Shall We Follow a Star?

Text: Matthew 2:1-23

If you were going to meet a king, how would you greet him? For most of us we would realize that there are certain rules of etiquette or customs that must be followed and we would try to abide by those rules as a matter of respect for the office provided they were not too archaic. I don’t think many of us today would go as far as to kneel and kiss a king’s ring unless it meant we otherwise would be imprisoned or impaled or something. But I do think most would, say, bow or curtsy if such were the custom. I think that if bringing the king a gift was the custom we would be glad to do so. I know we would definitely shake the king’s hand and express pleasure at meeting him. I think that most of us would try to express the respect due to those in positions of public authority.

But on the other hand, there always seems to be those who will not give respect where respect is due and this causes a bit of trouble to say the least. Sometimes this lack of respect is justly due especially when a person of high office has proven to be utterly despicable. For example, I would not speak kind words to or shake the hand of someone of the stature of Hitler, Pinochet, or Pol Pot. These were leaders who used their power to keep themselves and their evil ideologies in power. Those are cases when not displaying the proper etiquette of respect would be appropriate. Yet, there are also those who are of the more rebellious nature who will not extend respect to those who deserve it because it interferes with their own sense of inflated self-importance.

Well, the point here is that there are proper ways to greet people such as kings, queens, presidents, people of professional position, neighbours, parents, siblings, friends, and so one. Proper ways which demonstrate respect for the position they are in and the authority inherit in that position and even for the person. And I think this is part of the reason which Matthew goes about showing us how the three wise men and Herod and the chief priests and scribes all react to Jesus, the king of the Jews, how they greet him or refuse to do so.

Looking at the sitting king of the Jews, Herod the Great. He was the greatest builder of the Jewish nation outside of Solomon. He was also insanely jealous about his power and killed several of his children and many rabbi's because he perceived them to be a threat. Well, of course there’s a whole lot of disrespect in Herod's behaviour concerning Jesus. His jealousy leads him to slaughter innocent children in hopes of destroying the competition who may in fact be the Messiah. That’s some obvious disrespect and I don’t think we need to go into too much detail on Herod other than to say his reaction to Jesus is what we the church can expect when we push up against the powers that be with the truth even when its a fine, fair, just, and equitable Western democracy.

Moving on, concentrating too much on Herod here would keep us from paying due attention to some of the folks in this story who deserve it and who, in many respects, are a lot like us good church going people. Matthew has a message that he wanted his original audience to get and it is one to which we must also pay careful attention. His point is that three star-gazing Persians can long for, search for, and recognize Jesus the Lord and pay the respect due to the Messiah who would be the saviour of the world while the people to whom this king Jesus was sent, the ones who knew what the Scriptures said, the ones who should have been expectantly awaiting this king – these people, the religious authorities appear to be willing to conspire and betray their saviour into the hands of those who would just as soon see him dead.

This story does not come as welcome news to those who claim to be experts at the rituals of religion and at knowing the Scriptures. You would think that in Matthew’s day the Chief priests and scribes of the people, the experts, that they would welcome the news of the birth of the Messiah as good news and be excited and awed about it and want to go and see him themselves and worship him. You’d think that they would what to pay him the proper respect. But these folks are rather ambivalent. They don’t care. They are content to simply be the experts. And they in turn use their gifts of knowing the scriptures and the rituals of the faith of their fathers to, in the end, betray the one who had come to save them. The king asked them a question and they answered it with their expert opinion; no more, no less.

This was difficult news in Matthew's day and should be for the church today as well. For we the Christian church and particularly the evangelical church make the claim to the world that Jesus is the world's one and only true Lord and Saviour and that we are the experts in the way that he should be received, worshipped, and served. We claim to have scholars with expertise on the subject of what it says in the Bible. We Presbyterians especially with the emphasis that we place on having educated clergy and me one of those educated clergy, we need to perk up and listen here. We need to be a little bit worried that our attempts to conserve and preserve the faith of our fathers and our decent and in order ways of doing things just might be making us out to be those who are ambivalent towards our risen and living Lord and we may in fact be among those who are actually betraying him to the powers that be. Our heads are often in the right place, our bodies are at least once a week situated in the right place. But, what about our hearts? What about our devotedness to Jesus himself, Jesus the Christ and to living faithfully to him according to the way of the cross. I would like to say we have a more head-felt than a heart-felt religion. We do indeed like to have ideas about some nebulous thing we call “God”. Yet for the most part it is not a love of the Truth that we espouse. 

 Quite a few studies show us that we do not read and study our Bibles and theology with any regularity and when we do, because we don't find it meaningful. We confess to not understanding the faith and what it says in the Bible and so we consign our reading and study of things Christian to the experts, the clergy and popularist writers, who themselves consign their reading and study of things Christian to experts, PhD's and popularist writers. We really have no concern that the people in the pews have no idea what it says in the Bible and lack the tools and the vocabulary to read and study it for themselves. We love Nana-like Lanseer ministers who feed us pablum mixed with drivel about how to overcome the mountains we've likely made of our own mole hills. But, when a minister comes feeding us the solid food of the faith, proclaiming who Jesus is and inviting us to come and follow him in his cross-formed way of life, we say the are too academic and out of touch with reality and complain about how they dress and how much they cost. We should be more than a little bit concerned about about all this for the end result does indeed lead to the death of the church rather than its continued existence.

This is where the three wise men come in for they show us the proper way to greet our King. They were nothing more than three stargazers from Persia, but they knew the right way to greet a king. And so it is that we should be more like them in our devotion to Christ. We should make it a point to compare ourselves to these three wise men, they did something as odd as follow a star that would lead to this king. If I were a Nana-like Lanseer minister I would ask you a rather meaningless and ridiculous question like “how far would you be willing to follow a star just to see the baby Jesus and give him a special gift?” But, a question like that is just more of the sentimentality, nostalgia, and superstituion that fill our churches already.

A more biblical approach would be to note that these three men were astrologers. The studied the stars and looked for meaning in their patterns. We would be remiss simply to compare them to the roadside psychics and astrologers that litter our pathways today. Rather, it would be better to compare them to the premiere scientists of our day – people like James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble. Maxwell gave us Field Theory and Electromagnetism; radio and wireless technology would not be available to us without him. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe in that everything is related and relative to the speed of light. Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the universe than the Milky Way and was more or less the inventor of extragalactic astronomy as we call it. He also discovered that all galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from each other rather than decreasing in speed and collapsing in on itself. Without this counter-intuitive acceleration which apparently did not begin until 5 billion years ago our universe would no longer exist.

Similarly, our three wise men in Matthew saw something in the heavens which indicated a revolutionary upheaval in the way we understand our existence. It is likely, they saw a supernova, a star dying an massively explosive death that feeds the surrounding area of its galaxy with the material to form new stars and the heavier elements that form planets and indeed carbon-based life forms such as ourselves. They saw a star dying that would bring forth new life elsewhere. This reminds me of Jesus saying about himself, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). Could the heavens indeed have been telling of the glory of the Lord?...and three astrologers not Bible experts saw it?

Following a stellar sign of the cruciform life of the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus the Messiah, these three wise men had a vision to follow, a vision that would lead them into the presence of the Lord of the universe where they would simply just bow down and worship him and give to him of themselves. We must ask ourselves, What star are we following, if at all? Where is the star that will lead us to a deeper commitment of worshipping our Lord and Savior with our whole lives? What is our mission and what will it take for us to follow it. Are we following Jesus in his way of life, the cruciform way of life. The way of laying down our lives for him and loving each other as he has loved us each, loving the world as God has loved it, sacrificially and long-suffering.

What will it take to get us to make the leap from simply going to church every Sunday to wanting to know Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit to learn and live the Christ way of actually putting all other things aside to follow him and the mission he has given us of being his disciples, of being his body to everyone we meet? The call is at work in our midst. Jesus says, “Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. My yolk is easy and my burden is light.” Most of us I’m sure know what it is to have our burdens lifted by the Lord. We know the Peace that he has to give. We wouldn’t continue to come here if we didn’t. Yet, are we ready to make the commitment to do something as crazy as follow an exploded star, to follow Jesus Christ, to take up our own cross of the life of faithfulness, to bow before him and lay the entirety of our lives and not just a portions of them at his feet, and worship him with the entirety of the gift of life he has given to us each?

500 billion years ago something beyond our comprehension happened that kept the force of gravity from causing the universe to collapse back in on itself...the love and will and plan of the Trinity for his creation maybe? Roughly 2,000 years ago by the Incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit according to the love of God the Father the Trinity acted to free his creation from the gravitous, self-destructive force of sin and death. The question for us today is will we follow our Lord who died a supernova-like death to bring about the New Creation? Will we persist like apathetic experts who are ignorant in their own field and likewise given to betrayal or will we pick up our crosses and walk the way of the cross following Jesus which is the only proper way to greet this particular king? Amen.

Joseph's Delimma

Text: Matthew 1:18-25

In my previous church we had a spell of having concerts by some pretty big names in Canadian folk and traditional music. We were fortunate enough to have one among us who had “connections”. As the minister I found myself in the (for lack of a better word) awkward situation of having to introduce these artists and groups like Tanglefoot, The Brian Pickell Band, Pierre Schreier, Garnet Rogers, and a few others. I never knew quite what to say and for the most part the artists themselves didn't care. Yet, as the one doing the introduction I needed to make it sound like I knew a little something about them and liked their stuff. As the host for the evening I had to praise the artists and commend them to the audience. Failure to do so would have offended artist and audience alike.

Well, looking at the Gospel of Matthew and how he introduced Jesus the Jewish Messiah and Lord and Saviour of all creation I have to say that I'm left scratching my head because it seems he means to offend. He begins with Jesus' genealogical pedigree and simply says, “A record of the lineage of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” In the genealogy Matthew mentions four relationships: Judah and Tamar, Boaz and Ruth, David and Bathsheba otherwise known as the wife of Uriah, and then Joseph and Mary. If you know the Old Testament, Matthew is quite obviously saying that Jesus' particular link to David and to Abraham is morally tainted and not upright according to the Law. Jesus was born into a whole lineage of sin and more over, a lineage into which he had to be adopted.

Moving on from the begets, Matthew is the only gospelist to portray Joseph's dilemma at having to deal with the fact that his bride-to-be had suddenly become pregnant with a child that was not his own. While pondering what to do, he had a dream in which a messenger of the Lord tells him that this child would save his people from their sins and that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Moreover, there's that prophecy in Isaiah about a virgin conceiving and let's not fail to notice that this baby is God with us. Should Joseph believe this crazy dream and be gracious to Mary? Or, should he do what the religious/moral authorities of his day would have him do and that would be to break off the engagement? This would have grave consequences for Mary.

And so Matthew begins his Gospel with a troubling if not offensive introduction. If we are thinking people which I assume we are we will want to ask why. Why does Matthew introduce Jesus with scandal rather than by praising Jesus and commending him to us all as our Lord and Saviour? Well, it may be that Matthew wants us at the very outset to catch a glimpse of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father towards us and how he chooses to be gracious towards us rather than condemning. Matthew does this by making us to consider Joseph's dilemma.

Joseph had to adopt Jesus and love him as his own son for Jesus to be the Messiah of the line of David. So also, we have no place in this royal lineage as a kingdom of priests unless we also be born anew, born from above of the Holy Spirit by whom we are adopted into the communion of God the Father and God the Son. The Holy Spirit bonds us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' own relationship with God the Father. Joseph's steadfast love and faithfulness towards Mary and the child within her beams brightly of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God for Israel and the children of the Holy Spirit to be born through her...that's Jesus and you and me.

I find it quite staggering that God the Father in and through the presence and powerful and utterly gracious work of the Holy Spirit loves us as much as he does Jesus, his own son and is as steadfastly faithful to us as he is towards Jesus. Even when we are in the midst of impossible situations, when it seems all hell is breaking loose around us he is with us and faithfully working for our good making us to be more and more like Jesus by making us to know who Jesus is in his very self as the one who gives himself selflessly in all love and humility for us to heal and deliver us now in the present from the effects that our sin and the sin of others has on us. As we draw close to Jesus by service and devotion we find that he removes the deepest of our character flaws. He frees us from fear and self-pity, and pride, and our constant striving to be our own god. He truly saves us from our sins.

It is truly as Paul said, “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). For us to become the righteousness of God means that we become part of God's steadfastly loving and faithful acting in the world right now to set right his creation which by our act of sin has become subject to death. For God to be righteous does not mean that God is morally superior. Rather, it means that in his love and faithfulness God acts to save us from our own demise even when we are morally decadent. We are godless children whom the Triune God of grace has claimed as his own. The Father according to his love through the faithfulness of Jesus, the Incarnate Son, by the powerful presence and working of the Holy Spirit in and with us has adopted us to be his children. The inheritance that belongs to Jesus the firstborn Son now also belongs to us. We now, like Jesus, also call God “Abba. Father.” Matthew's rather troubling introduction of Jesus the Messiah begs us to consider the nature of God's love for us. Just as Jesus must be adopted by Joseph in love and faithfulness to Mary into the morally tainted line of David to be who he is as the Messiah, so God the Father in Christ Jesus has by his own decision acted to adopt us each as his own children into the communion of love that the Trinity is and this is what it is for Jesus to save us from our sins.

Now to ponder Matthew's introduction and Joseph's dilemma a bit further we have to note with an exclamation point how Matthew wants to show us right from the beginning that the reality of God coming and being with us as one of us is going to be something that does not meet our expectations and something difficult to handle especially for those who think they have mastered morality and religion and indeed who think they have mastered God. Grace is the element in this story that is so unexpected, so unpredictable, and so hard to handle. If we were reading or rather hearing Matthew’s gospel back when he wrote it, we would expect Joseph to publicly denounce Mary and that the village would react with such bitter anger towards her sinful ways that they took her outside the city and stoned her to death. That’s what we would expect. But instead, grace calls us to take another look at the situation. God calls us to be gracious towards people in situations that trouble us for what we suppose to be religious and moral reasons.

Joseph's dilemma reminds us that we must be careful how we judge people and their troubling situations for we never know when we might be passing judgement upon those through whom God is working or will work. We are called to be gracious in all situations. Grace leads people to Jesus. God’s kindness leads us to repentance it says in Romans 2:4. God shows his kindness to people when we choose to be gracious towards others. The baby Jesus, God’s means to save all of humanity, became Messiah as the direct result of Joseph being faithful to God and gracious to Mary rather than condemning her on a false pretence of faithfulness. When we let our hearts be moved with compassion and show grace it lends to salvation, to people discovering that they have been adopted into the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It lends to the presence of God working visibly and effectively in peoples lives to save. Amen.

The Word Who Invites us to Live

Text Matthew 11:2-11

I was once in on a conversation where a medical doctor was asking her friends what they would do in a situation she had just encountered. She had made a house call to a paraplegic who was suffering from a skin abscess that was going to require surgery and a 6-9 month hospital stay in a room of four. This would be the second time around. She didn’t want to go through with it because there are certain things that paraplegics need help with that are just humiliating to have done in front of other people. So she was putting it off, a decision that would lead to her eventual death. She then went on to share a bleak picture of her life with this physician. She was upset with her husband, who did nothing besides hang about elsewhere in the house, her son also. She had lived this way 20 years and could see no reason to endure another 20. Then, in all seriousness, she asked this doctor to write her a prescription for something to end it all. Well, the doctor was asking her friends “what should I do?” Even the doctor thought that the continuation of this person’s life was torturous.

           The responses were mixed mostly involving what we could call “psychologizing” the patient. Our culture has bred a wealth of armchair Dr. Phil’s who play God by distantly trying to sympathize with a person and then solve their problems. I know about how accurate I am in that department so I like to refrain from it. There were also faith-based questions. “Does she have any faith…believe in God…have a church?” I sat there just listening with not much to say. As far as what I would have done. My training in seminary would have led me to simply reflect back to the patient, “So you want to end your life and you want me to write the prescription?” and see where the conversation goes.

As I listened I thought two things. First, I began to wonder as to whether I’m required in Canada to tell some official if a person truly is suicidal? The second thing I was thinking was I’ve been there. I’ve been pushed to the point of wrestling with whether or not my presence in this life is worth it. We all have our limits as to how much we can cope with before becoming overwhelmed. That’s part of being human particularly in the wake some event like a death or a debilitating accident or a divorce or an act of violence coming to rob us of life as we know it. When that happens we all will have to decide whether we want to live this new life that has been thrust upon us or not. Many people avoid that decision. Being a minister I have encountered widows, widowers, indeed whole families still stuck in limbo years after the death of a person simply because they were struggling to find the reason to continue on and adapt to this new life that was not theirs by choice. I’ve heard people speak of deceased person as if they just died ten years after the fact. They’ve gotten stuck somehow and haven’t made the decision to start living again. They’d rather be dead too, but know that is not an option.

This woman, though a paraplegic, was still a human being still trying to decide whether life is worth living even 20 years after having her life radically changed by an accident. I can’t blame or fault her for wanting to end it. Like I said, I’ve been there, even as a man of faith, I’ve been there. The course of life can to often lead us to a point where we find ourselves asking, “Is my presence in this life really worth what I’m going to have to endure for the rest of it.” It is common for us to imprison ourselves in something or other to avoid dealing with the question; work, materialism, substances, over-indulging, just staying too busy, or just finding somebody to hate – whatever we can find to avoid answering the question do I really want to live this life that I have been given. Indeed, life is a gift. Didn’t a one of us ask to be born. We are here by accident or by decision of parental units. It doesn’t matter which. We have been given life and we are accountable for how we live it not just to God but also to ourselves and to one another. How we live or choose not to live has consequences not just for ourselves but more so for the “others” in our lives.

Turning towards a more theological understanding of this problem, one of the traditional ways of talking about the Holy Spirit is the confession that he is the Lord and Giver of life. At creation it was the Holy Spirit by whom God the Father spoke the Word and breathed life into all of creation. Life is not God in us. Life is a gift from God for which we are accountable. The new life given to us in Jesus Christ is akin to living in the breath of God as the Holy Spirit surrounds and indwells us creating His communion of love in our midst, uniting us to Christ Jesus as his body, that we might live in the image of him in this world. He is the Head of a new humanity meaning we are in a network of relationships which we call “our lives” and the Holy spirit is their in the midst of it pointing us to Jesus the Son and to the true life that God has given us in Him. So, whenever we find ourselves wrestling with the “do I really want to live” question and if so “how”, I believe we are wrestling with the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. And his answer to us, is to point us to Jesus and says “I am with you always. In the depths of your agony I am with you. Like the breath flowing through your body I am with you. You would not be alive right now were I not here giving life to you. You are the way that you are because this is the life I have given you to live that you may be a witness to the depths of my love. From this point on you shall live knowing that I am with you and this is all you need.”

John the Baptist, the one sent to announce the coming of the Lord, was imprisoned for calling to account those who were abusing the gift of life and causing others to suffer. While in prison he was battling with issues of the value of his life and God’s ability to keep his promises. He sent his disciples to Jesus to get some assurance that he had not lived his life in vain because Jesus was not living up to expectations. John like most Jews of faith in his day was expecting someone who would deliver them from the oppression of the Romans, of their own kings, and of their own religious authorities. The answer Jesus gives to John in a roundabout way is “John, don’t lose hope because I am not what you expect, for indeed I am the fulfillment of Scripture. I am the one who removes the curse of sin and death and God-forsakenness. I give life, life with God in the midst of it to those who have believed themselves cut-off from God.”

These miracles that Jesus performed…healing the blind, lame, leprous, the deaf, and raising the dead, and preaching good news to the poor…were more than just curing what ails the physical condition. In those days people believed that these diseases were evidence of being cut off and cursed by God. They believed that those who suffered from them had sinned so horribly bad that not only were they no longer allowed into the temple to be in God’s presence but God was punishing them with physical suffering. Even more so, healthy clean people were not allowed to touch them or they could not go in the Temple. By healing them Jesus removed the false curse from their lives and made it so they could worship God and be fully accepted into human community. He removed their shame and left them pondering how will I now live now that the curse has been taken away. Shame plays a major factor, deserved or not, when it comes to getting on with life.  It is dibilitating.  Shame cuts us off from others, yet oddly not from God. 

What Jesus gives through the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit is freedom from the binding power of shame. He comes with his Word – “I am with you always” – and he speaks it to us until we finally hear it and then he becomes redundant. It is a Word that cuts through our shame and gives real hope to us and invites us to really live...in him sharing his relationship with God the Father through the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit.  This real hope leads us to want not just to cope with life but to be proactive in it, to take the sufferings of others upon ourselves, to tell the world that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, to rejoice in the Holy Spirit and point to Jesus Christ and say to all he is our hope.

Jesus said to John the Baptist by way of John’s followers, “Blessed (Happy) are those who do not take offense at me.” A lot of people get tripped up in hearing the Word of “I am with you” because it’s not what we expect nor what we want. We want action. So, as if we were God we dismiss it and only find further bitterness. Yet, we cannot separate God's acts from his being. Giving us himself is the powerful thing the Trinity does for us. His presence in us and in the midst of our relationships changes everything. True life, blessedness, happiness is only found in living as a witness to the love of God in Christ in the sure knowledge that he is with us. God with us is what Christmas is all about. Praise be to God he keeps trying no matter how often we say no or don’t get it or can’t see past our own expectations. God wants us to live…in Him...and he will make it so. Amen.

Peace...See It!

Text: Isaiah 11:1-11; Romans 15:4-13

World peace, when I hear that phrase it reminds me of Sandra Bullock in the movie Miss Congeniality. She played the role of Gracie Hart, a very tomboyish FBI agent who went undercover at the Miss United States Beauty Pageant to capture a terrorist who dubbed himself “the Citizen”. When she received her orders to go undercover Gracie expressed her disdain for beauty pageant contestants as “stuffed bikinis who want world peace”. She was making fun off how beauty contestants so simplistically and generalistically answer those philosophically "heavy" questions that are meant to make their intelligence shine. The host will ask, “What is the one thing you want most in life?” to which the standard answer is “world peace”. Oddly, later in the movie when Gracie is asked that sort of question, we are given a dramatic pause as we expect her to rant on her view of beauty contests. Yet, she bites her tongue and says, “world peace”. Is world peace only something that beauty contestants want?

Well, peace is a hard thing to imagine. Really, it is. Truly we need to ask ourselves what do we mean when we say peace? I think we have a predisposition to think about peace as being among nations when it can also mean peace among neighbours. Moreover, in this world of talk shows, we have also been brainwashed into an understanding of peace as inner peace. Unfortunately, there is no peace with oneself unless there is peace with one’s family and friends and immediate community. On the subject of inner peace we frequently get reminders of how damaging a lack of inner peace can be especially among our young. I remember a few years an incident in Omaha, Nebraska because my sister lived hardly a mile from where a troubled nineteen year old, took the route of mass murder/suicide because he did not have inner peace, meaning a healthy love of self and others. His suicide note reflected that he believed himself to be simply a pain in the bum to everyone in his life, a far cry from inner peace. Although, we can contribute a good bit of his disposition to mental illness, we can not help but also chalk one up to the failure of family, friends, and his social community to have the courage to get involved in the life of one of their own. I don’t say this to blame anybody but rather to expose a culture that let’s someone who is suffering so painfully slip through not just a crack but a crevasse because mental health is a “private” matter. To that effect, we are all to blame.

Peace among neighbours is another hot topic these days particularly when houses are being built en masse hardly ten feet away from each other. In the compact world of the sub-development neighbours frequently commence to feuding when one neighbour does something that the next-door neighbour considers to have a negative impact on their property value because they all look more or less the same. It is a strange world when the first thing a person does upon moving into one of these urban sprawl subdivisions is build a fence, a fence which will require their neighbours approval and assistance if built on the property line (negotiate your way through that sometime) or you can just say “to heck with my neighbour I’m building it one inch on my side” which is exactly what your "neighbour" was hoping you would do in the first place. Neighbour gets worry-free fence and you pay for it.

So anyway, peace – peace is such a hard thing to imagine. It seems that in order to have it on the global level we have to learn how to do peace at the neighbourly level. In order to have it at the neighbourly level we have to learn how to do peace at the individual level. But, and a big one at that, the prophet Isaiah does not lead us down that road of thinking. The way he “sees” things is quite different. I use the word “sees” quite particularly. His vision, his imagination, of what things will be like when the Triune God of grac finally says “enough” is quite different than our saying, “I’ve got to get myself together and then get things right between my neighbours and me and then hopefully when we’ve all got our patchouli together, we can work on world peace. That is not what Isaiah sees for the Trinity's world after he, not us, has put it to rights.

Isaiah’s vision, his imagination (and please don’t think imagination here in the sense of he’s just imagining things. Imagination to the Old Testament Prophets was seeing the way things are/will be from God's perspective.) is that One will come, the One whom we’ve come to know as Jesus Christ, and in the end he will put things to right. The Spirit of God will be upon him. He will judge according to righteousness and equity giving the poor what they need. He will strike the land with the Word of the Truth and his breath shall put to death the wickedness and the wicked, those who have worked against God and his people. Isaiah's vision of that day calls us to re-imagine our world back within the bounds of the first days of creation when God spoke the Word and the aspiration or breath of that Word brought things into being out of nothing.

Let me step aside here and talk about the Trinity creating things out of nothing. There is a Russian physicist, Alex Vilenkin, who has written a book Many Worlds in One: the Search for Other Universes in which he describes what a good many, if not a majority of theoretical physicists, are saying about how our universe came into being. Without mentioning God, he says that the only reasonable, theoretical, and mathematical conclusion we can come to when talking about the origin of our universe – or any universe for that matter – is that it came into being out of nothing. In the midst of non-existence, no space and no time, a very dense particle out of nowhere began to do something called quantum tunnelling creating a false or unstable vacuum which exploded or rather big banged to become our stable vacuum of space-time. Now, fourteen billion years later under conditions more unique than New York City being levelled by nuclear bombs and suddenly out of the nothing that is left emerges a fully functional Boeing 747 life emerges and there’s you and I conscious life on the planet Earth, a planet that is in a Hell of a mess…and…and...and it appears quite probable that there are an infinite number of parallel universes where we may or may not exist and where things might be better or worse. The parallel universe part is just theory but it is comforting to me that in a parallel universe somewhere there is a me who hasn't messed up so badly.

We who are used to thinking of a universe according to Isaac Newton might think Velinkin has gone off the deep. Newton's universe, the universe of the Enlightenment and Modernity, was a static empty container into which things have been put that function according to set laws which we can understand and use to our benefit through technology. But, things have changed with the discovery that atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons that are made of even tinier particles that are acted upon by forces. James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematician and physicist' did a lot of work in the area of electro-magnetism published and in 1879 published his paradigm changing work The Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in which he opened up the world of radio waves and Field Theory. This work inspired Albert Einstein who has in turn given us a dynamic understanding of the universe in which everything is related to the one constant of the speed of light.

Newton's universe only needed a God to create the big machine and set the law's for it to operate. In the end, Newton's empty container universe and his Deistic understanding of God left God ultimately unnecessary even as Creator. Atheistic Scientism and the Kantian reduction of religion to moralism are its byproduct. On the other hand, Einstein's universe with its emphasis on relationship much more resembles its Maker who is the personal, relational communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves to each other in love so completely that they are One. Moreover, Einstein's universe is much more open to the Incarnation of God the Son; the Light in, by, and through whom all things were created and are held together.

Back to Isaiah, when this One, this Jesus Christ, returns and sets things right – imagine this – (and if you think parallel universes seems crazy) wolf will lay down with lamb, leopard with kid, lion with calf, cow and bear. Lions will eat straw instead of hunt and kill. Predation will not exist in this new creation. Moreover, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where not the old and the wise lead, but rather a little child. This may seem odd until we remember Jesus pointing out that the FAITH like that of little children is what we are called to have, indeed gifted by the Holy Spirit to have to be rightly related to God. Finally, Isaiah calls us to "see" a world where everything is full of the knowing of God.

The Enlightenment world of Modernity to which we all owe our antiquated understanding of reality says that God is outside the system and therefore cannot be known. Yet, the Bible says that God who is indeed outside the system can be known as he has revealed himself in the system in a way that human conscious life can know and understand him. God has revealed himself and made himself knowable to us as the Triune God of grace in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son and his relationship with God the Father in God the Holy Spirit, a relationship he has by grace made us able to partake of in the same Holy Spirit who unites us to Jesus the Son. Isaiah “sees” that one day the whole earth and not just the people on it, the whole earth will know the Trinity by partaking of his life, indeed, be filled with the knowing of God as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Peace on earth, world peace, if you can imagine it, looks like the loving communion that is the Trinity, loving communion not only among people but among the animals where predation rather than self-sacrificing love is the rule of life, and among the tiniest particles of which all things consist.

For Isaiah, world peace does not come about by me getting myself together so that I have inner peace and then, having inner peace, I can work with my neighbours to have peace among neighbours and then, having peace amoung neighbours, we can work together and bring about world peace. Isaiah says that God himself will intervene and fill everything with the knowledge of himself, with the loving communion of the Trinity, and then there will be peace, peace in which there will not even be predation in the animal world. Can you "see" that?

Well, believe it or not, God has given his creation a foretaste of this peace. Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians exhibits this particularly through Paul's encouraging them to welcome one another. Paul wrote Romans to address a problem in the Roman churches where Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians were not welcoming Jewish Christians into their midst. There was a wave of Jews and Jewish Christians returning to Rome at the time Paul wrote the letter. Boldly, Paul, who had no prior relationship with the Roman churches says, “Welcome one another, just has Christ Jesus has welcomed each of you.”

Hospitality in the name of Jesus Christ is a core component of world peace. In the Biblical imagination, the “seeing” of the prophets and apostles and of Jesus himself, there will not be world peace until Jesus returns and God puts all things to right. But until then, we are to offer hospitality to one another just as Jesus showing divine hospitality through the giving of his life over to death has welcomed each of us to himself to partake through him in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in his relationship with the Father. He has quite hospitably made us partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Isaiah’s “seeing' of peace has been given partial hands and feet in the communion of the church. The way we Christians welcome one another is the linchpin of world peace. We are not gathered here on Sunday morning just to sing hymns, hear a sermon, and drink some coffee. We are here to show hospitality to one another, to love one another as Jesus has loved us each as a sign and foretaste to the world of the Trinity's New/renewed Creation coming.

Jesus has shown loving hospitality to us each by giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we know personally the relationship that he and God the Father share, a relationship marked by steadfast love and faithfulness. Churches are not clubs marked by philanthropic gestures. Churches are communities, communions of people who because they know the love God in Jesus Christ by the free gift of the Holy Spirit where people show steadfast love and faithfulness to one another because they have experienced this from God in Christ.

Please do not think that I am insane in saying that we have a foretaste of world peace here or even that we are the foretaste of the healing of the entire universe.  In Newton's universe they think that if it cannot be observed or measured, then it does not exist.  In Einstein's universe there is so much we cannot see but know is there by the way things relate to one another; i.e., the effects the unseen have on what we can see.  Therefore, it is certainly not a stretch to say that the more openly we model the love of God in Jesus Christ to one another and all peoples before the community around us, the more hospitality we show to the world around us expecting nothing in return, then the more we foreshadow the world peace that is coming.

Friends, showing hospitality is central to Christian faithfulness. Therefore, welcome one another, indeed welcome all peoples with the same love that Christ Jesus has welcomed us each. Amen.

Hope That Is More Than a Wish

Text: Romans 13:8-14

I was in elementary school in the Seventies, a child growing up in the U.S. during the Cold War. I remember not only having to do bomb drills in case someone made a bomb threat, but also having to do nuclear bomb drills. A catastrophic, fiery, apocalyptic end to the world was a fear constantly on my mind, on the nation’s mind. I don’t know what it was like up here in Canada. I’m sure the same fear had to be at least in the back of your minds because any nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would have occurred by means of Canadian airspace. Yet, besides that menacing fear, life for me growing up was rather hopeful. I looked forward, dreamed of getting a college education, of having a good paying job, a wife and family, and doing financially better than my parents. I had dreams and for the most part I could expect they would come about. That’s hope, real hope, not some wish that life might be good some day. That hope got even better when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed. Peace seemed a real possibility that is unless space aliens invaded earth. You may have noticed that after the Berlin Wall came down the West no longer had a “common enemy” that Hollywood could vilify, so movies about space aliens began to proliferate.

Life must be a bit different for children in elementary school now. Children today are living in the post-Cold War world amidst what we in the West no longer call a War on Terror. Although it would appear that humanity's current problem with terrorism is driven by religious fanaticism, this post-9/11 world isn’t the product of religion. It is simply the aftermath of the Cold War and its accompanying economic and political imperialism. Israel, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet nations, and the Central American nations were all pawn nations in the Cold War, oppressed pawns. Afghanistan and Central America were the actual battlefields.

At the end of the Cold War everyone thought there would be peace not greater fear. Yet, children now must grow up with the fear of not only a lingering possibility of global nuclear exchange, but also nuclear terrorism; and not just nuclear terrorism, but also simple, random terrorist attacks on public places. Today’s children will also have to live with the effects of global warming, global overpopulation, and pandemics such as HIV-AIDS (which according to the 2007 UNAIDS report appears to have begun to level off and in some places even decline). If current economic trends continue most of our children will not have their share of the pie. Actually, the major disillusion for my generation has been that we are not financially better off than our parents and this trend will continue.

The future for today’s young people does not look hopeful. I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that all they have to look forward to are cooler electronic gadgets, faster computers, extremely life-like video games, and more potent street drugs. Hopelessness defines life today. Our young cannot dream like I did. When they look at the future all they can see is a huge overwhelming mess and the demand for a lot of hard work to clean up after the parties that their parents and grandparents and even great-grandparents have been throwing. It is a twisted world when children have to clean up after their parent’s parties.

Powerlessness defines life today as well. No one seems to believe that we as individuals have control over our lives and can do things that can bring about change. Among ministers we often joke that “there are a few people in that church who need to die before anything will ever change.” Well, there are a few people on this planet who need to die before anything will change, but even when those people die as long as human greed and powerlust are part of the human condition things will not change.

This overwhelming sense of hopelessness and powerlessness is taking its toll on global life. It promotes violence. Fanatics spread the message that if things cannot be changed, then blow something up particularly something that belongs to one of those people who need to die anyway. It also promotes the magical thinking of fundamentalism where if you believe right and live right God will be on your side. Unfortunately, power hungry people with even a little bit of charisma find it very easy to manipulate the hopeless and powerless with fundamentalism whether it be religious, environmental, or political. Materialism and consumerism are also a resulting plague. If there’s nothing in the future to live for, then live for today. Self-destructive and risky adrenalin-inducing behaviours also plague life. In a global culture that is emotionally depressed as we humans are people will do anything to feel pleasure, anything.

But, what about us Christians; we actually claim to have hope. What do we mean by hope? First, we have hope based in the immediacy of God’s presence with us and his intervention in our lives. Second, we have the future of the second coming of Jesus Christ when there will be the resurrection and God makes all things new. Our hope is more than a wish. We do not say I wish God was with me and I wish that he would intervene on my behalf. Anyone who has known the Lord Jesus Christ for any length of time knows certainly that God is personally present with us each and with the congregation where we worship and that God does intervene on our behalf. Our hope is real and if we know the Triune God of grace and his work in our lives now in the present then we know that what he promises for the future will occur. Jesus Christ will come back. He will put his world to rights. Indeed, there will be no more sin and death.

Since our hope is real, based on the fact that God is present and active in our lives; we must ask what difference this hope makes and if we have hope, how then should we live? To answer our first question about what difference our real hope can make in today’s world; well, we know that there is something to this thing called prayer. As far as what we who have this real hope can do; well, first of all pray and then strive to work for the kingdom coming.

There is a street ministry in Hollywood, CA called Youth Link of America. They are located on Hollywood Blvd. which seems to be a Mecca for runaway youth because they have delusional dreams of being or at least meeting a star. On the ministry's website they suggest ways people might assist in their ministry. There is obviously the request that people donate money. Yet, they also give a simple request that people pray for four things: safety for the youth, that they might be able to build relationships with the youth, for the spiritual and emotional strength to reach out to them, and the resources to meet the needs of the young people. I think the prayer request that Youth Link America makes is exactly what is needed for this entire world.

Every person on this planet needs to know safety and it is the work of Christians to pray and to strive for real peace in this world. God has not made himself present to us and intervened in our lives so that we simply continue on like everybody else. We are called to change, to follow. Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, not blessed are the money makers. It is our task in this world to make peace by calling evil, evil, and evil doers, evil doers; to call injustice, injustice; to call greed, greed. It is our task to call the offender to honesty and the victim to forgiveness. Real peace, safety is based in honesty and forgiveness.

Every person on this planet needs to have relationships where trust and unconditional love can be found. Friends, this is why there is a church. This is why Jesus commands his followers this one commandment, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The ultimate result of God’s presence in our lives is the creation of human community where love in the image of the Trinity can be found. God has made himself known to us so that we might build relationships with others in which the unconditional love of God, the Trinity himself, can be known and is known.

Every person on this planet needs the emotional and spiritual strength to move forward in life. Everyone needs to know the freedom and healing that comes with knowing Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit; freedom and healing from enslavement to addictions, the pain of childhood neglect and abuse; freedom from bearing grudges; and the freedom and healing that comes from forgiving. The greatest healing came in my life when Christ Jesus showed me that he loved and was gracious to certain people I was bearing a life-time grudge against, even though my grudge was based in the right. You see, there is a fine line between wanting God to avenge the wrongs done to us and bearing a grudge that becomes our life’s major pre-occupation that only results in self destruction and petty retaliation. The church is the only human community where forgiveness (rather than retribution) is the rule of the day, and praise be to God, he gives us the strength to forgive and to move forward.

Finally, it is not only the work of Christians to pray that everybody in the world gets their daily bread; it is also to work for the equal distribution of wealth around the world. This means that we Christians in the West need to put a limit on what honestly is enough and give the rest away. It means that we must simplify our lifestyles. This is more than just reducing our carbon footprint. It is learning to live with and on much less than we are accustomed simply for love of neighbour and love of God. We who know that the future is in God’s hands because we know his presence in the present, simply cannot model to the rest of the world a lifestyle that lives for the present. We must model the lifestyle that respects in love the needs of all peoples and that strives for the end of poverty not only with what we put in our refrigerators, but also for whom we vote.

We’ve been graciously given a real reason to hope, my friends; a very real reason. The Triune God of grace is with us…and we know it. Let us not take his graciousness towards us in vain. Let’s live this hope openly before the world. Amen.

Let's Take Jesus' Ministry out of Our Boxes

Text: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43; Colossians 1:11-23

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:16, “We are the temple of the living God.” The Trinity comes to dwell in us – his own, his church - in the midst of our fellowship, indeed in each of us. The Triune God of grace, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lives in us by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ (his presence with us, his favour poured upon us, his acting on our behalf for our good) in the communion of the Holy Spirit due to the love of the Father. We, the church, have got to get a handle on that. If we don’t have God right as the Triune God of grace and what he has done for his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ, what we are as congregations will be something other than the church of Jesus Christ. God is the communion of the personal, relational love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who so powerful that he can raise the dead, so powerful he created and holds the whole universe together, and so powerful that he can and will put it to rights.

Humanity, on the other hand, bears within itself in its relational way of being a very marred image of the Trinity. Yet, in us, the church, the Trinity is restoring his image within humanity through the reconciling work of the one true Shepherd, Jesus Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father. As the fullness of the loving communion of the Trinity dwells in Jesus in his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit, so also his fullness dwells in us as we are his body sharing in his relationship with the Father by the communioning work of the Holy Spirit.

           Sharing in Jesus' fullness of God the Trinity (his relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit) exhibits itself in and through us as we share in Jesus' ministry of reconciling the world to the Father in the Holy Spirit. His ministry is relational which means people oriented and geared at real needs and healing in all its forms. Jesus' ministry is not programs for this and activities for that which we pay staff to come and do for us. It is each of us entering into real relationships with people in authentic, self-giving, self-sharing, and unconditionally loving ways. Jesus ministry is the ministration of God’s love for each of us personally, a love marked by the way of the cross. This means we must enter into the lives of others through our own weakness and do so sacrificially at our own cost expecting nothing in return.

To give an example and since the mayor of Toronto has brought substance abuse and addiction to the fore lately, Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that no doctor, preacher, friend, spouse, counselor, etc., can get through to an alcoholic as effectively as another alcoholic in recovery who is willing to once again share his own humiliating story. A common feeling and thought pattern that comes along with the mental illness and chronic disease that alcoholism is is a profound indeed shame-filled awareness of “nobody knows what its like to be as unlovable as me.” What an alcoholic finds in Alcoholics Anonymous is an unconditionally loving community of people who know damn well how that feels but are getting better, healing and who have by an act of God had the compulsion to drink taken away. Outside of AA alcoholics will be perpetually stigmatized, but in AA alcoholics are always welcomed in the hopes that they will find/be given sobriety. The Trinity is powerfully and visibly at work in AA. I can think of no better example of how the church should be in and amongst humanity.

Similarly, we who know the healing love of God in Jesus Christ because he has built a loving, healing relationship with us by bringing us into himself through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit are to go to those who suffer our same, common human weakness and share his ministry with them. Indeed, let Jesus minister to them through us. Jesus ministry is his presence with us in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit bestowing care to each of us by which he then compels us to love one another as he has loved us so that he then continues his ministry beyond us through us. This is the communion of the Holy Spirit. I would dare say if the life of a congregation is not marked by this ministry of Christ’s cross–bearing love so that it reflects the Triune life of God, it is not the church. Any organization can give money and do things to help the poor and so forth. We, the church, on the other exist to get to the heart of the brokenness of all people. As AA exists to get to the particular brokenness of still suffering alcoholics, so we disciples of Jesus Christ, the bearers of his ministry, are here to be the unconditionally loving community where any person can find welcome and healing in the new humanity that the Trinity has wrought in, through, and as Jesus Christ.

Christ’s ministry has a purpose. Michael Jinkins Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Theological Seminary in Texas defines ministry like this: “the purpose of our common ministry is the transformation of persons into the likeness of Jesus Christ whom humanity crucified and God raised from the dead.” The transformation of persons into the image of Christ Jesus as exhibited in his life and death is what our shared ministry in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is all about. We do this transformational ministry by building one another up in love, speaking the truth to one another in love, worshipping with one another, praying with one another, even simply just sharing a cup of tea with one another yet meeting one another in our weaknesses, rather than our strengths. This transformation of our very being happens in the context of our relationships, which includes our relationship with God, and it comes about as we learn by the Spirit’s prompting to choose to be compassionate with each other until it becomes our nature.

Learning to love one another is the cross we all must bare. In the face of all brokenness from the depths of our own weakness we must choose to love as Christ loves us. He gave up his strength and became weak not only for us but with us. So must we and so also he is still with us. Carrying this cross of sharing and bearing our weaknesses with one another will put to death in us all those things that are contrary to God’s nature and we will find ourselves raised to a newness of life that we know can only come from the Trinity. We are not here to cater to the insecurities of one another or to avoid conflict at all cost. That’s not love. Rather, we are to augment each others giftedness and to expose each others flaws and to help each other past them. We are here to bear one another’s burdens. It hurts when our flaws get exposed yet this is exactly what happens in the life of the church as we learn to love one another. The cross is our standard and unfortunately it is typically the case that we want to judge each other according to it rather than examine ourselves.

To ensure that this transformative ministry occurs in the church (and indeed this learning to love one another is most certainly what the reign of Christ looks like), to ensure his ministry in the church Christ calls forth shepherds in the church. In the Presbyterian church we call them elders and ministers (not pastors. There is only one Pastor.). Everything one would expect from a minister is the shared responsibility of the elders and ministers. The nature and task of church leadership is to bestow Christ’s care upon the people. The Hebrew word in Jeremiah’s text which is translated as “bestow care on” very well suits the concept of being personally present with God’s flock at the point of their needs, needs judged according to cross. As Jesus Christ is our Pastor and his reign over us is his compelling us to love one another as he loves us according to the cross, so church leadership is to live his ministry, his reign, before and for his people. They are here to listen, to pray, to bear with us our burdens, and to see to it that the transformative work of the Holy Spirit is happening in us. Church leaders are here to ensure that we are carrying the cross. Never ever should a minister and church leadership be seen as the CEO and Board of Directors of an institution. To sound archaic, let that idea of church leadership be anathema.

I believe that small churches are truly privileged with respect to Jesus' ministry. I say privileged because their size helps them to resemble more clearly the church of the New Testament...yet, with a basic difference which too often can become fatal. The early church was house based rather than church building based. Early on, the church was basically a few households getting together in someone’s house to worship, pray, study, and share the Lord’s Supper. It wasn’t until the 300’s AD that church buildings began to appear and that was because Emperor Constantine made it legal to be a Christian and saw
Christianity as beneficial to holding the empire together. It would not be a stretch to say the church moved into church buildings so that we could have a temple just like all the other religions. We are apparently reluctant to think of our fellowship and our very selves as being God's temple.

In hindsight and in my opinion as a soapbox historian, moving the church from homes into church buildings wasn’t a good idea. Inevitably, the more institutionalized the church became the more religious and superstitious things became. I would even go on to say, (and this according to my tailgate expertise on the subject,) that our associating the church with buildings makes it easy for us to separate the Trinity from our daily lives, from our homes, from the fellowship of families; away from the people and rather way off somewhere. Then we begin to believe that we need the special boxes which we now call “our church” to meet with God. Inside these special boxes, the Christian “faith” tends to be simply the Christian “religion”. Inside the boxes we turn what should be a living faith, a life-trust in a personally present God among a transforming fellowship of believing friends, into being a system of religious rites and rules owned by a priesthood; a system where faith actually becomes magic. A priesthood pontificating rules and administering rites is a far cry from the ministry of “bestowing care upon” the flock of God’s pasture. The history of Christianity demonstrates well that when the ministry becomes a priesthood dealing in rules and rituals, that’s when the flock begins to get destroyed and scattered and God’s own sheep get driven away.

Jeremiah mentions God’s pasture. God’s pasture is the Kingdom of God and it is everywhere Jesus Christ is. It is Jesus’ personal ministry to each of us, among us, and through us into the world. I could be accused of being overly simplistic here but I surmise that one of the beliefs that hinder congregations from being living revelations of the Kingdom of God where there is peace and healing in the presence of God is that we believe the pasture is inside the building rather than out there in our homes, our jobs, the neighbourhood, the marketplace, indeed, in the whole universe. The Apostles in the early church took the Good News to temple courtyards and marketplaces, indeed house to house, and there proclaimed that God has created a new reality that was evident in the midst of their fellowship in which everyone was welcome, a new way of being human ordered according to the way of the cross. Jesus Christ has reconciled this whole creation to the Triune God and especially humanity, estranged as we are. It is the work of the church not to get people in its doors to get a confession of faith out of them so that the institution of the church will continue, but rather to go out into the streets and announce the Good News that the Kingdom of God has come near so that people can know what God is up to and believe and have hope and turn and be transformed. It is to take the transformational ministry of Jesus Christ to all people by sharing how Jesus made himself weak for us to be with us and heal us in our weakness. It is to meet others in their weakness by taking the humiliating step of saying “I am weak too, but Jesus is changing me. Come and see.”

God has made peace with us to heal us and out of this new reality he is causing a sprout of righteousness, of peace, of true justice to begin to grow here on earth and guess what? It’s here. He’s here. He pours his heavenly reign upon us and enables us to be a fellowship which echoes the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a fellowship which strives to be a blessing to the world, that strives for peace and justice and righteousness in this world full of fear and dismay. We are the temple of the living God. We carry a remarkable hope in our midst. Let’s not keep it behind the walls. Let's take the ministry out of our boxes. Amen.

By Patient Endurance You Will Gain Your Life

Text: Luke 21:5-19

The topic of this sermon is our life in Christ and particularly how it is a matter of patient endurance in the world in which we live because this world, life as we know it, is at enmity with Christ. Because of our association with him in the Holy Spirit and by our actions in this world as his disciples we will suffer that enmity as well. Please allow me a moment to throw some Scripture around.

Paul writes in Romans, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:4-11).

Then in Chapter Eight he writes, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you” (8:9-11). At the beginning of Chapter Three of Colossians, Paul writes, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Col. 3:1-4).

Paul’s thinking is pretty straight forward here. Our baptism was our sharing in Christ’s death. If we are united with him in his death, then we certainly will be united to him in his resurrection. Thus, we must consider ourselves dead to the present life and alive in him for the life that is to come. So, as we are alive in Christ and Christ lives to God, so must we. We cannot deny what we are as part of the new creation that is to come. As we are united to Christ in the Holy Spirit and our lives lived to self are dead and dying, our new life is hidden with Christ in God. Since we have been given new life in Christ, pursuit of the old life is only death. So, we must live in and for the new to know, to have the new life.

In our passage from Luke today, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that because of our association with him, which according to Paul is an association that is an organic or living union with him in the Holy Spirit, we will find ourselves at odds with the powers that be of this world. Therefore, it will be by patient endurance that we will gain, acquire, or secure the gift of this new life, the new life of the new creation in Christ Jesus. New life in Christ and new life in the new creation are a free gift from God but a gift that comes with a cost. Firstly, the cost comes as what we must presently leave behind that is attached to the old life and its consequence of death. Secondly, the cost comes with that we must live according to the new creation now while patiently enduring the opposition that this fallen world has to Christi Jesus. If we do not stand firm in Christ, we do not find our new lives in him. There is no real change in us.

Another way of saying this is that we are in this world yet not of it. Rather, we are of the world to come because of our union with Christ Jesus in the Holy Spirit. As far as this world, this age, this old way of being human; we live now with the purpose of announcing what God has done for humanity and all of his creation in, through and as Jesus Christ and in so doing living according to the new creation that has begun with his resurrection as living proof of it. This living accordingly is simply put in what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “But y’all, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary of doing what is right” (2 Thes. 3:13) and by right we mean right in the eyes of God not in the eyes of people. This is not a simple task. It is not easy to do what is right in the eyes of God. Because of this world’s enmity to Christ Jesus even what seems right in this world will too often be at odds with the love of God. We will struggle against ourselves. We will struggle against our brothers and sisters in Christ. We will struggle against those closest to us who do not share in this faith. We will struggle against the society, culture, and community in which we live. Therefore, we will find ourselves always having to patiently endure the temptation to be as the culture we live in and the persecution that arises because we live according to God’s demands on our lives. Let me say more on these things.

First, we will struggle with our very selves trying not to let sin and death continue to reign in us. Sin and death are tricky adversaries and our lives are complicated things. We do not instinctively know what the right thing to do in God’s eyes is. Because something feels or reasonably seems right according to our culture or gut or whatever does not mean its right in God’s eyes. If we do what feels right to us we are only catering to our sinful selves. If we do what is right in the eyes of other people we are only catering to that part of us that wants to be accepted in the eyes of others. I know from my own personal experience when I have asked others for their advice in what I should do, I’ve tended to only agree with those who have agreed with me. Indeed, some of the most significant hurts I have suffered in life have come about because I did what felt right not what the Bible said was right. This is why it is important for us to know the Scriptures and to know them prayerfully. God does not let his children who are made alive by his Spirit go on for too long living contrary to Scripture. As the one who loves us more than any of us can think or imagine, God works in our lives disciplining us to do what is right in his eyes. I can say with the utmost sincerity when God is at work with us, disciplining us to do the right, it does not feel good. Indeed, it hurts. But, when he is done with the lesson, we are better persons more compassionate, gracious, and understanding than we ever thought we could be.

Second, in addition to the constant struggle with ourselves, we must also patiently endure in our relationships with those closest to us. This struggle is quite painful. We as humans need close friendships. We need people we can trust unquestionably and we need people who love us unconditionally. Christ Jesus created the church to be such a place where we can find people we can trust and by whom be loved unconditionally. Yet, our friends in Christ are not here just to be positive support in our lives. Christ Jesus has given us close friends in Him in order to hold us accountable to being and doing what is right in his eyes. So, Christian friendship at times can be quite humbling.

Christian faith is more than simply my private relationship to God. It must be intensely about our relationship with one another with and in Christ and how we love another, build one another up in love, and hold each other accountable. The Christian faith is not about how relevant a church is to the world around it so that it can fill the pews. Nor is it about about having programs that "everybody knows" ought to have because of the altruistic role it has played in Western society. It is about our relationship with one another with and in Christ. We are called to fellowship in the love of Christ, a fellowship in which we hold one another accountable to what is right in the eyes of our Father in Heaven who is steadfastly loving and faithful to us on all accounts. It can be incredibly humbling when we speak the truth to one another in love for it is a painful struggle to accept the truth about ourselves. Yet, when we do the grace that moves in us to heal and change us is powerful. Sometimes Christians can’t handle the truth and in pride begin to retaliate. Christians who do not accept the truth about themselves can indeed become anti-Christian.

Another thing along this line we must patiently endure as Christians is people close to us who are not Christian. Who don’t understand why we do not live according to the same culture-dictated goals and values as they do. I know my family struggled with this when I first began to pursue the call to ministry. They didn’t feel the ministry was a safe profession for the little boy they knew to be so shy. They also struggled with my accepting calls to a church in West Virginia and then to a wee small church in Canada. It hurts when those closest to us don’t seem to understand. But, my pains in that area are nothing compared to those in our midst who are married to spouses or have family members who are actually belligerent to the faith. To these I say pray and patiently endure, you are especially close to Christ and are blessed to know him in his sufferings.

I spoke last week about our struggles with the world and how our mission of exposing evil and of forgiveness runs contrary to the powers that be so I will not comment there and finish up with a word of encouragement. A few years back when I was in West Virginia there was a state senator who for some reason had to divulge his financial status. People in his district thought that it was remarkable in a bad way that he was $245,000 in debt. I used to be a member of the Rotary Club there and one afternoon while we were doing our annual trash pickup along a highway, some of us began to discuss this senator’s situation. The local pharmacist who had a bit of change in the bank himself and probably a similar if not greater amount of debt said, “If you ain't at least $245,000 in debt, then you ain't even in the game.” Well, the game he was referring to was that of being a wealthy person. The same can be said about patient endurance and the Christian faith. If we are in Christ and are not patiently enduring the inner struggles and the inter-relational struggles that come as the cost of having been freely given new life in Christ, then we had better check and make sure we’re in the game. If you are patiently enduring, know in all confidence that you are in Christ and he is in you. Therefore, seek him out in prayer and prayerful reading of Scripture and in Christian friendship and you will find that he is with you and it is joy unspeakable. Amen.