We Share Hope (Luke 20:27-40)

Sunday, November 10, 2019

          His name was Wendell.  Everyone called him ‘Rip.’  Rip  was in the same church for over 40 years.  I was the under 30 pastor of just a couple of years. 

          Be patient with pastors under 30.  They’re full of energy and excitement.  They want to win the world for Jesus.  Let their energy energize you.  But, they don’t know much.  So, give them a lot of grace.  One guy in the church affectionately called me their “boy” pastor. 

          Ninety-year-old Rip was much healthier than a lot of the octogenarians and septuagenarians in the church.  His beloved wife Elizabeth, 87, was not in good shape.  Shortly after her funeral, Rip, clearly, shaken, came to ask me, his “boy” pastor a theological question.  “Rob,” his trembling voice said, “Do you think in Heaven we’ll get to see the people who died before us?” 

          I don’t remember how I answered.  I could see that Rip was trying to cope with the deep sadness he felt in burying his bride of more than 60 years.  The question is one that’s been asked since the beginning of time.  Once this life is over, will we see our loved ones again.?  In his song “When I Get Where I’m Going,” Brad Paisley sings, “I’m Gonna walk with my Grandaddy.  And he’ll match me step for step. And I’ll tell him how I’ve missed him every minute since he left.  And then I’ll hug his neck.”  It’s something we all want.

          Five weeks from today, we relaunch our congregation as Hillside Church.  What will this new thing be all about?  It’s about what we say and do.  At Hillside, we follow Jesus, love others, and share hope.  Zoom on that last word – “hope.”  What is the substance of the hope we claim to have and share?

          Will I get to see my loved ones when I get where I’m going?  Will Rip still be Elizabeth’s husband?  Can I play catch with my great-grandfather, the only Detroit Tiger fan I know who watched Ty Cobb play?  Paul addressed this concern directly in 1 Thessalonians 4:17.  He assures believers we will reunite with those who have preceded us in death.  Jesus does not deal with this question in his confrontation with the Sadducees in Luke 20.  However, when we read a story like this, the question of afterlife comes to mind..

          Several things happen at the end of Luke 19 and into chapter 20 that set the course of the story leading up to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion.  He weeps as he enters Jerusalem because God’s people fail to see what God is doing to save them from sin and death.  Next, Jesus enters the temple and violently evicts the moneychangers.  That week he daily taught in the temple court.  As he did, chief priests, scribes, and leaders of the people looked for the opportunity to kills Jesus, but were thwarted because he was so popular with crowds that were spellbound by his teaching.  

          Included in this leadership group opposed to Jesus were two political parties, the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  They generally hated each other.  The Sadducees were a wealthy, elite class and held most of the power.  There were more Pharisees.  They held greater influence in the countryside and outlying villages.  For all the confrontations Jesus had with Pharisees, he was much closer in thought to them than to the Sadducees. 

          The Sadducees only accepted Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the Torah.  They did not consider the Psalms or the prophets to be scripture.  Resurrection is not mentioned in the Torah, so the Sadducees had no place for it in their theology.

          By Luke 20:27, temple leaders have challenged Jesus’ authority and he has rejected theirs, calling them hypocrites and seeing them as opposing what God was trying to do.  The Sadducees wade into the arena.

          In Deuteronomy 25:5-10, a passage the Sadducees would have revered, it is decreed that if a man dies his wife shall marry his brother.  She is required to do this.  Any children the wife has with the brother will be credited to the man.  That man’s name would be remembered in Israel by his offspring.

          Marriage was not the result of romantic love.  Marriage was for procreation.  The woman probably had not chosen her first husband.  She was probably given to him by her father.  However she ended up marrying him, if he died, she had no choice.  Her duty was to marry his brother and have children with that brother so the original husband’s name lived on.  Marriage was for procreation.  The woman had no choice.  And the way one’s name lived on was in his offspring.

          Based on that law, the Sadducees came up with a hypothetical situation.  The oldest of seven brothers gets married, but dies childless.  The next brother does his duty and marries the woman, but also dies childless.  This continues until all seven and the woman are dead. 

          The Sadducees are so smart.  They’ve come up with a real doozy that will knock Jesus off his perch and will quiet their rivals, the Pharisees, who very much believed in resurrection just as Jesus did. 

          So, who does the woman belong to in the resurrection?  Jesus upends the Sadducees and their challenge by explaining that the age of resurrection is different than the present age, the age of death. Ever since Adam and Eve sinned, sin has been in the world, causing corruption and degradation of all living things, and bringing death.  This is a theological understanding of the world, not to be understood in place of the scientific explanations for the origin of the earth, the theory of evolution, or the way biology understands life cycles.  Read theologically, we see in Genesis the origin of sin and the way sin brings death.

          The present age lasts from the day Adam and Eve sinned to the end of history, the final resurrection, and the full inauguration of the eternal Kingdom of God.  The point Jesus makes in responding to the Sadducees is that the age of resurrection is fundamentally different than this age.  How?

          In this age we get married.  In Jesus’ day, marriage was for procreation and in ancient Israel it was to carry on a man’s name through his children.  Why?  In this age, the man would die.  In the age of resurrection Jesus says that man will not die.  No one does.  So marriage is irrelevant.  Procreation is not needed to carry on someone’s name. 

          One other fundamental difference: the woman will not be given in marriage by her father.  She will not be a possession of a husband required to do his bidding.  She will live freely as a child of God.  Jesus says she will be like the angels in this sense: she will not die. 

          Jesus was not saying she would become an angel. In Christ, we are sons and daughters of God, made in the image of God.  Angels are God’s servants, but are not God’s image bearers.  When we die, we do not go to heaven and become angels.  Hebrews chapter 1 is quite clear on this, and it is evident in the book of Revelation and other places.  We human beings fundamentally are different than angels.  In resurrection, we become more human – more of what God intended when creating humans in the first place. 

          That’s the hope on which we stand.  In Christ, we know that resurrection comes after death.  In resurrection, our physical bodies rise, take on flesh, are recognizable but also different.  We can be touched, but also can pass through locked doors as Jesus did after he rose in resurrection. 

The Bible does not promise that we go to Heaven when we die.  The Bible doesn’t tell us much about what happens to the soul at a person’s death.  From a few passages we can glean the after death our experience is in Jesus’ care and is peaceful and without suffering.  At funerals a grieving person will say of his lost loved one, “Well, she’s in a better place.”  I don’t know if it can be described as a “place.” All I can say with confidence is that our beloved dead are in the care of Jesus.  And that’s enough.

The Bible promises at the end, after this age is over, we rise as Jesus rose.  Our resurrected bodies cannot die, a point Jesus makes to the Sadducees.  We are free to live in joyful relationship with God and with each other.  Will Rip and Elizabeth again be husband and wife in the resurrection?  Jesus says no.  But, as Paul indicates in 1 Thessalonians, they will be together along with all of us who follow Jesus.  The reunion will be more joyful than relationships we have in these age, even our closest ones.  

Following Jesus and loving others, resurrection is the centerpiece of the hope we share.  It means freedom –oppressed people in this life will be liberated.  It means complete health as our bodies cannot be injured or killed; we are eternal. 

As we live here and now, awaiting that glorious day, the materialistic values of this age hold no sway over us.  As we live here in Christ we are already getting glimpses of resurrection joy that will be ours eternally and those glimpses of God shape who we are in the present.  We have a mission to glorify God and draw others to him that they might know the salvation he gives.  When we get hurt, and we will, or we meet others in pain and they’re all around us, we comfort each other, share with one another the love of Christ, and help each other see the promised eternity before us. 

We feel sadness.  We grieve, but not as those who have no hope. We have eternal hope for ourselves and those whom we love.  At Hillside Church, we share that hope with a dying world that badly needs it.

AMEN

With God - 2nd Sunday of Lent (John 3:1-21)

Second Sunday of Lent, March 12, 2017

            In any story, there is an antagonist.  This is the person or the force that is against the main character, the protagonist.  Whenever we watch a movie, my kids ask, “OK, who’s the bad guy?”  They need to know, who am I for, and who I am against?

            Sometimes, it is not that simple.  When dealing with history, every side casts themselves as the “good guys.”  From November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, 52 American citizens and diplomats were held hostage in Iran.  We Americans would have called the Iranians the antagonists, “the bad guys” in that story.  But at that time, Iranian families were led to believe America is the ‘Great Satan.’  In their telling of the same story, we, America, would be the “bad guys.”  It is not always simple. 

            Also, in some stories, bad guys turn out to be good guys.  In the Star Wars movies, Anakin Skywalker is the Jedi prodigy, the one who will bring balance to The Force. But then, Anakin becomes Darth Vader, one of the iconic villains of all-time.  He kills everyone, include his teacher, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  But then, we learn Darth Vader is the father of the new hero, Luke Skywalker.  And in the end, Anakin/Darth, saves Luke by killing evil Emperor Palpatine.  Bad guy or good guy?

            This same confusion over protagonist and antagonist is seen throughout the Bible and especially in Jesus’ life.  In many stories, those antagonistic to Jesus are religious leaders, the sect known as the Pharisees.  Yet, we must remember, they weren’t really the bad guys.  In the New Testament, the true antagonists are our three enemies – sin, death, and Satan, with death being the greatest of our enemies.

            What we see in John 3 is one of these supposed antagonists, the Pharisee Nicodemus, coming to Jesus.  In the conversation between the two, Nicodemus doesn’t come off looking very good.  He’s baffled by what Jesus says, and Jesus seems exasperated that a “legal expert” and a “teacher of Israel” is so confused.  However, this morning, I encourage us to notice something.  Nicodemus came to Jesus.  He calls Jesus ‘Rabbi.’  ‘We know you come from God,’ Nicodemus says.  He did not try to trap Jesus with tricky questions.  He came because he wanted to be closer to God.  Nicodemus took the initiative to seek Jesus out because he wanted to be with God and he was sure Jesus could show him the way.  And throughout John’s gospel, Nicodemus will pop back into the story as one on Jesus’ side.

            Speaking of initiative, we see God’s motives in one of the most quoted verses of scripture following the Jesus-Nicodemus conversation.  John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  Our hope for rescue from our great enemy, death, is in what God has done.  God took the initiative, sent Jesus for us, and God did it because God loves us.

            So in John chapter 3 we have two instances of initiative.  The Pharisee Nicodemus came to Jesus because he wanted to be with God.  God sent Jesus to rescue all of us from death, because God loves us and wants us with Him in eternal life.

            This is all great, but when we look back at the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, we see a bit of a problem.  Jesus encourages Nicodemus’ action of coming, but then gives him a word that neither Nicodemus nor you nor I could possibly follow.  “You must be born from above,” Jesus tells Nicodemus (3:7).  We cannot see the Kingdom of God without being born from above (3:3).  At some point toward the end of the 20^th century the phrase ‘born-again’ came to describe a movement in American Christianity.  Certain believers were called ‘born-agains.’  And other Christians thought they were kind of weird.  But, according to the words of Jesus here, the only way to see the Kingdom and be with God in the Kingdom is to be born again.

            The problem is we cannot obey the command to be born again.  If a woman has been pregnant for 5 months and she cannot wait any longer, can she just stare at her belly and firmly order the baby inside “Be born?”  Of course not!  Even if the baby could understand and wanted to obey, she would not be able.  It doesn’t work that way.

            Similarly, when Jesus says to Nicodemus and to us, “You must be born again,” well, we can’t.  We can’t control that.  Even if we think understand the concept in a way poor Nicodemus did not, we still cannot force the outcome.  We cannot cause ourselves to be born again. 

            We’re left to wonder if Jesus lured Nicodemus and us into a trap.  Being born again means being born of the Spirit.  Jesus says this in verse 6.  We cannot see the kingdom unless we are born in this way – verse 3.  But then in verse 8 he says, the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.”  In other words, to be with God in the Kingdom, we need to be born in the Spirit, and we can control that about as easily as we can control the wind. 

            Remember, in the Bible, wind, breath, and spirit, are all related concepts.  In Genesis chapter 2 it says God formed the first human from the dirt.  The man was made, but only after God breathed the breath of life into him, God’s spirit, does Genesis say he became a living being (2:7).  In John 20:22, the resurrected Jesus appears to the terrified and amazed disciples, and it says he breathes on them and they are filled with the Holy Spirit. 

            OK, so we need to be born again to be with God in the Kingdom and live eternally.  We want that because death is our last and greatest enemy.  But, we have no control over that.  To be born again, we are completely dependent on God’s action and the Holy Spirit is uncontrollable and unpredictable.  No amount of initiative on our part will get us born again.  Where does that leave us?

            Remember that verse that everyone remembers – verse 16.  God loves the world.  We want to be saved from sin and death.  God wants to save us.  This story ends in victory when we participate in cooperative initiative.  God’s part is to save us from sin and God did that in the incarnation.

            Incarnation is a very theological term, and maybe a churchy term.  Normally, I try to use other words – words that make sense outside of church.  But this one is so important, we all need to understand.  Jesus is the incarnation: God in human flesh.  God the Son, the cosmic Christ, is the second person of the trinity, the divine logos.  I just unloaded a suitcase full of theological terms, I know.  But this is what we need to see.  Jesus is fully God and fully man, and in him, in his death on the cross, sin is covered and we are saved from death.  Our sins are nailed to his cross.

            It is in Jesus that God does God’s part.  He dies for sin and because of sin.  He forgives us.  He rises from death defeating all our enemies in the process: sin, death, and Satan.  Jesus is God’s initiative.

            There is more.  The phrase I used was cooperative initiative.  God has the hard part: the abandonment; the betrayal; and, the taking on himself the death that sin brings.  But we have a part in this too.  In verse 12, 15, 16, and 18, Jesus mentions believe.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  In John’s Gospel, belief means follow.  To say we believe in Jesus is to say He is absolute Lord over our lives, master of every area of life.  We live every moment under His leadership.  Christianity and church are not just small part of our lives.  When we say we believe, we are saying our lives are not our own. We belong to Jesus. 

            Many of Nicodemus’ colleagues among the Pharisees were ready to challenge Jesus and to oppose him.  For Nicodemus to call Jesus ‘Rabbi,’ and to believe in him, would be costly.  He’d be at odds with his peers and he’d become an outcast in the circles where he had spent his entire life.  We see it in John chapter 7.  There, people are calling Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, and a group of chief priests and Pharisees call for his arrest on charges of blasphemy – a capital crime.  Nicodemus challenges this action and declares them to be in the wrong for trying to detain Jesus.  And his friends among the Pharisees turn on him immediately.

            That can happen when we do our part.  In our own lives, when we believe Jesus is Lord, the forces around us that want to be in charge feel threatened.  Then we have to choose to whom will we listen?  On whose behalf will we speak up?  Nicodemus chose Jesus even when it cost him.  The late Walter Wink of Auburn Theological Seminary wrote a chapter in a volume on the writings John.  In his explanation of belief, he captures what it means when we say, “I believe in Jesus.”  He writes, “To believe is not just to weigh, consider, think about, ponder, reflect on, or entertain the idea of following Jesus.  It is to throw one’s whole life on the side of Jesus.”[i]

            In this idea of cooperative initiative, God has to act first.  Jesus says in verse 13, “No one has ascended into Heaven except the one who has descended from Heaven.”  This point was made a moment ago.  We can’t force this.  We can’t make ourselves be born again.  But God has acted.  Jesus did come.

            Thus in verse 15 he says, “Whoever believes in Him has eternal life.”  We are dependent, yet we must also act.  Our action is fully invested, life-committed belief.  There is no half-way.  We are either all-in with Jesus or we are not with God at all.  And if we choose to not believe, God honors that choice.  Verse 19 says, “This is judgment, that the light came into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light.”  God will confront us in our sin.  God will not force us to believe.  If we meet Jesus and choose to reject him, God lets us have that option.

            Then we face a godless eternity.  Our sins lead to death.  This is true for all people.  When we die in sin instead of dying in Christ, we face our old enemy, death, without God’s help.  Instead of eternal life, before us is the prospect of eternal death.  It is not a restful sleep.  It is not the end of existence.  It is the process of dying experienced forever.

            As grim as that sounds, there is hope – the greatest of hopes.  In the Gospel of John, before we learn that the second person of the trinity is a man named Jesus, we are told, in chapter, that it is the ‘Logos.’  This Greek term is usually described as “the word.”  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  Logos is actually a deeper concept.  From Logos we get the idea of logic. 

The Baptist theologian James McClendon thinks of Logos as the idea of story.  Each one of us lives a story.  The Logos is the story of a “Divine One who loves and lives to save, who suffers and dies but overcomes; … this is the eternal character of God.”[ii] It is inherent in who God is that God wants to save us from sin and death, that God can save us from sin and death, and that God has acted to save us from sin and death.  That’s the Jesus story.

The hero is Jesus Christ – crucified and resurrected.  The enemy is death.  Death’s tool is sin and death’s ally is Satan.  The plot is our rescue and death’s defeat, both are achieved by God acting on our behalf in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

God has acted and in the Holy Spirit continues to act.

We have heard the story.  Do we continue to hear?  Are we attentive, watching, ready to respond in faith when the Spirit moves in our lives?  I believe God appeals to people throughout their lives.  The Spirit speaks in worship, the Spirit speaks through scripture, the Spirit speaks in the world, in nature, in other people.  My own belief is that we each have numerous opportunities to respond and continue living in God’s grace. 

In the spirit of cooperative initiative, will we, today, do what Nicodemus did?  God has acted.  Will we step to God, throwing our entire lives on the side of Jesus?  Each one of us is invited to step into belief and to step into God’s Love and into life with God.

AMEN

---

[i] W. Wink (2001).  “’The Son of the Man’ in the Gospel of John,” chapter 10 in Jesus in the Johannine Tradition, Robert Fortna, Tom Thatcher, editors, Westminster John Knox Press (Louisville), p.123.

[ii] J. McClendon (1994).  Systematic Theology: Doctrine, Abingdon Press (Nashville), p.289.

God, the Maker of Worlds (Psalm 16)

Sunday, February 5, 2017

            In the Fantastic Four super hero comic books, one of the enemies of the Fantastic Four is Galactus, an alien so large, he travels through the universe consuming planets.  When they made the Fantastic Four into movies, in one of the films, another alien, the Silver Surfer, came to earth to warn us of Galactus’ approach and intention of eating our planet, and all of us.  The Surfer told the Fantastic Four, “It is called Galactus, ‘Destroyer of worlds.’”

            What kind of Greek trip am on that I would read Psalm 16 and think of Marvel comics and the Fantastic Four?  It’s not the first thought I had in my reading of Psalm 16.  In fact, I’ve been reading that Psalm over and over for almost a month now.  I’ll get to that in a bit, but first, what about that?  What about Psalm 16 and Galactus and the ‘Destroyer of worlds?’

It is actually something a great Bible scholar said about the Psalms and what Israel was doing when they sang the Psalms in worship and what God did through the Psalms in the heart of Israel and in us when we worship through reading, praying, singing, and most importantly believing the Psalms.  In his brief commentary Abiding Astonishment, Walter Brueggemann wrote the Psalms “intend … to unmake, deconstruct, and unmask … worlds which seduce and endanger Israel.”[i]

In this sense then, the real God, not the Marvel Comics Galactus, is the ‘Destroyer of Worlds.’  God destroys worlds – threats, ideologies, lies, false theologies, idolatries, fears, seductions.  The Psalms reiterate again and again that God is faithful and is Almighty.  No threat will come to Israel that possesses more power than God.  Foreign invaders like Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Rome will hurt Israel, but only because God permits it.  And those injuries always come in conjunction with Israel turning away from God, turning to false God, trusting in unwise alliances, and exploiting the poor.  Unfaithfulness and exploitation always, always accompany the arrival of a foreign power in Israel’s history.

God is never off the scene.  God sometimes moves to the background to allow Israel to live with the pain that comes with her sins.  But God is always present to destroy the invader and ideological and political worlds that threaten God’s order.  God is a destroyer of worlds. 

What’s true of what God does for and in Israel is also true for the rest of human society.  First through the creation mandate to scatter over the earth, then through the priestly mandate to Israel to be a Holy nation that draws lost and sinful humanity back to God, then through Israel’s prophets who imagine a future in which all kingdoms of the earth find their fulfillment in the worship of God, and finally in the Great Commission to make all of the world followers of Jesus, the words of the Psalms ring true for the church.  God is a destroyer of worlds, the forces that would seduce, threaten, and ultimately kill the church. 

What are some of those forces?  What draws our attention away from the Gospel?  What tries to tell us who we are, when we know our identities are based on who we are in Christ? 

Some voices insist we must advocate on behalf of refugees.  Their lives are fluttering in the wind and we in the wealthy west must open our hearts and our arms and homes.  It’s matter of valuing lives.  Yet, the same voices will not permit space for the unborn when the conversation switches to crisis pregnancies or unwanted pregnancies.  Then, we can’t talk about the baby’s life, only the woman’s choice.

Some voices insist that we get very specific in damning certain sins, like homosexuality.  We must declare it an evil that threatens our way of life.  And this insistence ignores completely the way Jesus welcomed people – all people, and gave extra love to those who needed most, people rejected in society.  The voices insisting this righteous condemnation ignores the truth that the Holy Spirit is leading the church to love all people and welcome all people.

Conversely, there are voices that are just as loud that demand that all relationships be affirmed by the church.  A Christian baker or photographer sees his work as a kind of ministry.  But then these voices tell him, he has to serve a same-sex wedding.  His reading of scripture tells him that’s against God’s will.  Those voices aren’t interested in his reading of scripture.  He either has to go against what he thinks God is telling him in the Bible and bake the cake for the same-sex marriage; or he has to give up the business he loves and believes is a ministry. 

What forces draw our attention away from who God tells us who we are in Christ?

Some voices insists that our primary identity involves the country of our citizenship, instead of our belief that we are subjects in an eternal kingdom.  As citizens our top concern should be for border security.  We know our calling to go out; ‘go into the all world baptizing and making disciples.’  It’s hard to remember our call when so many voices vie for our attention and compete to tell us who we are.

I’ve done a very rough run through of just some of the issues that have dominated the headlines in the past couple of years, right up to today.  I believe we have a call from God to care for all lives – refugees, the unborn, persecuted persons in other countries, disadvantaged persons in our own community.  We are called to love these individuals and help them know Jesus as their Savior and thrive as his disciples.  We are called to love and welcome people who are confused about their own sexuality or who openly claim a sexual identity that is outside the parameters of what’s allowed in scripture.  The church must be in the mercy-giving business.  If condemnation is to come, let it come directly from God to the individual.  We’re to be mercy, love, and grace-givers.  And because theology is so complicated, I think we have to create space for people to have different beliefs on issues, but still feel at home among us.

The grand issue is calling.  We are called to the cross – to confess and then leave our sins there.  We are call to receive forgiveness and new life.  All these issues and many I have not mentioned turn into idolatries that seduce and endanger us.  God is the destroyer of the worlds that would come about if we forfeited our unity in Christ for the sake of commitment to issues instead of commitment to Him as Lord.  We’re not to be an issue-driven church.  We’re to be a Kingdom-driven church.  We love refugees and speak for the unborn, and we love and welcome straight people and gay people because love is a core Kingdom value intrinsic to who we are. 

Through the Psalms, through the church, through the work of the Holy Spirit in the world, God destroys some worlds to make room for the world God is constructing, creating.  There’s one line that has daily drawn me back to Psalm 16.  “In your presence, there is fullness of joy.” 

I look to God and say it over and I over.  I sit down to pray and begin with silence.  I try to shut out the noise of the latest rally or protest, the latest outcry or accusation that leaps off the new website.  I get my mind as quiet as I can before God, praying for the Spirit to fill the void.  After a minute or two, I then begin filling the quiet with that phrase, “In your presence, there is fullness of joy.”  I need to remember that God is present and what it means because God is present.

Reaching for that palpable sense of God’s presence, I then proceed into prayer and Bible reading and then into the day.  This yearning for God to be present and make sense of the world that seems to be devolving toward chaos is what led me to the whole idea of the ice berg.  If you haven’t been here, I’ve proposed that our mission in worship has been to seek more and more of God the way we might see more and more of the iceberg beneath the surface of the water.

This not escapism, an attempt to pretend the world’s problems don’t exist.  They do and we Christians must be a witness in the midst of the conversation.  But whether it is the refugee crisis, the abortion question, the conversation over sexual ethics, or something else, we do not come it as people of a particular stance.  We see as if we are standing in the Kingdom already.  We see it in the light of who God is.  Saying that, I do not give an answer as to what view the church holds in any specific case.  Rather, I insist that we who are in Christ view each issue through a prism of love, grace, and mercy. 

The debates over each of these issues that have produced such division turns the issues themselves into idolatries, but we will not be seduced into walking to our own destruction.  We are followers of Jesus who know God is present and thus we keep our attention on him.  We look to the Holy Spirit to know how to think, act, and speak.  And we keep looking back to the Spirit knowing the Spirit is dynamic, always on the move, leading us onto new paths. 

The Psalm itself gives markers both of God’s presence and of who we are because God is present.  In these markers we see the worlds God destroys.  We also see what God makes – a world of beautiful relationships; a world run by love.

The first marker is verse 2 – “I say to the Lord, you are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.”  A few weeks ago, I came across a quote that is going to be part of my self-understanding going forward.  My life makes no sense apart from God.  Either I do good and help people because I yield to God love in me and allow God to direct my life, or I rebel against God’s love and thus I live selfishly.  Either way, the only way to understand a Christ-follower is in terms of his or her relationship with God.  Similarly, the only good in our lives is the good God brings into our lives.  Other pleasures will turn out to be relatively harmless forgeries or life-destroying seductions.  We are aligned with God when we can truly say the good in our lives comes from him.

The second marker is verse 5 – “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup.”  Originally this may have be sung by Levites or referred to Levites.  In ancient Israel they were the one group not allotted land.  They were assigned to oversee worship, so their food and their provision was mandated in the commandments.  When society was obedient, they provided; thus, God was their portion.

The verse speaks to us to remind us that in addition to giving us all that is good in our lives, God meets our needs.  It’s basic to the Lord’s Prayer.  “Give us this day, our daily bread.”  Through the disappointments and triumphs, life’s wins and losses, God is always present.  God works in our pleasure and our pain, always making us new and preparing us for the eternal Kingdom.

That leads to the third marker of God’s world-making in Psalm 16 and it comes in verses 10-11.  “You, O God, do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit.  You show me the path of life.  In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”  God gives us good things and our lives make no sense apart from him.  God is our portion, provider of all we need.  And, God’s future for us is rescue from death; rescue to eternal life.

The word Sheol and the concept of the pit are both Old Testament descriptions of death and separation from God.  The idea I’ve been trying to present is that God rescues us by destroying divisions and temptations that separate us from Him.  God destroys those worlds without him in our lives that would arise as we follow those temptations.  Where verse 10 says God does not let His faithful one fall into the Pit, we see a Messianic prediction.  God will rescue the Messiah and we believe that rescue comes when the Messiah, Jesus Christ, is resurrected.

First Corinthians 15 says Jesus is the “last Adam,” the “life-giving Spirit.”  As he was resurrected, so will we be.  As his disciples, we have resurrection and eternal life ahead of us.  It’s all promised in this Psalm: all the good in our lives, all our needs met, and rescue from death.  “In God’s presence, there truly is fullness of joy.”

So, we unite in God.  Plenty of ideas and movements, forces of evil afoot and on the move, are jockeying to divide us and destroy us.  The Holy Spirit is drawing us together in Christ because that’s what God does.  We’ve talked about how God is big and relational.  We’ve talked about how God goes out His way for poor and downtrodden people.  We’ve talked about God loves riches and powerful people and they can see that when they see their own brokenness.  Today we see that God is a maker of worlds.  God prepare us for life in a world where love what drives relationships.  We can be active in this world, helping people, participating in causes, and raising our voices.  But whatever we do, our eyes are on God and we step out at God’s prompting, as God clears the path ahead.

AMEN

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[i] W. Brueggemann (1991), Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity, and the Making of History, Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville), p.26.

Christmas Birth (Christmas Eve Sermon, 2015)

Christmas Birth (John 1:1-3, 14)

December 24, 2015 – Christmas Eve Worship

            Luke’s telling of the story of the night Christ was born, is unremarkable.  There was a census.  Because Joseph was in the line of David, he had to go to Bethlehem.  The baby was born in a manger because the inn was full. 

            They did not have hospitals.  They did not have bathtubs.  They did not have climate controlled buildings.  Where did births usually happen?  That the savior of the world, God incarnate, was born in a manger – maybe that was business as usual in the first century.

            Of course, the air was thick with animal smells and sounds.  The birth of Jesus was draped in the pungent fragrance of manure.  Sheep and cows baahed and mooed.   Mary delivered her baby with no epidural or any other medication or medical help.  Joseph’s panicked, beating heart provided percussion.  And baby Jesus cried when his bare skin was exposed to the cold night air. 

            In the birth of Jesus, God entered the everyday messiness of human life.  Jesus was every bit a human being, coming into the world the way all humans do.  At the same time, Jesus was fully God.  This is a mystery.    Somehow, this most vulnerable of living things, a human newborn, was, in a way we cannot quite grasp, God. 

            Why would God do this?  Why leave the glories of heaven to live in the squalor of earthly life?  And I don’t think it makes any difference if God entered humanity with 21^st century creature comforts or with the hardships faced by a peasant family in 6BC.  Either case is a complete emptying of God’s divinity, God’s majesty.  Why would God do this?  Why did God do this?

            “For God so loved the world, he gave his only son that whoever believes in him would not die, but would have eternal life.”  The story of the birth of Christ is the story of God’s work to offer salvation to the world. 

Sin cuts people off from God, leads people into a society of harm and pain and loss, and ends in death.  This is what sin does.  All people sin throughout their lives.  We live on a planet of 7 billion sinners who descend from hundreds of generations of sinners.  The compounded harm makes this place a hellish distortion of the good earth God originally created.

And we can’t shake our sins.  We cannot, by a herculean moral or ethical effort, stop sinning.

In Jesus, God rescues us from our sins.  The story’s climax is Jesus on the cross taking on himself the end results of sin – suffering and death.  Resolution comes in the resurrection, the defeat of death.  Sin has been accounted for and death defeated.  In Christ, we are saved from sin, saved for relationship with God, saved to eternal life. 

Our first step is to acknowledge our sins and ask God to save us.  We do this and we receive his forgiveness.  We give our lives to Jesus and acknowledge him as our Lord.  And God’s rescue comes – to each who turn to Christ. 

‘Incarnation’ is the theological term that describes God inhabiting humanity.  Jesus is God in human flesh.  This is what is meant when the term ‘incarnation’ is used. 

The Gospel of John illustrates this.  The gospel opens this way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” 

‘The Word’ in John refers to Jesus.  The Gospel establishes that this is God. Another Bible author, the Apostle Paul, makes a similar point about Jesus in Colossians 1. 

He writes, “The Father … has enabled [us] to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. ¹³ He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. ¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶ for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:13-20).

Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is God and has always been God.  He became human in order to endure the reality of human life.  But he was a human who never sinned.  He lived the human life the way God intended.  John writes, “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14).  Jesus left Heaven’s glory and arrived in a noisy, smelly, cold world.

Because he did this, every human being is invited by God to put their faith in him through Jesus Christ.  When we do we are freed from sin and drawn into eternal life in spiritual, resurrected bodies that cannot be hurt or killed, but that live in perfect love and perfect, unending community.  As John puts it, “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).  Jesus left eternity and entered our humanity that we might be freed from the limits of corruption that come with sin and join him in eternity.

Paul also asserts this in Colossians.  “⁹ For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, ¹⁰ and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. ¹¹ In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision,^[d] by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ;¹² when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³ And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God^[e] made you^[f] alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, ¹⁴ erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ He disarmed^[g] the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it” (2:9-15).

On Christmas Eve, God sits before us and bids us to come and enter the divine, eternal story.  For some it is unbelievable.  Maybe it is too good to be true?  Maybe it is too fanciful and we are people of logic and reason and science? 

Lee Strobel was an investigative reporter for a Chicago newspaper.  He didn’t believe in fairytales like Christianity.  He was interested in facts, not stories.  Then, his wife became a Christian and this threw him for a loop.  He had to get to the bottom of the phenomenon.  So, he did an exhaustive investigation of Christianity in order to show her the fallacy of it.  He came to a conclusion he could not avoid.  It is all true.

In his book The Case for Christmas he gives this invitation to anyone stuck in doubt, resisting the invitation of God.

I had come to the point where I was ready … [to believe in] the Christ child, whose love and grace are offered freely to everyone who receives him in repentance and faith.  Even [a skeptic] like me.

So I talked with God in a heartfelt and unedited prayer, turning from my wrongdoing and receiving his forgiveness and eternal life through Jesus.

… I know some people feel a rush of emotion at such a moment.  For me, there was something equally exhilarating: a rush of reason. 

Over time, there has been so much more.  I have endeavored to follow Jesus’ teachings and open myself to his transforming power, my priorities, my values, my character, my worldview, my attitudes, and my relationships have been changing for the better (Strobel, 1998, p.91).

And then Strobel writes, what about you?

That’s where we end this evening?  Would you consider turning from sin, turning to God, and receiving Jesus as your Lord and as your Savior.  When you do this, Christmas moves from being a nice story to becoming a part of the greatest turn to happen in your life.  In Christ we turn from sin and death to forgiveness, resurrection, adoption, and eternal life.  Would you make that turn this Christmas?

We end our Christmas service by lighting candles.  We take the light from the center candle, the Christ candle.  We sing “Silent Night.”  As we sing by candle light, open your heart to God.  Let Him in. 

After the service we’ll have some refreshments.  Please join us and enjoy some Christmas cheer.  If you would like to talk further about following Jesus, I’ll be here.