it all because he loves us and will guide us in life so that His joy is in us and our joy is complete. 

The final word is similar to what we see in John’s gospel.  This is written to us so that we who believe in the name of the Son of God may know, absolutely, confidently know that we have eternal life with Him (1 John 5:13, paraphrased).  Turn to Jesus and receive eternal life and eternal joy.

AMEN

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[i] The conversation on page 1 of this message come from Christianity Today, Mark Galli, “’Crucified under Pontius Pilate,’” April 2012, p.32-35.

[ii] Institutes, book 1, chapter IV.1 and V.1.