The Distinguishing Mark of His Presence

Text: Isaiah 63:7-9; Ephesians 1:1-14

 You may remember the golden calf incident from the story of the Exodus.  Briefly, Moses went up the mountain to meet the LORD God and receive the Ten Commandments.  He was up there forty days which to the people was a little too long considering to lightening display going on up there.  They thought he had died which posed a problem; if Moses was gone then they had no connection to Yahweh.  Yahweh was the name God revealed to Moses.  It’s a form of the verb to be and it means “I am who I am and I will be who I will be”.  To solve this problem they had Aaron make a couple of idols, two golden calves, from the gold the Egyptians had given them as they left and, as the Bible says, “They rose up to play.”  In the wake of that Yahweh told Moses to take the people and go to the land he was giving them.  Yet, Yahweh was no longer going to go with them fearing he would only wind up destroying them for they were a stubborn people. 

Moses had a way of changing Yahweh’s mind about things and so he made his case: “Moses said to the LORD, "You have been telling me, 'Lead these people,' but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, 'I know you by name and you have found favour with me.'  ¹³ If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favour with you. Remember that this nation is your people."  ¹⁴ The LORD replied, "My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."  ¹⁵ Then Moses said to him, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.  ¹⁶ How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?"  ¹⁷ And the LORD said to Moses, "I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name" (Ex. 33:12-17).” 

That last question Moses asks is very important…VERY IMPORTANT!  “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”  What distinguishes the Trinity's people from all other peoples is his saving presence with his people.  The ancient Israelites were the one people whom the One true God was visibly acting to save from the most powerful nation at the time before the eyes of all the other nations.  Not only had the Trinity acted visibly to save the Israelites but he also kept his presence visibly known by being with them in a whirlwind cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. 

After the Exodus and the the Trinity's giving them the Land of Canaan, the LORD God continued to act to save them, but his visibility moved from clouds and pillars of fire to the Tabernacle/Temple and Israel's keeping of the Covenant by keeping the Law.  Thus, God's visible presence in this world became integrally connected to the way the Israelites lived together as a community.  When they kept the Covenant the Lord God visibly blessed them.  When they did not, the LORD God let their enemies overcome them as if he had abandoned them.

In our passage from Isaiah Yahweh’s presence with his people during the Exodus is what Isaiah was referring to.  Isaiah remembers how the Trinity had identified with the Israelites in the distress of their slavery, indeed felt their suffering.  Then he became personally involved in delivering them from slavery and made his presence evident among them by the visible signs of the whirlwind and pillar of fire.  His presence with them and his presence alone made them distinct among all peoples.  Nothing about the Israelites in themselves made them distinct.  It was only the presence of their God Yahweh who had entered into their suffering and delivered them.

Moving on from there, the Exodus story foreshadows what Yahweh has done for all peoples in, through and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit sent by the Father because of his/their love for us.  The Trinity has personally and visibly entered into our human situation as the man Jesus of Nazareth and lived and suffered more than most of us have or will.  Indeed, Jesus’ last twelve hours before dying and his actual death were worse than anything any of us want to imagine.  God the Father raised Jesus from the dead as we will be and Jesus ascended into heaven to return one day.  Until then God, the Holy Spirit, remains personally present with and in us pointing us to Christ Jesus, bonding us to Christ Jesus to share in his relationship with God the Father, and He begins the work of deliverance or salvation in us that Jesus authored in his life with us.  AND, all this happens predominantly within the context of Christian community.

Jesus personally experienced what we experience in our doubts, our fears, our grief, our regrets, our joys, our laughter.  He knew in the form of a constant temptation to which he did not succumb what we know by instinct and do succumb, turning against the will of God the Father.  He knows personally the inescapability of humanity’s futile enslavement to be self-serving in very evil ways.  But he remained faithful to the Father, indeed faithful for us.  He is humanity's one and only once and for all faithful response to God.  By his incarnation, faithfulness unto death, and his resurrection God the Son as Jesus the man has freed us from our futile enslavement to be self-serving in very evil ways.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us now to make that freedom a reality.  He personally addresses us each so that we know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God as Jesus the Son knows it and makes us able to faithfully respond to the Trinity by keeping the one commandment that Jesus gave his followers, that we love one another as he has loved us each.  As he laid down his life for us each, so we lay down our lives for one another in mutual, self-giving love.  The personal knowledge of God’s love and faithfulness, of his presence in our lives, in his suffering with us through life, in the very least…the very least…has given us the ability to choose to set aside pridefulness and self-centeredness and our otherwise butt-headed opinionations in order to love and to be faithful to one another and in this we love and are faithful to the Triune God of Grace whom Moses knew as Yahweh, the LORD God.

The Triune God’s presence with us is what makes us distinct from all other forms of human community.  We Christians claim that God is with us.  Every year at Christmas time we rather sanctimoniously throw around that ancient Hebrew name Immanuel which means God-with-us.  The skeptic asks, “Where is the whirlwind?  Where is the pillar of fire?”  Our only answer can be that “Our whirlwind, our pillar of fire, the physical evidence of God’s presence with us is the way we love one another.”  The Christian faith is not a matter of private belief where we make some personal self-saving decision with respect to Jesus and postmortem individual security.  God the Son did not become human, live faithfully, and die just so I can have the possibility of being forgiven by God set before me to simply believe that I might go to Heaven when I die instead of Hell.  God the Son became human, lived faithfully, died, and was raised firstly  according to Ephesians 1:1-14 for the purpose of uniting humanity to himself in a truly organic way to be the Father's children, sharing with the Son in his relationship to the Father in the Holy Spirit.  The incarnation of the Son was not the Trinity's catering to our sin and death.  The incarnation of the Son was God's plan all along.  Yet, because of our sin and death Jesus the incarnate Son consequentially suffered and died and in so doing destroyed sin and death in the Trinity's good creation once and for all.  God the Son as Jesus the man has taken sin-death-evil into the Trinity's very self where it can no longer exist.  Consequentially, we who should never have known separation from the Trinity are now in Christ reconciled to the Trinity.  Jesus the incarnate Son has lifted our sin upon himself and carried it away to destruction which is what the Bible means by what we inadequately translate with the word "forgiveness".

Secondly, by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit the community which Jesus gathers to himself is humanity in whom the image of the Trinity is being restored.  When the Trinity is present people begin to love one another unconditionally just as the Trinity has loved us as and through Jesus and his life giving ministry unto death and through to the other side where there is new creation.  God enters into our lives, especially into our suffering, in such away as to leave us knowing that he is steadfastly loving and faithful.  His presence takes on hands and feet as we struggle together in response to his love and faithfulness to die to self, struggle together to be obedient to scripture, struggle together to support one another, struggle together to build one another up in Christ, struggle together to speak the truth in love, and struggle together to be people who forgive.  In all of this the reality of the mystery of the Trinity's saving presence with and in us becomes authentically visible for the world to see.  The Triune God of Grace is making us, his people, to be a different kind of people, people who reflect his image of persons in loving communion within the new humanity born in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the new humanity of the new creation that is soon to come.  Let us be that people.  Amen.

Insignificantly Significant

Text: Micah 5:2-5; Hebrews 10:5-10
It is amazing how people, things, and events we consider to be insignificant can suddenly become significant as history plays out.  Consider the banana.  Bananas were an insignificant fruit until 1870 when they came to North America.  By 1900 they were an indispensable commodity and thus begins the illustrious career of what is known as the United Fruit Company or Chiquita as we know it today.  The UFC, owned by a number of powerful people about this time became a very large landholder in Latin America, particularly in Guatemala.  In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz became the second freely elected president in Guatemala and unfortunately for him he was a socialist.  When he took office 70% of the land was owned by 2.2 percent of the population and 90% of the people, mostly native peoples, had to live on 10% of the land.  A very large portion of that 70% of land was unused.  So, Arbenz decided he would redistribute the unused lands.  The government would buy the land and then give small plots to families to farm.  Well, the UFC didn’t like the price he offered.
Here’s where the UFC/Chiquita story gets interesting.  Remember the powerful people I spoke of earlier?  Well, two of them were Americans and both sons of a Presbyterian minister.  They were John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles; both were stockholders in the UFC.  Allen had at one time been its president and John Foster had been one of its lawyers.  Allen is significant because he became the first and longest serving director of the CIA in 1951.  John Foster was significant because he was Secretary of State under Eisenhower; so significant that Dulles International Airport is named after him.  Eisenhower’s brother-in-law was also a major player on the board of the UFC which brings Eisenhower into the picture.  When UFC interests were threatened in Guatemala, the Dulles brothers aided by President Eisenhower began a media campaign in the U.S. claiming that Guatemala had gone Communist and this would have a domino effect leading Communism right into the backdoor of the U.S.  In reality, Guatemala had only four communist members in its 51 member Senate.  So, in 1954 and with large public support the CIA orchestrated a coup d’etat in Guatemala called “Operation PBSUCCESS”  which resulted in the overthrow of a freely elected democratic government which they replaced with a military dictator who looked out for the interests of the large landholders by murdering the poor.  Guatemala has never recovered.  This pattern of propagandist behavior – incite public fear that our nation and its way of life is being threatened so that a military option seems reasonable to the public yet behind the scenes it is all for the protection of the financial interests of individuals holding high offices in the government - was carried out upon nearly every country in Central and South America and in Vietnam.  Pinochet in Chile was a product of the Nixon administration.  It seems the insignificant banana has played a significant part in world history.
Let’s talk about the prophet Micah for things weren’t too different in Judah in Micah’s day than they were in Guatemala in the 1950’s.  Micah was from an insignificant little rural town in Judah, Moreseth, about 40 klicks SW of Jerusalem.  He lived in the early decades of the 700’s when the Assyrians were destroying the Northern kingdom of Israel and making their way to Judah and Jerusalem.  The Lord gave insignificant Micah from insignificant Moreseth a preposterous message to give to the significant wealthy power-holders and priests in very significant Jerusalem.  It was that God was going to destroy significant Jerusalem and all you significants along with it because of your idolatry and your abuse of the poor.
        You see, a handful of wealthy powerful people in Jerusalem owned most of the outlying lands and they squeezed every penny they could out of it by means of the very lives of the rural people.  To justify themselves, the Jerusalemites thought they could buy the LORD off with lavish sacrifices, even child sacrifices.  So, Micah came to tell them that doing the will of the LORD, not sacrifices was the Lord’s desire.  Micah’s most quoted verse is 6:8, “He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
         In the midst of his prophesying Micah mentions another insignificant city, Bethlehem, and foretells the birth of the one we know to be the most significant person to have ever lived, Jesus the Christ.  Micah says “his origin is from of old, from ancient days.”  That’s Old Testament prophet code for his being somehow the LORD himself.  Significant Jerusalem and the significant Jerusalemites would not have the honour of bringing forth the Messiah.  Rather, Bethlehem, a rural town of no significance just ten klicks out of Jerusalem, is where the one who would bring salvation would be born.
         In our passage from Hebrews Paul further speaks of this child’s significance quoting Psalm 40 he writes that this Jesus came to do the will of God and to do it once and for all.  The significance of his life, insignificant by the world’s standards, was that he was the only person to do the will of God the Father and he indeed has done it for all.  He truly sought justice, truly loved kindness, and indeed walked humbly with our God.  Paul says that by him and because of his faith and faithfulness we are all sanctified.  Sanctified means to be made holy which is to be cleaned up and set apart for God’s purposes.
         Yet, there is more to Jesus than just his being the one truly faithful person.  Paul again says in Hebrews 1:1-5, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.  The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.  So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.  For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father’? Or again, ‘I will be his Father, and he will be my Son’?”  This Jesus is the Son of God, God the Son.  He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of who the Father is.  This means that if we really want to know God and his ways we must get to know this man Jesus and devote ourselves to his ways.  That then raises the question of how do we do this?
         First, Jesus reveals himself to us and through him the love of the Father by the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  The Holy Spirit is the unseen radiance and warmth that rests upon us this very moment making us to feel that this time together must be shared week after week after week or as often as possible.  The Holy Spirit is that something we can’t explain but just is that makes us to know personally the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Father and the obedience of the Son.
Second, as Jesus came to do the will of the Father so by the gift of the Holy Spirit he enables us and sends us forth to do the Father’s will.  He does not call us to a religion of sacrifices where we say “God, if you do this then I will do this” or “I do what I think the LORD requires of me which is my duty so he has to do what I want.”  Rather, after having done in us what Jesus the Son has done for us, he sends us forth walking humbly able to seek and to do justice and able to love and to do kindness simply by the very fact of having been in his Presence.
     The Holy Spirit equips us for participation in Jesus ongoing ministry by the simple means of our being in his Presence experiencing the steadfast love and faithfulness which the Father has for the Son and the adoration for and desire to do the will of the Father.  It is that simple.  Simply being in the Presence of the Trinity transforms us to be more and more in person and character as Jesus the Son is so that we may live faithfully in the way he lived his earthly life.  So, the more we devote ourselves to being aware of the reality that we are in the Trinity's Presence the more we find that we are in the midst of doing his will.  So also, personal devotions and gathering together as the Body of Christ are indispensable to living the Christian life which Micah described as walking humbly with the LORD God all the while loving kindness and seeking justice.
      We are integral parts of what the Trinity is doing, of his Kingdom coming on Earth.  Being faithful is not our simply doing what we think we ought to be doing or what we think churches ought to be doing and hoping that the Trinity will somehow be a part of it.  Faithfulness flows from faith and faith is the word the Bible gives to the relational reality of our being in the Presence of the Trinity.  Time spent in the Presence of the Triune God of grace transforms us by grace to be able to walk the walk of faith and faithfulness.  As the Trinity is a relational Communion of Persons it follows that our nurturing together our relationship with the Trinity is utterly fundamental to anything we do as Christians.  The transformation the Holy Spirit works in us by grace is a new heart that loves kindness and seeks justice.  Again, he does in us what Jesus the Son has done for us.
     Therefore, we as individual Christians and as a community of faith are able and should do our best to make sure that everyone we come in contact with knows that the LORD God is kind and yes this does indeed mean that we Christians must learn to be kind to each other.  I have known children who knew their parents truly loved them but that love was greatly overshadowed by a lack of encouragement, love, and support from their siblings.  Brothers and sisters do pick on and hurt one another for some very fickle reasons and it does little to reinforce a sense of being loved in the family even though the parents love is not not doubted.  So, it is often the case in the Church.  People may know that God loves them, but if Christians don’t reinforce that sense of being loved with encouragement, compassion, and real support then what good is it to know the Trinity loves us.  Church is the place where people know they will be listened to, encouraged, respected, and cherished.  That’s called kindness.
     Justice or fairness is another component of being faithful that flows from being in the transforming presence of the Trinity.  In our consumeristic-materialistic culture wealth and how we get it is Public Enemy #1 when it comes to justice.  The Trinity did not been put us on this earth to be financially successful, but rather to be faithful.  The command to faithfulness demands we be financially just.  In our wold something as insignificant as a banana can lead to the oppression and death of thousands all for profit.  As Christians in a Capitalist society we must be mindful of how we use wealth to generate wealth.  We should check our stock portfolios to which our retirement security is "faithfully" entrusted and see if our investments are just.  Do we have investments in companies that do as the UFC/Chiquita has done in Latin America or as Nestle has done in Africa or in the war, tobacco, pharmaceutical, mass food, or oil industries which are notorious for making wealth at the expense of all things vulnerable?  Is it just for us to be making money at the cost of the oppression and indeed starvation of the poor?  There are just ventures to invest in such as community self-help initiatives or micro banking in poorer countries.  As disciples of Jesus the Christ our mandate is to invest in justice not in profit.  The LORD has given you a new heart that desires justice and loves kindness.  Please don’t let it go to waste.  As participants in the life of the Trinity we each are significantly insignificant.  As a banana can be used for destruction, so the Trinity uses each of us to bring in his Reign.  Amen.

The Joy of Being Restored

Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20

The Trinity's gracious presence in our lives can indeed be problematic for us.   Problematic in that when God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bring us to partake of their loving communion of Persons relating to one another in the utmost of mutual, self-giving, and indeed sacrificial love to the extent that they are One; when the Trinity brings us to participate in their Self, the Trinity will also inevitably strip us of our false gods.  It sounds strange in this day and age to say it, but we are idolatrous.  Human beings are inherently spiritual beings which means we are created to be in a relationship with the Trinity whose image we bear in the midst of our relationships.  Sin is that we turn away from that particular relationship and yet still having the need for it, we turn to something else.  Therefore, the problem with sin is not in the first place morality.  It is idolatry.  Our problem in the area of morality is secondary and indeed the result of our idolatry. 

So, what are false gods?  Well, unlike our ancient predecessors we don't keep little figurines in shrines around our houses which we overtly worship unless of course we haven't yet parted with our Barbie's and G.I. Joe's.  Rather and generally speaking, we all have false securities to which we are devoted which we serve in the belief that we need them to live the lives we think we should be living.  Moreover, as we are made in the divine image we all have things in our lives from which we falsely derive our self-image.  These false securities by which we image ourselves are people, things, thought patterns, feelings, beliefs and on and on to which we devote our hearts, our minds, our souls, our strength in a false sort of worship only in the end to find that though they make us feel a sense of identity whether good or bad and secure in our world, they ultimately prove to be self-destructive and destructive to our relationships.

Therefore, to heal us and to restore his own image in us the Trinity manipulates, yes manipulates, our lives to bring us to freedom from our false gods and to a point where we truly experience in the Holy Spirit our heavenly Father’s love for us as his own dear children, the same love he has for Jesus the  incarnate Son.  The Trinity brings us to our home in his very self so that we learn to trust his care and will for us in all matters.  Yet, to get us to that point the Trinity will lead us through a refining process in which we will unfortunately suffer, suffer because we have enthroned our false loves and securities intimately at the core of who we are and it is not easy to let go of them.  In fact, I would say that it is impossible for us of our own effort apart from the Trinity's help to rid ourselves f our false gods.  There's an old adage, "You have to go through Hell before you get to Heaven."  So it is that the Triune God of grace brings us to a point where we know the only way we are going to be happy is to rest in his love alone.  As someone once said, “If God is all you’ve got, you’ve got more than enough.”

On the tail-end of and very often in the midst of the Trinity removing our false gods from us, we begin to sense his presence with us and that the Trinity his very self is giving us the strength we need to simply love and trust him through it all.  Quite often, there comes the moment when the desire to serve that false god is literally taken away.  Then sets in the joy of being restored because God truly does begin to restore life to us where previously there was anxiety, sadness, lost-ness, brokenness, and just plain clueless-ness and even butt-headedness.  This restoration is an amazing work of the Trinity’s grace that he simply chooses to do for us his children.  We cannot earn it.  In this new freedom there is happiness and praise for God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Happiness in my opinion is being lost in wonder, love, and praise in the presence of our heavenly Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit and to be that way rationally. 

2 Corinthians 5:17-21 reads, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has past away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”

The Trinity's delivering us from our false gods is not something simply for our own personal and individual benefit.  He restores us that we may be integral participants in community that more clearly reflects his image, a community through which he blesses humanity.  The Holy Spirit living in us makes us part of Christ’s body.  We live in him.  We move in him.  Our whole being is in him.  In him is where the Trinity is making us to reflect the image of himself, a loving fellowship of persons who are being-in-communion.

The Trinity's reconciling us to himself means more than just Jesus has made it so that the Father won’t get us because of sin.  It means we are united to The Trinity.  We are in Christ by the Holy Spirit’s presence in us.  Ephesians 2:17 says this means we have access in one Spirit to the Father.  2 Peter 1:4 says this means we are becoming participants in the divine nature, the divine Communion.  God is pouring his very self upon us that we may participate in his life and become more and more like him.  In and through the Holy Spirit our new being in Christ is that we share in the relationship of God the Father and God the Son.  The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and all who are in the Son, in him, share in that love.  To be reconciled to God is to share with Christ in the Father’s love through our union with the Son in the Holy Spirit.

Christian faith is ultimately about God’s love for his children and our partaking thereof.  Throw religion out the door.  God in his staggering love for us, his children, has been for our whole lives trying to get us to feel, understand, trust, and live in his love for us.  For too many centuries the church has preached a false, coercive, powerless gospel that said “Get yourself right with God so things will go well for you eternally and maybe in this life.  Confess Christ and live faithfully so you can go to Heaven when you die.”  All I can say is that when I’ve tried to get myself right with God all I’ve wound up doing is feeling like a miserable failure and I don't think that I am alone in that experience. 

There’s another way, look back on your entire life and dare to presume that God the Father loves you because that's how Jesus the incarnate Son has revealed him to be.  Presume the Father's love.  Presume that he has been doing wonderful little yet great things to prove it to you and you will, I guarantee, you will begin to feel and understand how much your heavenly Father loves you.  This is where faith is born.

Myself, I remember my first heartfelt prayer, a prayer other than the “bless Mommy and Daddy” prayers we teach our children.  I was five and had had my first experience of playing with the older kids up the street.  For several days in a row I came home in tears because I was the little kid, the identified target for big kid torment.  I remember staring out the living room window and praying, “God, what’s wrong with me that other kids won’t play with me.”  I never got an answer so I guess there wasn’t anything wrong with me but within a couple of weeks a little boy Ronnie showed up at my front door.  He had just moved in across the street and we were best friends until well after high school.  I can look back over my life and find it full of so many things like that.  No matter how bad the circumstances of my life got, the Trinity has always been working through that bad to make me better for you.  Things like that are the core of faith, by them the Trinity brings us to experience his love and know that we can trust him through the worst of things and indeed through the times when it is he who is refining us.

I like this passage from Zephaniah for it reflects well how the Trinity works in our lives to restore us in his love to have faith.  It’s filled with how the Trinity gets personally involved in our lives.  God himself speaks and uses the pronoun “I” throughout.  God says, “I will remove disaster and shame from you.”  “I will deal with those who wrong you.”  “I will save you and make people praise you.”  “I will bring you home.”  “I will restore your fortunes right before your very eyes.” Verse 17 reads, “The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.”  The Trinity is in our midst, in your very lives, and in our fellowship   He always has been and always will be. 

A final thought from Zephaniah, a - if not the - predominant way of thinking about God in our culture is of this wise old man sitting on a throne, running the world, and expecting us to dutifully serve him and follow his rules and he is ready to pour out his wrath if we don't.  God as Trinity, as the loving communion of the persons of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit is typically not the image the word God brings up for us.   Zephaniah adds another monkey wrench for us to add to having to wrap our minds around the Trinity.  Instead of our false image of God being a rather unpassioned often grumpy rule-maker/judge stoically uninvolved in our lives because it is up to us to follow the rules he made because that's the stipulation of the contract (not covenant) he has with us and whose honour we have perpetually offended, instead of that false image Zephaniah says the Trinity is shouting for joy over us.  He’s having a party over us.  Just like in the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke when the wayward son came home, the father was there watching the horizon and when sees his son far off he runs to him, embraces him, and throws a party.  God is shouting for joy over us his children because he loves us so much.

It is the Trinity's love for us that renews us and leads us to repentance.  At the heart of our prayer life is a loving relationship with God, a union with him in our hearts.  Oh yeah, you say, what’s it feel like.  It feels like rest, peace, joy, gratitude, trust, respect, and a desire to want to please God.  Go and take some time to sit and look over your life asking God to show you how he’s been working in your life in time you will begin to know it. God will reveal it to you maybe not at first because we have to get past that “Prove it, God” mentality to sincerely wanting to know.  In time you will come to know God’s love for you.  It will become your chief work in life to keep your heart turning back to this loving relationship with God and it will deepen.  You will find that God will make it so that you can even feel love for this unseen Three-in-One in your life.  That relationship is reconciliation and it renews you like nothing else.  It heals your hurts.  It truly does.

Backing up a bit, if we are in Christ through the Holy Spirit and in him have access to the Father, access so complete that we participate in his divine nature, what should our response be to this loving Father who shouts for joy over us.  Well, join in the shout.  Live in the feast.  “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.”  Worship.  Adore your Father with the Son and feast with them.  That’s the secret to happiness.  Life can be very miserable.  Worries and hurts can and do weigh us done.  Seek your rest in his love.  Let him lift your heart to join in his shout for joy.  Life truly is too short not to feel the joy.  Live in his love.  Let the Trinity work to restore you and it will blow you away...along with your false gods.  Amen.

Refining for Righteousness

Text: Malachi 3:1-4

At Advent we talk about the coming of Christ Jesus in all its forms: his first coming, his coming into our lives now, and his return.  Today I would like to devout a few minutes to how he comes into and is present in our lives now. I think the Malachi passage describes this quite well.  He comes by means of a messenger, the proclamation of the Gospel, and then begins to work in our lives like a refiner and purifier of silver to create righteousness; or faith and faithfulness in us.  But, before getting into Malachi I think it important to point out two approaches different forms of Christianity have taken in saying how Christ Jesus comes into our lives now that are a bit off the mark.  The first is that he can only come in by our invitation and the second is that of spiritually awakening to a Christ-nature already present in everyone.

The first approach is the one that says that we must invite Jesus into our hearts and lives before he will come in and save us.  There are two fallacious assumptions in this approach.  First, it assumes that the Trinity is not a gracious and saving presence in our lives until we wise up and get rational enough to invite Jesus in.  Yet, the whole Creation exists in a contingent relationship with the Trinity so that the simple fact that we are alive entails that we are in a relationship with the Trinity whether we want to be or not.  Every human being who has ever lived is in a relationship with the Triune God of grace who has revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus Christ and gives himself to us as the Holy Spirit.  Moreover, the Trinity is at work in the lives of all people to make himself known and to bring forth faith in us whether we want him to be or not.  Saying that we can invite Jesus into our lives is like saying my mother wasn’t my mother until I invited her to be a part of my life. 

Secondly, and albeit for the honourable reason of protecting a person’s right to choose, this approach very subtly destroys the Trinity’s lordship over his Creation by placing us, the creature, in God’s place by making our capacity to make a decision to ultimately become the means by which we are saved.  The fact of the matter is that the Triune God of grace has out of love for us acted to save us in, through, and as Jesus Christ even and indeed apart from any desire for it on our part.  Humanity and all this creation will be saved whether we want to be or not.  It’s like this and remember all metaphors fall apart in the end, if you saw a child drowning in a lake would you rush in to save her or wait for her suddenly to find it deep within herself to put her panicked thinking aside and invite you into the water to save her?  Humanity is like that child except that even though we can’t swim we insist on going further and further out into the water.  What is The Trinity to do?  Let his beloved children die because we are too dull to figure out the implications of our being unable to swim in water that is ever-deepening so that we can invite him in to save us?  Does he wait for us to turn around and walk ourselves back to safety so he can say “well done, my child.”?  No, the Father sends the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit to become human just as we are - unable to swim - and he rushes into the ever-deepening water into the midst of our peril and dies saving us, pummelled to death by us in our panicked state of drowning.  But, it does not end there.  We have to throw in the Resurrection here and the Trinity's reworking of the entire situation so that death is no more, the water is no longer perilous, and the futility or our inability swim all the while believing we can is utterly vanquished by our being given the ability to swim (as Paul says in Ephesians "for the praise of God's glory").

[I realize that I appear to be verging into Universalism, that all are saved.  I am not a Universalist.  Theologically speaking, we have to respect the Trinity's freedom to be as he told Moses, "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy."  Biblically speaking, the fact that there will be some who are damned is not so easily side-stepped.  Moreover, when broaching this topic we must humbly remember that it was with respect to people who believed themselves to be his faithful disciples that Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness" (Mat. 7:21-23).  The point of the Doctrine of Election is that there are those who were drowning but are now standing on the shore as the living proof that in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father the Trinity is saving his Creation from sin and death.  These are whom Paul calls "the righteousness of God".  "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).]

A second approach to talking about how Jesus comes into our lives now is to talk about a Christ-nature or something nebulous to that effect that is present in everyone to which we must awaken.  Spirituality is a key word in this camp.  They say our Christ-nature can be discovered through practicing spiritual disciples that help us to experience ourselves in the moment as Christ.  The chief method is more or less borrowed for Buddhism.  It is to empty one’s mind and focus on feeling good feelings like compassion and then to discipline one's conduct to live as selflessly and compassionately as Jesus did.  The desired result is that we become more and more Christ-like as we awaken more and more to our inner Christ-nature.  The trouble with this approach is that we eclipse the Trinity behind our own disciplining of mind and conduct to be like Christ.  It is like mistaking the moon for the sun in the midst of a solar eclipse and, indeed, darkness for light.  This approach ultimately does not need God.  We do it all ourselves.

Well, to speak kindly of these two approaches, first, it is good to invite Christ into our hearts, but not as the means to get oneself saved.  Rather, we should do so continually as a way of being open to God’s work in our lives.  "Come, Lord" (Maranatha) was one of the earliest prayers and proclamations of the church.  Second, it is good to meditate, but meditate on Bible verses not on good feelings. It is also good to desire to want to be Christ-like and to desire and strive to be as selfless and compassionate as him.  But, it is important to note that everything Jesus did was not for the sake of being selfless and compassionate.  He did what he did because he came to do the Father’s will.  He was striving to be faithful to the Father and to what the Father had sent him to do.  He was selfless and compassionate by nature and for us to share in anyway in his nature is a gift from him through the Holy Spirit as Peter wrote: "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire" (2 Pet. 2:3-4).

Let’s now take a look at Malachi.  Malachi says that a messenger comes first to clear the way for the Lord is coming.  Then he says the Lord comes into his temple.  Finally, in his temple he takes his seat as a refiner and purifier of silver and works so that we may present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.

Jesus’ coming into our lives now is preceded by a messenger.  When Malachi gave this prophecy he was speaking of John the Baptist preaching repentance out in the wilderness preparing the way for Jesus’ first coming.  Today the proclamation of the gospel takes the place of the messenger.  Whenever the Good News is proclaimed that Jesus is Lord and the Kingdom of God is at hand seeds of grace are planted in people and God begins to work savingly in lives.  Whenever we proclaim that our heavenly Father because of his love has sent God the Son in, through, and as Jesus Christ so that in his life, death, and resurrection he has saved us, humanity, truly the whole Creation from sin and death and that his resurrected life is at work now in us, humanity, and truly the whole of his Creation by the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit, whenever this is proclaimed the seed of grace is planted in all who hear regardless of whether they want it, believe it, or understand it or even think it is ridiculous.  A seed is planted that will make every effort to grow into faith. 

Next Malachi says that the Lord comes into his temple.  When he first made this prophecy he was referring to the temple in Jerusalem.  But since Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the temple has become you and me, the Church.  Second Corinthians 6:16-18 reads, “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, "I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people…I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."  The seed that God plants in us is the Holy Spirit who comes into us simply by having heard the proclamation of the Gospel.  He comes to do his work of creating faith in God the Father and to make us into the image of the Son, Christ Jesus.  We can say “no” to this work and indeed we will.  Because of sin in us, "no" is the only thing we are truly capable of saying.  Jesus has said “yes” for us.  It is by his faith and faithfulness that we have been saved, a faith and faithfulness that we participate in through union with him in the Holy Spirit.  We’re drowning, remember.  We are unable to say "yes" apart from the work of he Holy Spirit upon us.

            Next, Malachi says that when the Lord comes into the temple, into us, he takes his seat, which in the Jerusalem temple was the mercy seat, the lid of the Ark of the Covenant.  But for us his seat is his claiming Lordship over our lives, a lordship which the art of refining silver is an apt metaphor.  When refining silver, one must hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest so as to burn away all the impurities.  Moreover, the refiner sit in front of the fire holding and watching the silver the whole time it is being refined.  The fire must stay hot enough and the silver must not be left even a moment too long in the flames or it can be ruined.  The silversmith knows when the silver is ready when he can see his image in it.

This metaphor speaks loudly of the Lord’s faithfulness and love for us and his work in our lives to restore his image in us both as individuals and as a fellowship of believers which has been marred by sin and death.  The Trinity is at work in every one of us to create faith and faithfulness in us that reflects his image back to him.  He works with us each in accordance with who we are.  For some of us, the flames have been hotter than for others.  He will burn away our impurities so that we won’t suffer with them anymore.  He works with us each according to our unique questions, doubts, and fears.  The main thing we must do is acknowledge our "impurities" and that we are powerless over them.  The rest is the work of the Trinity.  Our loving Father by the work of the Son through the Spirit will bring us to know him and to have faith and be faithful, to be righteous so that we offer our lives to him for the praise of his glory. 

The Triune God of grace has made it so that we can have a life-giving and personal relationship with him and with each other in him because Jesus Christ has said “yes” for us in the faithful life that he lived.  A seed has been planted in by the Spirit-filled proclamation of the Gospel in our hearing.  Help it grow and enjoy this refining relationship with God that you have been freely given.  Our individual lives and our life together in Christ are what God has chosen to be his own righteousness.  Live for the praise of his glory.  Amen.

Was it Coincidence…or Something Else?

Text: Mark 6:30-44

The wall of champions back in the Fellowship Hall has more than a few faces on it.  Actually, other ministers see the wall and note that there have been a lot of ministers here; twenty-six since 1843 with the average length of stay being about six and a half years.  One of the faces back there and I have something in common, the Rev. Mr. David Coutts the very first minister.  Is it coincidence…something else that the Census of 1863 has him living with the Smith family on what is now the farm of John and Helen Mason where I lived for my first year here?  Whether he actually lived there or just happened to be there for the counting is something we’ll never know.  Still, it’s just a little of hinky. 

Was it coincidence…or something else?  For me, of course my delusional mind was/is wondering if God was trying to tell me something.  Since the Reverend Mr. Coutts and I lived on the same farm and he was the first minister here, would I be the last?  And to add a little more hinky to the pot, as I wrote this paragraph someone from the Presbyterian Record called to ask about the picture they received of our annual picnic this year of us sitting on the steps of John and Helen Mason’s barn which is about as old as this congregation.  I got to tell him all about David Coutts and myself living on that farm.  Coincidence?  Enquiring minds want to know.  Am I to be the last minister here? 

Well, deluded optimist that I am I didn’t want to go with that delusion because I rather felt, believed, sensed, discerned that the Trinity had better things in store for us.  So, I chose rather to go with another possible delusional meaning to the coincidence.  Maybe it meant I was to be the first minister in something new here at Claude.  After all, the congregation that I came to nine and a half years ago was for the most part only fifteen or so years old.  There were only three or four people attending that had any association with this church for any longer than that.  So, I had a relatively new congregation to serve as opposed to one that was for decades set in its ways and so we did a lot and I mean a lot of new things. 

In my first six years here something really new and really refreshing seemed to be coming about.  We were one of those small churches that were doing great things.  We had a great youth ministry going and younger children coming along.  The concerts we had included some of the biggest names in Canadian folk music outside of the Maritimes and even had the CBC taking note of this little church on Highway 10 just north of Brampton.  The monthly fiddle jam had people coming from the bowels of Toronto and from points further than Schomberg to play.  We even got the Jammers to do a benefit concert for Caledon Community Services for whom this church became the west end location for Jobs Caledon.  Twice a year we provided the Sunday dinner at Evangel Hall and were the highlight providers if I must say.  We gave the disadvantaged in Toronto a real meal and live music to boot.  We got Arno up on a reserve planting potatoes.  We carolled in Inglewood and along with the Forget-Me-Nots’ we did a CBC Dickens’ Christmas Carol.  I played fiddle and banjo for a few of the nursing homes in the area and with a couple of friends have freely provided music for the Inglewood Farmer's Market helping to make that market more of a community gathering than just a market place.  We made our mark in doing things that foster community in an area that really needs community. 

Inside the house, we've done Christian Education and Worship very well.  The Gospel of the lordship of Jesus Christ and his defeat of sin and death which has resulted in the Trinity's reconciling us to himself by grace through faith (not by faith through grace) and making us to be and to know we are his beloved children who graciously have God the Father's steadfast love and faithfulness given to us just as he gives it to God the Son, Jesus because we are united to him and together in him by the Holy Spirit.  The image of God, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been renewed in us and is visible.  As a minister, a teaching elder I've done what I was called to do in holding before you in truth the vision of who God the Trinity is and what he has done for his entire Creation in, through, and as Jesus the Christ.  Overall, you folks have been quite energetic and creative in your faithful response to the Trinity and the Gospel.

Let me wax hinky again concerning the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 which I think describes this congregation very well.  For the last nine and a half years on at least a weekly basis our Lord has brought this passage before me.  This has been a coincidence or something else that has helped to keep me going.  Indeed, Jesus has shown himself to be Lord and has literally and metaphorically fed the multitudes with the limited resource of people we have in this wee small congregation and it has been miraculous.  Yet with outreach and with doing things new comes change and with change comes in-house tension, behind the scenes tension among the leadership and tension between the leadership and the people, as well as tension between the people.  We have lost a few along the way who simply chose to stop coming rather than to settle the differences.  That hurts.  In a small church when people stop coming it hurts us all emotionally.  It challenges our faith.  And for ministers, we tend to take all this quite personally.  It is indeed a cross to bear and the reason why small church ministry can be particularly brutal.  Yet, during those first six years it seemed that when we lost somebody, the Lord would send somebody new.  But, the last two-three years that hasn’t happened.  We have become financially strained, people poor, and wanting for additional leadership.  I could have stuck with the wall of champions’ law of averages and gone elsewhere at the six and a half year mark, but the word was always to stay.  In a way, I feel like Moses on Mt. Nebo.  We’ve seen the promise land, but I’m not the one who will see you into it.

So, was it coincidence…or something else?  Will I be the last minister here at Claude or was I the first in something new?  I stand here concerned because the delusional question that coincidence or something else raises is actually a valid one.  You have the choice to continue on or call it a day.  It will be a tough go and there will be those who chose to stop coming.  The only thing I can really say to you is that this congregation belongs to Jesus Christ.  It is his church and no one else’s.  His will has been and always will be done.  As Paul said to the Ephesian elders, “I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified”.  And so also, I commend you.  You know the Trinity and you know the Gospel which is able to build you up.  The Greek word for able there, dynamai is the same word from which we get our word dynamite.  Please do not underestimate the living and dynamic power of the grace of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit among you, the power that creates this universe anew and raises the dead.  It often is the case that the moment you think you are dead is the moment in which you actually begin to live.  Elders, as St. Ignatius said to Bishop Polycarp on his way to Rome to die in the Coliseum, “Have a regard to preserve unity, than which nothing is better.”  Amen.

Family and the Image of God

Text: Genesis 2:18-24

What do Tarzan, Mowgli, and Peter Pan all have in common?  They are fictional feral children; homo sapiens feralus if you are into Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.  They were children who were either lost or abandoned or just run away who lived in the wild where they were adopted and raised by wolves or apes or fairies.  The authors who created these legendary wild children held to the Enlightenment ideal that humans are basically good and if we could be raised apart from normal human culture and upbringing we would display a purer and less corrupted form of human nature.  Thus these legendary wild children are portrayed with a higher than normal intelligence and an inborn understanding of human culture and the way civilization works.  They also exhibit expert survival skills, superior strength, and high moral standards. 

Not so in reality.  There are just over 100 documented cases of feral children in the last several hundred years, most of them being in the last fifty or so years.  Although many of these children were abandoned because the parents realized they were mentally and/or emotionally challenged, none of these children were able to re-enter human society.  They could not learn language or acceptable social skills.  Those who lived with animals simply continued to behave like them.  They simply could not understand or appreciate human society although some did fair better when in smaller family environments. 

If there is one thing we can learn from these so-called wild children is that human beings are not meant to be alone, not meant to be cut off from other humans.  When it is children who are in this state, they do not develop into fully functioning persons and I say that realizing we need to be careful in where we draw the line on what constitutes a human person.  For example, do people with late stage dementia ever cease to be persons to the extent that we no longer have to treat them as persons?  The answer to that is "of course not".

The writer of Genesis 2-3 would agree with me here.  One thing in Genesis 2 that comes as a surprise is that there is something not good in the Garden in Eden when Adam is first put there.  It's surprising because in Genesis 1 God completed every act of creation with the observation that it was good.  But here in chapter two God makes the observation that it is not good for the man to be alone.  So, God sets about creating companions for Adam.  Animal after animal the LORD God brings before Adam to name but none are a suitable companion.  So then the LORD God takes a rib from Adam and makes a helper for him, a companion equal to him.  (Unless of course, we count the number of times in the Old Testament that God is called a helper to humans then women should be considered the superior who simply condescends to help men.  I could probably agree with that.)  Then, and I bet you’ve never noticed this, when Adam sees the woman he blurts out what is the first instance of poetry in the Bible.  (Hmm…I used to try to woo Dana with Robbie Burns’ poems.) 

This just all goes to say that what makes us persons is that we are relational beings.  We need relationships, indeed close and intimate relationships to thrive.  We as persons are relational beings.  What makes the me in me is the sum total of nearly every relationship I have ever had, good and bad, plus my own unique wiring.  This definition of person comes as a bit of a contradiction to our the Western idea of what a person is.  A 5^th Century philosopher named Boethius said a person is a “suppositum naturae rationalis” (Yes, the word suppositum should disturb us.) - an individual substance of a rational nature.  That definition of person is what drives our culture to be individualistic to the point of a near innate narcissism.  It is also why we have such a very difficult time thinking of God as three persons in one being.  So, let’s go there.

When in Genesis 1 it says that we are created in the image of God it does not mean that I am an image of God or that you each are an image of God, but that we all together are the image of God.  We are relational beings whom when we get together we form a larger relational being, a corporate being.  That is why this church is different from that church and that family is different from that family.  Thus, it is in the midst of relational beings relating to one another that we find the image of God.  Persons-in-relationship is the image of God.  In Genesis 1 the Trinity said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”  The fact of our relational nature is manifest in that God made humanity to consist of two utterly different beings, man and woman, who must find someway to get together in love in order to bring about and nurture further human life that thrives.

This now leads us to talk about family, probably a good thing to do since it is Thanksgiving weekend and many of us will be either blessed by our familial bond or tormented by its dysfunction.  Granted people like to say that there are many different ways to be family.  Yes, ok, I truly do get that but let us not dismiss that there is something fundamentally and fully human about the family unit of a man and woman coming together in the covenant of marriage to bring forth children.  At the risk of sounding like the Vatican here, the nuclear family bears the image of God like no other human community can.  Genesis 2 reflects this in portraying that the “marital bond is so intimate that the two "become one flesh"—naked, open to one another, vulnerable, trusting, passionate, loving, and ‘not ashamed’ (2:24-25).”  One commentator wrote, “This union of two lonely human beings yearning for community and finding it in one another is the great climax of the second creation story.”  Indeed, in Genesis 1 when God finished and looked at everything and pronounced it “very good”, the crown jewel of it all was human beings in the image of God, human beings carrying out the blessed mandate of multiplying and having rule over the creation.

The person of a father and the person of a mother coming together in faithful, self-giving, loving relationship to bring forth and nurture the person of a child is the image of God resembling the relational communion of the persons of the Father and the Son in the person of the Holy Spirit.  Our biological families gathered around the sanctum of a table and a shared meal reflects the image of God in a way that no other union of people can.  And please, I do not want to lessen those bonds among friends who have become family to each because the bonds of biological family are absent or have become nothing short of sub-human.  I do not want to lesson the meaning and necessity of those bonds.  I am not shy to say that adopted family, friends who by choice have become family in place of biological family, probably more than any other relational bond reflects the image of God in his saving grace.  Indeed, adopted family, friends whom God has brought together and who by choice regard each other as family in the name of Jesus is what the church is as the Body of Christ, the renewed image of God in Creation, the New Humanity rising forth from God’s redeeming of the broken, fallen, distorted humanity of Adam.

So, winding down, I’ve given you quite the theology lesson here on the family being the image of God and I’ve avoided going preachy on things that we do either to foster and make more clear the image of God in our families or the things we do or don’t do that mar God’s image among us.  But, this I will say.  To be human is to be in relationship with other persons from which God’s image arises.  Things which destroy our family bonds be it our biological or adoptive family don’t just put asunder a network of relationship, they destroy us at the core of our very being as persons so that we no longer know who we are.  When the union of love that brought us forth and nurtured us suddenly is no more, we lose the sense of who we are and that we are truly loved.  Ask any child who has had to split themselves between a home with her mother and a home with her father as the result of divorce.  She suddenly experiences a duplicity and insecurity deep within herself, in her person that I dare say never heals except by the healing hand of the Trinity to bring that wild child into his self as his own beloved child and into a community of healing that exists in Jesus’ name.

So, it’s Thanksgiving.  Leave here and go to your respective families and gather around your tables for your Thanksgiving exercise of gluttony and abdominal misery.  While there in the midst of those people please take a moment and ponder this mystery of the image of God in which you live and move and have your being and please not take it for granted.  There’s a beauty there which like light, can only be beheld.  Amen.