"Put the Rock Down" (Mark 11:20-25)

 

watch it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRSrSUQE9S8&t=2s

Sunday, November 15, 2020

 

            What can we contribute to the public good?    Ah, so many questions.  Who do I mean by ‘we?’  I mean the church – Hillside, a local congregation, and believers nationwide and worldwide, the community of faith.  What about, public good? By that I mean the people of the community – the public.  By ‘good,’ I mean conditions that enable as many as possible to thrive. 

‘Good’ would be a reduction in poverty and elimination of food and housing insecurity.  If people aren’t worried about eating or having a roof over their heads, they can concentrate their money, energy, and time on living an enriching life.

‘Good’ refers to relationships.  Everyone is fighting right now.  People fight about wearing masks or not wearing masks.  People condemn each other over politics.  In one family, a woman was on one side of the Biden-Trump divide, opposite her cousin.  Discouraged, she overlooked a lifetime of close family bonds and declared they have nothing in common but that their mothers were sisters.  In another case, two brothers, both over 60, refuse to talk to each because one called the other a ‘socialist.’  ‘Good’ is the repair of these fractured relationships.

Do ‘we’ – the church – have any responsibility for the ‘public good,’ for feeding the hungry, helping those who struggle, and bringing together those who have turn against each other?  Does God call us to be the voice of healing and hope? 

Yes.  In 2019, our elders and deacons adopted the slogan – “At Hillside, we follow Jesus, love others, and share hope.”  We know we are living into this motto when our actions as a church lift people from despair and draw them to Jesus.  Hence the question, what can we contribute to the public good?

We have a lot to contribute!  Love, eternal hope, joy, purpose.  This morning, we focus on forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not a uniquely Christian idea.  Other faiths teach forgiveness.  People who have no faith find it in themselves to offer it. The distinct Christian gift to the world is the message of Jesus.   

We can’t present a Christianity that doesn’t include forgiveness as a core value.  Expressing divine love is what we do.  They know we are Christians by our love.  What can we offer, to contribute to the public good?  Forgiveness!

Jesus tells his disciples, “When you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anyone; so [then] your father in heaven may also forgive you” (Mk 11:25).  He says this after having ridden, on Sunday, into Jerusalem on a donkey with admirers shouting “Hosanna.  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  From Monday to Thursday of that week, he will teach in the outer court of the temple.  It’s as if he is piling on the lessons, deflecting challenges, and sharing final instructions before he will die.  Could you or I focus knowing that heartbreaking betrayals and gruesome suffering and death lie immediately ahead?

On one of the trips to the city from where they stayed in the outlying village of Bethany, Jesus sees a fig tree with no ripe fruit on it; even though it is not the season for figs, he curses the tree.  It’s a prophetic act akin to Isaiah walking across the city barefoot and Ezekiel lying on his side for 300 days.  Prophets did odd things so their listeners would remember more vividly their message.  People didn’t just remember John the Baptist’s sermons; they remembered his coarse clothing, his diet of honey-covered bugs, and river baptism.  Cursing the fig tree caught the disciples’ attention.

When they walked that way the next day, Peter marveled that the tree had withered overnight (11:20-21).  Not batting an eye, Jesus says to Peter and the disciples, “Have faith in God.  Truly I tell you if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, it will come to pass.”  Jesus did not hate fig trees and he did not want to change Jerusalem’s topography.  He wanted his disciples, us included, to understand that prayer makes a difference.  God listens.  When we pray in faith, God’s power comes. 

Note the connections.  The fig tree represented the system of sacrificial worship.  Sin separates us from God and the sacrificial worship system could not overcome the damaging affects sin had on God’s relationship with human beings.  That system did not produce righteousness or salvation as its fruit.  It was fruitless, like the condemned tree.  Jesus later on makes a similar point when he talks about tearing down the temple.  When he says he will rebuild it, he’s talking about his resurrection.  The temple no longer produces the fruit of new life.  That can only be had through faith in him. 

After teaching about mountain-moving prayer, he connects forgiving others with receiving forgiveness from God.  Of course, God’s forgiveness is not conditional.  God doesn’t forgive us if we forgive each other.  Jesus hung on the cross abandoned by his followers and berated by his despisers.  No one repented as he suffered.  His death, for everyone, was God’s definitive declaration of love for humanity.

The reason Jesus ties forgiving each other to the forgiveness that comes from God and to the replacement of temple-worship with the worship of Jesus is the posture of receiving.  Every time you or I forgive each other, it’s a sign we have received God’s forgiveness.  We don’t just talk about it.  We stand as new creations, forgiven being.  God’s grace takes affect when we receive it.  Standing as forgiven ones, we cannot withhold forgiveness. We are not able. 

The corollary holds as well.  When we withhold forgiveness, it’s a sign we have not received the forgiveness Jesus achieved on the cross and freely offers to all.  It’s there, but we can’t believe it or we are too locked in our shame.  For some reason, we cannot gain release from our own sins.  We can’t allow ourselves to receive the forgiveness God lovingly gives.  So, we can’t forgive others.  We are bound, chained, by our sin and the sins of others.

  Jesus is the truth that sets us free.  We share Him with the hurting world around us.  Why does polarization win?  Why let partisan division claim the day?  Why does animosity, revenge, and discord get the last word?  We tell of God’s forgiveness.  We model it, and in doing so, we step into freedom. 

Those who accept our invitation and turn to Jesus also take the first step to freedom.  Freedom spreads through the church, and out to the world.  It is not easy.

Immaculee Ilibagiza survived the Rwandan genocide of the 1990’s.[i]  She and several other Tutsi women crammed into the bathroom of a man who hid them from Hutu neighbors determined to wipe out all Tutsis.  The conditions were unimaginable, yet, she and the others survived many months in the impossibly cramped quarters.  Immaculees’ parents and most of her siblings were massacred. 

Survival was only part of the miracle.  The bigger part came in Immaculee’s determination to find it in herself to forgive the Hutus, including her family’s killers.  In order for her to reclaim her own humanity, she had to see the humanity in these who had performed such evil.  By God’s grace, she claimed freedom by forgiving those who took everything from her. 

Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa touches on this in his work The Book of Forgiving, written with his daughter Mpho.  South Africa, for over a century, existed in a system of Apartheid as evil as slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration here in the United States.  Blacks in South Africa, the majority, had no rights, and lived in extreme poverty, as servants to the whites who held the money, guns, and power.

When revolution came in the 1990’s, it could have been deadly for the white minority.  But the black citizenry, following the example and lead of people like Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, committed to forgiving and moving forward together.

Tutu proposed an exercise for the reader of his book.  First, select a stone and remember where you found it.  Then, one morning, carry it, the entire morning, never setting it down for any reason.  Do this for six hours.  That stone is the pain you are holding, the wrongs done to you that still have you in their insidious grip.  Oh, to put that stone down.  Oh, to be free from that pain, the loss, and injustice. 

Let it go.  Forgive.  There will be time for justice if that’s called for.  An abused wife should not just forgive the abuser, stay with him to endure more beatings.  The robbery victim should hope to get back what was taken.  The criminal must be prosecuted.  That’s all another conversation; an important one, but another one.

In terms of forgiveness, release the offender as Jesus releases you.  Set the rock down.  Open your arms in embrace.  This is emotional work, psychological work, and soul work.  But, think of that rock – the way it weighs you down and impedes your progress in life.  Look to the cross where Jesus bleeds out the death brought about by your sins.  Receive his forgiveness and extend it to someone.

Think of someone who’s deeply hurt and angered you through this election season.  You think you’re taking the Christian position.  He thinks the same thing.  You’re frustrated by his politics and he by yours.  Set that rock down. 

This is one of our offerings to the world, church.  It’s the way of grace and it’s sorely needed.   Let love win.  Walk in freedom.  Forgive and invite your neighbor to walk in freedom with you.

AMEN

---

[i] I. Iligabiza (2006), Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.

"I will not Come in Wrath" (Hosea 11:1-2, 8-9)

HillSong Church, Chapel Hill, NC

Sunday, August 12, 2018

            We’ve heard much about God’s anger as we have listened to the prophet Hosea.  Now, we come to chapter 11.  In the New Revised Standard Version, at the end of verse 9, we hear God say, “I will not come in wrath.”  God’s fury and God’s hurt have been spoken, but God won’t stop at these broken emotions. God has more to say. “My heart recoils; … my compassion grows. … I will not execute my fierce anger; … I will not come in wrath.”  Punishment?  Yes, God disciplines, but in the end, gives mercy. 

            Hold onto that thought and do not let it go.  However you see yourself, hold onto this.  God loves you.  God has mercy, forgiveness, new life.  God has this for you, for the people around you, for the people who have been hurt by you, and those who have hurt you.  It’s true for me, for all sitting here, and for all people who come to Him in faith.  God’s mercy and love are beyond our capacity to sin; God’s forgiveness exceeds the sins we’ve committed. 

            Hold onto that as I look at the Bible and recent history this morning. 

           

            Recent history: September 11, 2001 is, for the United States, the defining moment of this young century.  Passenger airlines were hijacked by terrorists and flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Thousands going about their daily routines in what they thought was safety died violently.  We Americans thought ourselves untouchable by enemy fire, suddenly felt very vulnerable.  We didn’t like the feeling and did not know what to do with it.

            In Dallas, Texas, one American, a white man, thought he knew what to do.  Born in 1969, Mark Stroman was almost 32 when the planes piloted by extremist terrorists hit the twin towers and killed so many people.  By that point in his life, he had a history of criminal activity, broken relationships, drug use (including crystal meth) and prison time.  He was a well-known name in the white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles in Texas.  His daughter said that once she identified who her father was to Aryan Brotherhood racists she met in a bar, they began singing his praises and treating her well.[i]

            He was an uneducated racist with violent tendencies who had never been out of Texas in his life.  He loved America in his own perverted way, and after the terrorist attacks, he decided to join the war on terror by killing Arab Muslims who happened to live in America.  So he went on a shooting spree.  He thought that as a good American, it was his duty to murder Arab Muslims.  He didn’t actually kill any Arabs, but that didn’t matter.  In his mind, as long as he was fighting brown-skinned people, he was showing his love for America. 

On September 15^th, 2001, four days after the attacks he killed not an Arab, but a man of Pakistani descent, convenience store owner Waqar Hasan.  On October 4^th, he murdered Vasudev Patel.  Mr. Patel was neither Muslim nor Arab.  He was a Hindu man from India.  Again, it made no difference to the one-man American killing machine, Mark Stroman.

            In between those homicides, senseless killings of people who loved America as much as he did, on September 21, 2011, Mark Stroman shot a Muslim man working at another convenience store, Bengali Rais Bhuiyan.  Mr. Bhuiyan didn’t die.  As the pellets fired out of the barrel, he turned his head.  His face was filled with the burning metal and he collapsed to the floor, but he was alive.  After many surgeries, Rais Bhuiyan recovered.  Loss of sight in his right eye was the only permanent damage. 

            Texas law enforcement officers quickly apprehended Mr. Stroman.  The trial was never in doubt.  Mr. Bhuiyan was able to testify, and soon Mark Stroman was on death row.  Prisoners go through a lot of appeals and end up spending years awaiting execution.  That was Stroman’s experience.

            For his part, Mr. Bhuiyan faced multiple surgeries, mounting medical bills, and heartbreak.  He had a fiancé back in Bangladesh, but she ended their relationship.  Depression threatened to set in.  However, this Bengali demonstrated remarkable resilience.  He had already climbed the ranks in the Bangladeshi air force.  He won a diversity lottery which got him his visa to come to America.  Alone and recovering, he tenaciously pursued all the financial aid he could get so that his medical debt became manageable. 

            Then he got work at Olive Garden.  He started as a waiter and worked his way up, slowly increasing his earnings and decreasing his debt.  His heartbreak healed as did his wounds, and he managed to get a technology degree and became a highly paid IT professional.  He also became an American citizen.  He was living the American dream so many immigrants hope can be theirs. 

            However, for Rais Bhuiyan, the changes weren’t just in his body and financial status and national citizenship.  A devout Muslim, he turned inward, and tried to understand who God wanted him to become.  The spiritual breakthrough came when he did something he had, for years, promised himself he would do.  He took his mother on a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.   The trip to Mecca, where Islam started is something all Muslims aspire to do in their lifetimes.   Those who can financially afford the trip take it.  While he was there, praying, reflecting on life and faith, he felt God was leading him to forgive Mark Stroman. 

            I don’t know what your impression of Islam is.  I know some people – some in our church with whom I have spoken – hear “Islam” and think “terrorist.”  I am telling you, the only person who did any killing in this true story was a white man from Texas who claimed to be a Christian.  A brown-skinned Bengali man, Rais Bhuiyan, looked to the heart of his Muslim faith and heard God tell him to forgive. 

            Make no mistake!  I am a follow of Jesus Christ.  I believe Him to be God in human flesh and the one and only Savior of humanity.  In order to have a right relationship with God, one has to give his heart to Jesus, receive forgiveness in Jesus’ name, and worship him as Lord.

I look into Islam and I see a faith that admires Jesus as a prophet, but does not worship him as Lord.  Anyone who fails to worship Jesus as Lord, in my understanding, is lost.  Jesus Christ is Lord.  We who follow and worship Him cannot accept any confession that comes short of this. 

However, I know God can and does work outside my religious boundaries.  Does God work through Islam to speak to the hearts of Muslims?  All I can do is listen to the stories of real people.  This man was led to do the very thing Jesus commanded.  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  Rais Bhuiyan did all of this and he did it to the fullest extent.

While he was healing and growing spiritually, the man who tried to kill him, Mark Stroman, sat in prison with death ahead.  But, as it always does, the execution day was a long time in coming, years in fact.  When Mr. Bhuiyan returned from Mecca, he took up a cause.  He was going to stop this execution. Citing his legal right to mediation with the criminal who harmed him, he worked with lawyers and anti-death penalty advocates to try to keep Mark Stroman alive.   

Mr. Bhuiyan’s quest became an international campaign.  Through a prison pen pal program, antideath penalty activists in Europe came into contact with Mark Stroman while he was in prison.  They became his most ardent supporters.  Stroman’s own children, in their own way loved him, but also, for the most part, did not keep in contact with him as the years on death row went by.  He pined for letters, but they never came.  The correspondence came from strangers who encouraged him, doing it all in the name of opposing the death penalty.  And one the leading the charge to save him, was the victim who survived his attack.

Alas, all the appeals and attempts to find legal loopholes were no match for the Texas legal system’s undaunted quest for finality.  On July 20, 2011, almost 10 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was executed by lethal injection for the murders he committed in the weeks after 9/11/2001.

Do you remember, from the beginning, what I asked you to hold onto and not let go?  God’s mercy is bigger than our sin.  In the story of Hosea, God is frustrated because the people He has selected as His chosen ones, the people of Israel, have turned away from God to worship the idols representing false gods: the gods of Assyria and Egypt and other ancient peoples.  Along with this idolatry came abuse of power by many of Israel’s kings, and the corruption of justice, especially for the poor.  The poor were exploited as the rich perceived themselves to be untouchable.  And worst of all, the leading perpetrators of the corruption were priests who were supposed to lead God’s people in worship.

Hosea has vividly depicted God’s anger at the conditions in Israel, 8^th century BC.  However, now in chapter 11, we see anger cannot be God’s last word.  Yes, the people sinned and yes the nation did go into exile.  But God went with His people.  Their descendants, the Samaritans, were among the first to meet God’s grace in the person of Jesus.  There was suffering in the story, but it leads to salvation and new life in Jesus Christ. 

In the aftermath of 9/11, Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel were murdered.  Rais Bhuiyan was injured.  Mark Stroman ended being executed; so much loss in this story.  But out of it, we see grace.  Rais Bhuiyan fought for Stroman’s life.  After the execution, he gave financial support to Stroman’s children in his attempt to end the cycle of hate, violence, and revenge.  He overwhelmed these Texans with his love and he did it for the sake of changing the world, combatting hatred, and glorifying God.

Now, what about my story, or yours?  God sees our sins and sees the hurt we cause to ourselves and those around us.  God pours out love asking, “How can I make you like Admah?  How can I treat you like Zeboiim?”  Deuteronomy 29:23 reports that these cities, Admah and Zeboiim, were destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah.  God’s promise in Hosea 11 is that anger and destruction is not the end for people who turn to Him in faith.  Those cities were consumed, but God’s followers will not be.  “I will not come in wrath,” God says.  God comes in grace.  God is love.

The mercy Rais Bhuiyan showed Mark Stroman is a picture of the love God has for us.  God wants the best for us.  God’s mercy never runs out.  God’s love overflows.  You know your own life story.  I know my own sins and how much they hurt me and the people I love.  You know your own sins. 

What do we do?

We come before the cross of Christ.  We fall to our knees and pray for forgiveness.  We receive it.  And we stand as healed people, washed and cleansed, new creations marked by the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Come and lay your heart out before God.  Come and receive forgiveness. 

AMEN

---

[i] Giridharadas, Anand (2014), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, W.W. Norton & Company (New York), p. 263.

Once Far off ... Brought Near by the Blood of Christ (Eph. 2:13)

Sunday, October 5, 2017

            Two Satursdays ago, I took a shovel to a weed patch.  Hiding under that invasive overgrowth is good dirt, ripe for a garden.  But the green blanket of nuisance is covering it, so I took to digging.  Forty-five minutes later, good dirt smiled through and said to me, “Fill me with your seeds.  Flowers.  Vegetables.  Greens.  Let beautiful and delicious things grow here.”  I dragged three cans full of weeds to the curb for pick-up, went in the house, cleaned up, and began folding the mountain of clean laundry that needed to be put away.

            The weeding wasn’t done.  I was just done weeding.  I picked it back up yesterday. I got more done but still wasn’t finished.  Again, I went inside to fold Laundry with college football on in the background.  Fold the laundry.  Put it away.  Rinse.  Repeat. It’s a lot of work to maintain a home.  It’s good work.  A blessing.  But still, a lot of work.

            “We are no longer strangers and aliens,” Ephesians 2:19.  We are no longer cut off from God or the people of God.  The verse continues, “We are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”  I mentioned three weeks ago that we would talk about HillSong as “the household of God.”  Our aim is to maintain this household so that all who come feel welcomed and feel at home here. 

            However, after setting that goal, I did a message about grace.  And then last week’s message was about how the Christian view of reality is more hopeful than any other.  In essence, that too is a message about grace.  Why so much emphasis on grace when the end in mind is to build up the household of God? I think people are scared of God; scared of what it will mean for them to be too close to God. 

            The question for reflection in your bulletin is “what, specifically, makes it hard for you to draw near to God?”  It’s unhelpful to be generic with this question. 

What make it hard to draw near to God? I ask.  Sin, you say.

That neuters the question.  You say, well sin is what cuts people off from God, so the answer must be sin.  It’s logical.

Yes, I respond, but which sin? 

Drinking to excess? 

Abusing power? 

Living in paralyzed fear when God calls us to bold faith? 

Living in affluence surrounded by need when God calls us to extravagant generosity? 

By saying “sin is what prevents anyone from coming close to God,” we avoid naming our individual, specific sins that prevent us from drawing near to God.  Church goers love condemning sin in general and especially love damning sins that don’t tempt them.  We don’t like it so much when talk of sin turns to our sins and thus to confession.  We have to confess things we have done, sins we have committed that hurt people and serve to separate us from a relationship of closeness and trust with God. 

Verse 13 says, “You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”  I have seen people sit in the sanctuary as far back as possible during worship.  If we moved the back wall 15 further back, they’d be grateful.  Because up front is where the communion table is; up front is where the baptismal pool sits.  The big cross high up on the wall is up front.  That’s too close to God.  That’s terrifying. 

Why is it hard to draw near to God?  Before we can begin doing our part to maintain the household God has constructed in Christ at work in the hearts of people, before we can live as God has invited us to live, we have accept God’s invitation to come close.    That means we have to be honest with ourselves and about ourselves.  We’re sinners.

Twelve step programs get this right.  Hi, my name is Rob, and I am an alcoholic, or, I am an addict.  Stark honesty is essential.  What would church be like if every week, we began by going person by person, beginning our worship in raw confession.  Hi my name is Rob and I am sinner.  I am saved by grace, but though the Holy Spirit of God lives in me, still this week, I have sinned against God and against people.  How different would church be if instead of worrying about our “Sunday best” we live in confessional honesty?  We cannot draw near to God unless we do that.  If we do that God draws us into a bear hug of forgiveness and love.  Verse 13 says, “We’re brought near by the blood of Christ.”  That blood was shed for the forgiveness of sins.  Sins are covered and forgiveness received as we confess, as we come to God with our full selves, as we are.

What comes between us and drawing close to God?  Fear of standing before the Holy One exposed in our sin. 

Another question that must be faced as we prepare to join our hearts with one another and live in the house God built as the household of God is this.  What new thing is God doing?

            Hear the language in Ephesians 2.  “At one time you … were called the uncircumcision.”  “Remember that at that time you were without Christ … having no hope and without God in the world.”  The view from Ephesians is that to be without God is to be without hope.  Those addressed were without hope.

            However, that changed.  “Remember at that time” yields to the language of verse 13.  “But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”  Something happened.  Something changed.

            This change occurs at two levels in Ephesians.  First, the individual is cut off from God by sin, but through Jesus’ work on the cross, the death sin brings is shouldered by Jesus.  So the individual is saved from death, saved for life.  Salvation! 

We saw this in Greg’s life.  He came to know himself as a new person, forgiven by God.  His baptism gives witness.  His baptism is public, a statement made before the entire church.  He is lowered under the water, dead in sin and buried.  But we don’t leave him under the water.  He is raised just as Jesus rose from death in resurrection.  Greg is raised to new life.  It’s the story of everyone who comes to God in confession and repentance.  Each person’s journey is unique, but we are united in our baptism.  What is god doing?  God is saving individuals.

            What else is God doing?  Reconciliation!  We are united in baptism.  Whatever may have previously divided groups of people is removed.  Race.  Ethnicity.  Social class.  Place of birth.  Country of citizenship.  It doesn’t matter what divides us because that division has been removed. 

            What is God doing? 

·         Saving individuals from death. 

·         Eliminating the divisions that come between groups of people. 

·         Building a house – a gathering of people into a family, the household of God. 

In Ephesians, the specific division is between Jews who follow Jesus and Gentiles who follow Jesus.  Ephesians existed as theological writing in the late first century when the church was a couple of generations old.  This is Jewish-Gentile tension had several decades to evolve into an ongoing institutional sickness that weakened the entire church.  One of the main reasons Ephesians was important as a letter is the profound statement of 2:15-16.  It says God [created] “in himself one new humanity in place of two, [reconciling] both groups to God in one body through the cross.”  This action put to death hostility. 

            Why is it hard to draw near to God?  Because of the specific sins you and I commit.

            What is God doing?  Saving people from sin and death, bring together groups who were hostile to each other.

            A third question: what hostility among us is bring broken down?

            Possibilities include the tension between white people who live privileged in society and non-white people who have to contend in society with privileged persons; also, the tension between people who deny there is such a thing as white privilege and those who insist it is an evil that plagues our culture; also, the tension between conservatives and liberals.  These and many tensions would divide us, but they cannot when we live in Christ because, he, “Puts to death the hostility” (v.16).

            Practically speaking, what does this mean?  It means your stand is not that important and cannot be what defines your relationships. 

Where do I stand on gun control? 

Where do I stand on birth control? 

Where do I stand on immigration? 

Where do I stand on tax reform? 

Where do I stand on big government v. small government?

Where do I stand on race relations?

            If, as I went through these questions, you thought of where you stand on each issue, you’re missing the point.  The first thing and the last thing is am standing in Christ?  Am I one forgiven, full of the spirit, ready to love, ready to forgiven, and ready to welcome my brother or sister, even the one who is opposite of me on all these issues?  Am I so grounded in Christ, I won’t run to Facebook to list all my stances in confrontational way that puts people with opposite views down because I know doing so will bring pain to my brother or sister?  I might post my ideas, but not in a way that demonizes people with other ideas.

            Facebook can be an arena of dialogue.  And it is OK to have opinions and hold them passionately.  But for the sake of who we are in Christ and for the sake of being a household that welcomes in people, all kinds of people, will I make it a spiritual discipline to show restraint in my language, in my use of social media, and in my expression of my passionately held views?  I will make sure that whatever I say is said in language colored by love and fragranced by Christ. 

            If you know that I love you no matter what your views are or who you voted for and if I know you love me no matter what my views are or who I voted for, then we can talk, laugh, shout, and cry together in our agreement and our disagreement because we are united in Christ.  If I trust you to be sensitive and not use language that hurts me and to apologize when you have hurt me, and if you trust me to be sensitive and not use language that hurts you and to apologize when I have hurt you, then we talk.  About anything.  The hostility has been broken down.  We are ready to work together to maintain the household of God.

            Jesus accomplishes a lot on the cross, more than we often acknowledge.  We know about the individual’s experience of grace.  Salvation is a work of the cross.  But so too is the work of reconciliation.  Groups welcoming each other – groups previously hostile to each other – is as important to God as the experience of individuals.  Salvation and reconciliation are both important.

            And so, we pray. 

In prayer, think about the group in society today that is the object of your hostility.  You don’t like liberals.  You don’t like people who post of Facebook.  You don’t like supporters of our current president.  You don’t like supporters of our previous president.  Think about the object of your hostility.

            Now confess sins hostility has led you to commit. 

Maybe you will need to go to someone and confess how you have thought hurtful thoughts about them or done hurtful things to them. 

If someone comes to you confessing, give them the grace you want God to give you.  Let this be a time where our hearts are wide open before God.  As church family, may we together pray, asking God to rain down grace, forgiveness, and healing.  We also want God to do some wall-busting.  O God destroy the hostilities that arise and divide us. 

In upcoming weeks, we’ll go deeper in Ephesians as we examine how we live as the household of God. 

This morning we pray for an in-breaking of the Holy Spirit.  May the Lord draw us together – to one another.  May the Lord provoke us to full-bodies, raw, honest confession.  And in that confession, may we accept God’s invitation to come close to Him.

AMEN

Freedom from Stone Laws

            I have enjoyed Sabbatical for the past months.  In 7 days, I return to my work as a church pastor.  I will sit with people over cups of coffee or lunch at Mexican restaurants.  In the same conversation, I will listen as they share their fears that the Tar Heels aren’t going to have a good season and their fears that their young adult children aren’t going to live good lives.  I will talk with our administrative assistant and our associate pastors about the daily details of life in the church.  I will get that email that the surgery has been scheduled, and then I will meet the family at the hospital at 6AM, and together we will pray.  We will pray that all will go well and she will be fine.  And as I leave the hospital, I will pray that my presence there helped with the anxiety, even just a little.

            And sermons.  I will be back to the work of studying scripture and studying our congregation and studying our culture and world, and all that study will merge on the interstate highway of ideas.  After merging, one focused idea will exit the off ramp that leads to the next Sunday’s message.  Yes, I am ready and very excited about returning to the flowing motion of sermon writing and worship planning.

            To all of this, I am ready to return.  Who am I, the man returning to this life?  I’ve written in previous posts that I want to learn to be gentle.  I want to be known as a person who gives graces.  I pray that I can grow into gentleness.  I pray that I can live grace-filled and be extravagantly generous in giving grace.

            What obstacles overshadow my efforts?  There are many, but one stands out from my time of personal Bible reading.  I’ve been making my way slowly through 2 Corinthians.  In chapter 3, Paul contrasts the old covenant[i] and the new.  Now, as an aside, I caution Christians not to be dismissive of the Law of Moses (see Exodus-Deuteronomy, books 2 through of the OT).  We must not see the coming of Jesus as rendering that scripture as obsolete.  Jesus fulfills that Old Testament word of God.  Jesus does not negate it.  Gospel is found in the Law, but we see the law through the light of Jesus.

            When Paul writes about the old covenant, the discerning reader has to be very attentive.  In 2 Corinthians 3 he says, “The Old Covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life.  The old way, with its laws etched in stone, led to death” (see verses 6 & 7).  Ends in death.  In order for sins to be atoned, an animal sacrifice was required.  Something had to die.  In the new covenant, something comes after death – resurrection: first Jesus, then us.  The new covenant leads to eternal life.

            Etched in stone.  That can be taken literally.  Moses ascended the mountain and came down with laws that were inflexible – etched in stone tablets.  But living out that fixed law requires a dynamic relationship with God because questions arise.  What if someone is in a situation where he has to “bear false witness” (tell a lie) to prevent a murder?  Is he breaking the law if in doing it he prevents another of the commands from being broken?

            The new covenant it written on our hearts (Romans 2:29).  Our very inclinations, motivations, and impulses are guided by the Spirit – the Spirit of the same God who gave the law that was originally etched in stone.  There is continuity from the tablets Moses held to the way of God the Holy Spirit who is active in our daily lives.  However, we must live on the far side of history, the post-resurrection side, where we live responsively.  Our lives are a dance in which the Holy Spirit is the leader and we the follower, the responsive dance partner. 

            What’s obstructed my path to gentleness and grace are the laws etched in stone: laws I have etched in the rigidity of my expectations.  In some ways, this has been my own personal bugaboo for my entire life.  I expect things to go a certain way (in relationships, in ministry, in sports).  Then life turns our differently than I expected.  The girl breaks up with me, my kids do the opposite of what I say, the church doesn’t like my new idea, my team loses.  And I am disappointed, angered, and defeated.  My poor children bear the brunt of this when I get angry at them for not being who I expect them to be instead of loving who they are.  If I can just learn to be gentle with them and give them (and my wife too) grace, lots and lots of grace, I will change as a person.  I will become a “graced” person.  Or more accurately, I will begin living in the graced identity Christ has already given.

            One of my favorite Christian role models, Tony Dungy, writes, “Your real influence [as a Christian] comes from the foundation of your character.”[ii]  I want God’s grace to be the foundation of my character.  That Rob Tennant, man.  That guy is full of grace.  When people talk about me, that’s what I hope they will say.  This is the “greater glory” under the “new way,” which makes us “right with God” (Apostle Paul – 2 Corinthians 3:8, 9).  

            I am not there yet.  I know from the ways I have harangued my 15-year-old the last few days, I am not even close.  But because God is so grace-filled, God’s grace for me is never exhausted.  I fail and then, with tail tucked between my legs, come repentantly to God.  My sin is before me and I have to sit with it a while, but the Holy Spirit showers grace and forgiveness down on me, and cleansed, I try again. 

            My life rhythm is about to change.  I’ll return to the world of church work.  I come back with goals and hopes and dreams, but the big story, for me, is the prayer that I will follow the Spirit and walk alongside the Law (old covenant) down the path that leads to life in Christ (new covenant).  The further down that path I walk, the more people will see newness in me.  My life will emit the fragrance of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). 

            To walk that path, I have to do what I have struggled to do my entire life.  I will need to turn my expectations over to God.  I need to be freed from the stone laws I have set over myself, the unyielding determination that things will turn out the way I think they should.  I need freedom from the yoke with which I burden myself.  One of the songs we sing at church has this line in it.  “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.”  That’s 2 Corinthians 3:17.  In the next verse says, “The Lord – who is the Spirit – makes us more and more like Him as we are changed into His glorious image.”

            As I get ready for the world of church work, I yearn for freedom the stone laws, freedom to live in the dynamic of the Spirit. 

---

[i] I use “old covenant,” “Law of Moses,” and Old Testament interchangeably in this post because each phrase represents the content that we find in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy, and I read these texts from a Christian/New Testament perspective. Thus, I also use “new covenant,” “Christian,” and New Testament interchangeably. 

[ii] T. Dungy and Nathan Whittaker (2011).  The Uncommon Life Daily Challenge, Tyndale-Momentum (Carol Stream, IL), September 8 entry.  This book uses calendar dates, not page numbers.

Hearts Ripped Open

            “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and mourning; rend your hearts and not your garments.  Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing” (Joel 2:12-13).

            Isn’t it hard to open one’s heart before God?  Every day, it seems, I say something or do something that makes me look weak.  Or, my words or actions in some way hurt someone else.  If I open my heart before God fully, I have to be completely open about my shortcomings.  It doesn’t feel good.  Who wants to look at his own flaws?  Not me.

            The prophet doesn’t shy away from this.  Joel urges us to turn to God “with fasting, with weeping and mourning.”  If anything, Joel deepens the shame and despairing sense that sin produces.  We are to grieve the condition in which our failures leave us.  A traditional form of grief in ancient Israel was the ripping of garments and this was significant.  Many people only had one or two garments of clothing. Sin was so grievous they did something costly. They rent their garment.

            But no, says, God, that’s not enough.  Rip open the heart!  In turning from sin to God, we rip ourselves wide open.  It sounds unbearable.  What good can come of such raw, honest confession?  Only this: New Life!

            Besides saying what we are to do in confession, Joel describes the character of God.  Joel tells us who God is.  The Lord is the one who says to us “return to me with all your heart.”  The Lord is gracious and merciful … and relents from punishing.”  What the Lord has waiting for us when we come with hearts ripped open, tears shed, and body weakened is forgiveness and new life.  God takes all our shame and makes us new. 

            This Sunday is Palm Sunday and next week is holy week.  What if you and I rip our hearts open and come before God.  We come in raw, exposed confession as we worship, as we sing, as we enter the church building, as we take communion, and as we bow our heads to pray.  What if we open the closet in the interior of our hearts and empty it before God?  What will God do with all our junk?

            Look to the words of the prophet Joel, who tells us God is “abounding in steadfast love.”  God will take the messes of our lives, will wash us, and will replace our baggage and burdens with blessings.  Look to the cross where your sins are nailed to Jesus.  And look to the horizon.  That light that’s breaking through the black shadows of shame is the eternal life that springs in his resurrection.  You and I are beckoned by our Lord to walk in that light.

            Our first step is the step of confession-repentance; full repentance and complete confession.  It isn’t easy.  But it gets easier with each step.  And before we know it we are walking quicker, running, flying, soaring on the wind of the Spirit of God.  I pray this Easter you will know the glorious freedom of forgiveness.

First Sunday of Lent - Forgiveness (Psalm 32)

            This Psalm begins, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven.”  Doesn’t that assume that the transgressor feels guilt and shame because of his misdeeds?  If he didn’t, he would not need the forgiveness to feel happy.  Maybe the sin itself gives him a thrill, a guilty pleasure, if you will. 

            Have you had that experience with sin?  You know a particular word is offensive, an abhorrent word, but you giggle when you hear it or say it.  Gossip; does it really even count sin?  And systemic sins – sinful systems; who ever heard of such a thing?  Am guilty for benefitting in a sinful system?  Seriously, who feels guilt over sin whether it’s individual or systemic?  You know the phrase.  I’m only human.  Why even make a big deal about disobeying God? 

            But this singer, in Psalm 32:3, says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.”  Kept silence; he, or she, the singer, kept it inside.  Whatever the sin was, he buried it deep in his heart.   This Psalm is attributed to David and his most public of sins was to have an adulterous affair, try to cover it up, and then have the wronged husband, Uriah, murdered in a way that would protect him from guilt.  David committed both individual and systemic-power related sins in the Bathsheba episode.  You can read about it in 2 Samuel 11-12.  Psalm 32 is one of David’s confession songs. 

            However, the Psalms are portable.  What David sang, you or me or anyone could sing in reference to our own sins.  We could sing, if we feel guilty.   David had help feeling guilty.  He says in Psalm 32:4, “Day and night your hand, [O Lord], was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”  The way God’s hand fell on heavy David was through the confrontation provoked by the prophet Nathan. 

            God’s heavy hand sets upon us until we have to face our sin, the damage it does, and the guilt it throws on us.  Two of history’s most acclaimed authors have captured this guilt sin has wrought.

            We’ve already mentioned that a parable from the prophet Nathan provoked King David’s guilt.  In 1843 Edgar Allen Poe published “the Tell Tale Heart.” In the poem, the narrator is driven by his own madness to the kill the old man.  He thinks the murder and brilliant cover-up has relieved his gnawing insanity, but it only drives it all the more. 

            A couple of police officers come to the door because a neighbor heard a midnight cry.  The narrator has successfully hidden the body and the police officers are about to leave the house when his screaming madness awakens with a vengeance. 

Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men --but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

            Day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us in our sin.

           

            Twenty years or so Poe published his account of agonizing guilt in ‘The Telltale Heart,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s presents a similar theme in his novel Crime and Punishment where the gifted but starving writer and student Raskolnikov bludgeons the old woman Alena Ivanova.  She is stingy with her money and has no pity on this able, but poor young man.  The police suspect someone else in the crime, and that man commits suicide.  Raskolnikov is in the clear.  But, we are never in the clear. 

            Leaving Lieutenant Elia Petrovitch, Raskolnikov knows he is free, but when he steps from the police station, there she is waiting, his beloved Sonia.  She knows what he has done.

Her countenance expressed the utmost despair.  At the sight, Raskolnikov smiled, but such a smile!  A moment afterwards he had gone back to the police-office.  Elia Petrovitch was in the act of ransacking some papers.  “Ah!  There you are again!  Have you forgotten something?  But what is the matter with you?”  With pale lips and fixed gaze, Raskolnikov slowly advanced toward Elia Petrovitch.  [He] allowed himself to sink into a chair that was offered, but could not take his eyes off of Elia Petrovitch.  For a moment, both men looked at one another in silence.  “It was I – “said Raskolnikov.  “It was I who killed, with a hatchet, the old moneylender and her sister, Elizabeth, and robbery was my motive.”  Elia Petrovitch called for assistance.  People rushed in from various directions (p.421).

In the Psalm, David sings, day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us in our sin.  We are not murders like Raskolnikov or Poe’s narrator, or David for that matter, but sin rests just as heavy on us.  Our sense of guilt is enough to crush us and when it does not, God’s Holy Spirit convicts our soul.  When our conscience is dull and we seem content in spite of our words and deeds that hurt others, not bothered that we are agents of pain and deception, then God steps in and pricks the conscience and convicts the soul.  As long as we deny our need for forgiveness, we waste away, groaning all day.

However, there is hope – the best of hopes.  That’s the point of Psalm 32 and the simple message of this day.  There is a way out of this fog of sin, a fog so thick it is only cleared after God the son is murdered by us all when he’s nailed to the cross.  There’s a light that shows the path from crippling guilt and shame to unfettered freedom, a freedom that enables us to soar to the heavens. 

Again, the Psalm: “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.  Happy are those whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt, in whose spirit there is no deceit” (32:1-2).  David knew that happiness because he confessed, received forgiveness, and rose to stand as a new man.  He says as much in the Psalm.  “I acknowledged my sin to you … and you forgave” (32:5).  It is a basic, central Christian belief.  When we confess our sins by name, repent of those sins by turning away from them, and turn to Jesus, we are forgiven and we are made new.

In this Psalm, God is not an angry judge waiting to crush us in our guilt.  It is our guilt itself that crushes us.  In the Psalm, God’s heavy hand is meant to lead us to confession that we might be forgiven and rescued from the weight of our sins.  Verse 6 says, “Let all who are faithful offer prayer to you.”  And in the next verse, the singer sings to God, “You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance” (32:7).

Confession is freeing.  We fear it because walking through our guilt is painful, but God walks with us.  And the church must walk with people so they don’t have to face their own shame alone.  We cannot be a judging community that compounds the pain and shame of the guilty by rejecting them.  We have to imitate our Lord by forgiving as God forgives. We have to be a community of grace, a community in which grace is extended to all.

In this way, and only in this way, does confession bring freedom.  And, O, what freedom it is!  Dostoevsky captures it well at the end of Crime and Punishment.  Sonia goes with Raskolnikov to Siberia.  She will wait for him to serve out his 7-year prison sentence.  She has been his conscience, by her purity forcing him to confess, and staying with him when he did.  She did not preach at him, but she lived her faith.  She gave him a New Testament, but never forced him to read it.

On the last page, he sits in his sell, holding the closed Bible, contemplating all that has happened: his crime, his confession, Sonia’s love for him.  He notes that as hard as things have been for her, “nothing could take her joy!”  And thinks to himself, “Her faith, her feelings, may not mine become like them” (p.434).  The books ends, “Now a new history begins: a story of the gradual renewing of a man, of his slow, progressive regeneration, and change from one world to another – an introduction to the previously unknown realities of life.”  Those are the realities of the happiness and freedom we have when we turn to God in Christ and receive forgiveness. 

A final note from the Psalm reiterates the necessity of grace from God to us and from us to one another.  Verse 10 says, “Many are the torments of the wicked.”  And we might expect the next stanza to say, “But great are the delights of the righteous.”  However, it does not say that.  It says, “Steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.” 

The contrast is not between the wicked and the obedient, the sinful and the righteous.  David, the singer of this Psalm, knows we all sin.  The contrast is between those who are miserable because they are stuck in sin and don’t see the way and just suffer the pain of it all, and those who, in the midst of the messes of their own making, turn to God and trusted God.  God can be trusted with our junk, with our messes.  “Steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.”

Enter that freedom today.  Fully confess your sin today and look to the cross and know that you are forgiven.  One of the ways God makes things right in the world is the gift of freedom.  God frees us from our own sins by forgiving and making us clean and new.  Confess today, and receive the new life God offers.

When we do that, then the final verse, Psalm 32:11 is ours.

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart” (32:11). 

AMEN