Where's Jesus?

Text: 1 Corinthians 15:1-28 
          The people in my first church in West Virginia told stories of a local woman named Rita. Rita lived with a mental illness. I’m not sure one should say she suffered from mental illness because, from the stories they told of her, Rita seemed quite content. It was everyone else who “suffered” Rita’s extravagance of character, particularly the minister who was my predecessor. You see, it was not that long ago that they left the doors of the church there unlocked so that people might come in whenever they wanted to sit and pray. Rev. Newkirk was frequently surprised by Rita being in the church, smoking, and playing the piano. It was also not unusual for Rita to show up on Sunday morning in the middle of the service. They say she would stand quietly in the back of the church and listen. This was not a problem until she felt that a smoke would help her listen. So she would light up and listen. Apparently she was unaware that smoking was one of the two things one must abstain from doing in church because they make people stare. The other is making out.

           The most profound Rita story I heard was the Sunday morning she came looking for Jesus. Rita showed up late as usual. Something came over her which inspired her to start walking down the centre aisle. As she went she would tap someone on the shoulder and ask, “Is Jesus here?” After receiving a rather helpless glance she would move on to another and again ask, “Is Jesus here?” Now I’m not one to say that this was the devil tormenting this church by routinely sending a “crazy” lady to interrupt their worship services. Rather, I think that Rita might have been more like Jesus in disguise. After all, Jesus did say something to the effect of “What you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” Indeed, the way a church welcomes the mentally ill is one indicator of whether or not Jesus is actually in a church for to welcome them is to welcome Christ. Rita was never run out of that church. The answer given her that day was “Yes, he is. Come sit down.”

           The question Rita asked is the age old question that children sooner or later ask “Where is Jesus?” If he has risen from the dead and is alive then he must be somewhere. So, where is Jesus? Now that, my friends is a difficult one to answer and do it justice. We can’t just simply say he’s with God the Father in heaven which he is because that would make him absent from us now which he is not. If we say he is here with us now, and he is, then we must say in what manner because indeed where is he? Is he everywhere present or just present with us. Most people avoid these questions on Easter morning and just say God raised Jesus from the dead and the same will happen to us; after all isn’t that what egg-laying bunnies and green grass are all about?

So where is Jesus? Well, God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit really raised Jesus from the dead publicly manifesting that this Jesus of Nazareth, a crucified Messiah claimant is indeed the Son of God. Jesus is alive. He wasn’t simply resuscitated. He has bodily been through death and bodily come out the other side which means he isn’t just some spiritual presence or energy permeating the universe. He has been bodily raised from the dead. Indeed, God did not create this creation, bless it, and call it good just to destroy it. Nor did God create humanity in his image with a body, bless us, and call us very good only to destroy our bodies with death so that we could exist out there somewhere as nodes of eternal energy which we mistakenly call spirit or soul. Jesus has an immortal and imperishable body in which by the power of the Holy Spirit he has ascended to be with the Father. Jesus is the first fruit of a New Creation that is coming at the end of this age for resurrection is the end of us all.

Jesus Christ is the first human of a new humanity just like Adam was the first human of humanity as we know it, humanity that has fallen. In, through and as Jesus Christ in the communioning power of the Holy Spirit God the Father has and is reconciling humanity to himself, indeed the whole Creation making all things new. The theologian Karl Barth said that what the Trinity has done in Jesus Christ is create a new humanity who lives in a faithfulness to the Trinity that corresponds to the Trinity’s faithfulness to us; a new humanity that lives in peace with the Trinity and one another as a witness to the Trinity’s glory. We all share the body and nature of Adam, the first human who sinned and brought death to all. Jesus is the second Adam by whose love and fidelity reconciliation, grace, and life - the new human nature - have come to all (Rom. 5:6-21). More over, the Trinity is making us to be the body of Christ that will correspond to his resurrected and glorified body.

Yet I digress, and have not answered the question “Where is Jesus?” Well, since God the Son became human as Jesus who lived, died, was resurrected and is now ascended to the Father (that is where Jesus’ physical body is located); and since the Trinity has poured out his self, the Holy Spirit, upon humanity through us the church on the day of Pentecost and who in the midst of humanity is calling and unioning people together in Christ to be the body of Christ, the Church in this world; taking those two saving and transformative events into account we can say that the new humanity of Jesus Christ is pervading the old everywhere. Everywhere is where Jesus is. So, he is bodily present before God the Father and his humanity through the work of God the Holy Spirit is everywhere pervading the old. Therefore, if we want to see Jesus who is with the Father we need just look into the face of everyone you meet, you will see Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected as the Holy Spirit reveals him.

Therefore, everything we do to one another we do unto Jesus Christ. Thus, it is best we love one another for why crucify him again. It is best we work to aid the suffering and those who are dying world over because they are powerless to change their situations for why persist in letting Jesus be crucified again. This requires we die to self and to our selfish motives and be raised to new life in him. His new humanity at work in us now looks like self-emptying love, like intentional economic downward mob. It is not materialistic and consumeristic. It does not seek its own interests, but looks to the needs and interests of others. It builds up. It hopes. It loves. The new humanity is rooted in a life-giving relationship with God the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit, which requires we meet our resurrected Lord and Saviour. This encounter and the cruciform life that ensues is faith. Our power is in the weakness of a cross-formed life – cruciformity.

The Apostle Paul, the first great persecutor of the church, upon meeting the resurrected Lord became the first great missionary of the church. Though he was struck blind his eyes were opened in faith to see the kingdom of God breaking in all over the world and everywhere he went indeed it broke out around him. Though it may not be the dramatic and traumatic experience that Paul had upon encountering Jesus, at some point our eyes must be opened in faith that we might trust and obey as disciples of Jesus Christ. At some point the Holy Spirit will open our eyes to see Jesus whether it be in the faces of everyone we meet or as it was for Paul we meet him as he is in glory.

When the Holy Spirit opens us up to meet Jesus, he also brings us together with others into a fellowship where we learn who Jesus Christ is, his personality, as we learn to love one another as he has loved us. As we together become more and more like Jesus by living out our baptism and gathering around his table to share in his meal, as we together pray and devour the Holy Scriptures, as we rest in the Sabbath rest of worship, the Holy Spirit will open our eyes to see where Jesus is at work in this world so that we may go and be his body and be the sign of the new humanity that will come about on the day of resurrection. Hopefully, when someone like Rita is sent to us and asks, “Is Jesus here?” we too shall answer, “Yes, he is! Come and sit down.” Amen.

God Is Working in You All…So Work Out Your Salvation

Text: Philippians 2:1-13
There was an Old Order Mennonite man standing at a subway stop in New York City. If you can imagine him – black plainclothes, long beard, wide-brimmed hat. While he waits, a long-haired “Jesus freak” or one of the Jesus People came to him and asked, “Are you saved?” Well, the Elderly Mennonite stood there a minute pondering the question and finally answered, “I suppose you should ask my neighbours.”

In the past I have explained this story from the perspective of individual eternal salvation because that is immediately where Christians in the evangelical world would go with it. We assume that the Jesus People fellow was wanting to know if the Mennonite gentleman had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour so that he may go to heaven when he dies. Yet, the Mennonite gentleman, being more aware of the community aspect of the Christian faith, answers indicating that our eternal salvation, if valid, would be evidenced now by our conduct towards our neighbours. Faith cannot be separated from works of love. As James writes, “Faith without works is dead” (Jm. 2:26).

Well, this morning I would like to monkey about with that story a bit in an effort to explain what Paul means in Philippians 2:12-13, “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” The end result is that I hope we will have an expanded definition of what salvation is and a greater awareness that the Trinity is working in us as the catalyst to salvation.

I must note that the possessive pronoun “his” is not in the Greek text though nearly all English translations throw it in there. Philippians 2:13 is best translated “For God is the one effecting in you both to will and to work for the furtherance of the well pleasing.” The Greek word for “well pleasing”, eudokia, is literally “good thinking” which is being minded upon the things of the Trinity rather than the things of humanity. In the Biblical world one's thinking, the things one is minded towards drives the conduct of life. Jesus set his mind towards Jerusalem and the cross. We should therefore set our minds on being conformed to his mindedness as Paul says in verse five “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” which he follows up with the Christ-hymn. This way of life, the Jesus way of life could be called Cruciformity.  The self-emptying, community building way of love which leads to the cross is the well-pleasing mindset we have in Christ.

First, I want to tell you about the Jesus People movement. My first exposure to them was from that old ‘70’s trucking song “Convoy”. The truck driver known as the Rubber Duck on the CB radio gets a convoy of trucks together to go speed across the USA thinking that the police can’t stop a massive line of tractor-trailers for speeding. The convoy gets going and finally the police call out the National Guard to block the road and C.W. McCall sings: “There's armoured cars and tanks and jeeps, and rigs of every size. Yeah, them chicken coops was full of bears and choppers filled the skies. Well, we shot the line. We went for broke with a thousand screamin' trucks and eleven long-haired Fiends of Jesus in a Chartreuse microbus.” For me, those long-haired Friends of Jesus were simply hippies on a drug induced Jesus-trip. In reality, yes, the Jesus People movement were hippies, but they were looking for an alternative lifestyle to the drug culture, the Vietnam War, and the American Dream. They wanted to be like the early church. So, they lived in communes and shared their possessions. Healings and “miracles” were known to happen among them. Though they looked like hippies, the Jesus People movement truly resembled the early church. They lasted only ten years, but their legacy includes what we call contemporary worship and contemporary Christian music.

With that way of life in mind, maybe what that long-haired friend of Jesus gentleman meant by asking, “Are you saved?” was “Do you know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour of all Creation and he has delivered you from all things in this world that oppress you and keep you from knowing and worshipping the true God. Come with me and meet my friends for the Kingdom of God is here and you can truly live in it.” Salvation as he had experienced it in the Jesus People communities was a “this world” thing as much as it was a “coming world” thing. We really do a disservice to the salvation God wrought in, through, and as Jesus the Christ when we limit it to being simply about what happens after death. Salvation as far as the Bible is concerned is the Trinity's acting to deliver not only his people but more so the entirety of his Creation from evil powers that oppress.

In the early church, salvation had more to do with present situations than one's eternal state. The Jews who became the first church were waiting expectantly in great hope for God to act in their lives by sending his Messiah, the Anointed One, who would deliver his people from the evil oppression of the Romans, from their own corrupt monarchy, and from their crooked priesthood. They also expected that God’s Messiah would then establish the reign of God, that the Holy Spirit would be poured upon God’s people, and that all nations would flock to the Messiah to be healed. Throw in there also an open can of whoop on all evil spiritual powers which worked through idolatry. The early Christians were not really concerned about their after life other than the expectation of the resurrection of the dead. Their hope was for salvation to come about in the now of their lives, their hope was for Jesus' eminent return and his establishing his kingdom here on earth. All definitions of salvation must find its roots in this coming event.

The Song of Zechariah at Luke 1:68-79 reflects this well: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” This song truly portrays that the first Christians expected the Trinity to act to save them in their present lives from all oppressive powers and the God of Israel did exactly that in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth who by his life, death, resurrection, and ascension and the free gift of the Holy Spirit has reconciled the world to the Trinity’s very self.

And so it is with us, salvation is here in our present reality. The Trinity is at work in us causing us, enabling us to will and work for the well-pleasing, for Cruciformity – the self-emptying way of love which leads to the cross. Did you know that repentance begins with the Trinity working in us to bring about the desire to turn to him and not the other way around? Because of sin we are truly unable to “repent” apart from a work of the Trinity’s grace upon us. The Greek word we translate as repentance in Greek is “metanoia” which quite literally means “with-minded”, to be with-minded with Jesus. Paul tells us to work out our salvation fearfully for the Trinity is working in us. That little word “for” there is a powerful little word. It structures the sentence to mean that God’s working in us comes before our ability to work for him. The Triune God of Grace first saves us and then we must live in that salvation. It’s like the emancipation of the slaves in the States. When freedom was decreed, they had to go live as free people and that was scary and difficult for them for they had only known slavery. So the truth today is that our faithfulness, our working out of our salvation is preceded by, established by, and enabled by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working grace in us.

At the beginning of chapter 2 Paul tells us how to work out our salvation. He writes: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,…”. Even though Paul uses the word “if” at the beginning and makes the whole thing sound “iffy”, according to the rules of Greek grammar Paul isn’t being iffy here. He’s actually using a rhetorical device to state what is certainly true among the Philippians. There is encouragement among them. There is comfort in love. There is affection and sympathy. These well-pleasing things are in their midst because of their relationship with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit who dwells in and among them. Therefore, they are able to share the same love in Christ. They can now be harmonious and single-minded in their pursuit of living a lifestyle worthy of the Gospel of Christ – the life of Cruciformity. The Philippians had this communion in love because of the free gift of the Trinity’s working in them…and so do we.

Since this is the case, the way we are to work out our salvation is as Paul instructs us by not doing anything from selfish motives. But rather, doing all things in humility. This is a difficult task for it means before we do or not do anything and before we say or not say anything we have to do an inventory of our motives. Is our mindset self-thinking or Trinity-thinking. Is it for selfish motives or in humility? We must look after the interests of each other as if those interests are our own. We must regard even those who are the most obnoxious among us as being more significant than ourselves. The Trinity has enabled us to be this way, the way of Jesus and we must do our best to follow through on it for it is what salvation is and looks like. Salvation in practice looks like the way of the cross for the way of the cross is is what the Trinity looks like in practice. The Trinity is as he does therefore let us be as he has done. Let us live from the cruciform mindedness of Christ Jesus that is in us by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us in love die to ourselves and be each others slave. Amen.

…For They Shall All Know Me

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34

You may remember a few weeks ago I gave a sermon on whether or not we can know God. The point was that we can only know God as he reveals himself to us. In the account the Bible gives of how God has revealed himself we find that God is Trinity, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To say it even more confusingly we encounter God the Holy Spirit and in this encounter we are brought to share in the relationship that the Son has with the Father. In this relationship we come to know the love of the Father and what our proper response should be in the Son. Jesus’ relationship with the Father in the Spirit is the God we know. As the Apostle John writes in his Gospel: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The question arises then, “How can we know this?”

Well, if you remember, in that sermon I said we relate to God personally or we know God in the same way we know another person. It was Martin Buber who said that we are not able to know other people as they are within themselves. We can only know the change that comes about in us having been in a relationship with them. This is true even of husbands and wives who have been married fifty-plus years. They know so much about each other that it almost seems they can read each others' minds, but they still don’t know what it is like to be the other. Even with best friends this is the case. I remember several times my best friend and I from my school days thinking the same thing at the same time, but that did not mean that we had somehow come to know who each other was within himself. Therefore, since we cannot know what it is like to be another it is very important that we learn to listen to each other. The closest we can come knowing what it is to be somebody else is to listen to them and try to put ourselves in their shoes. That’s called empathy. People need empathy not just sympathy. Sympathy is simply to share an emotion. Empathy is to understand. Listening is very important in relationships because the need to be heard and understood is so profoundly there within us each.

All of us have a deep-seated need to be heard and understood, indeed to be known. But, unfortunately our inner worlds are so cluttered up and there are things about us that we don’t want anybody to know. Therefore, we hide our inner-selves from others. This is what the writer of the Adam and Eve narrative in Genesis 3 sought to highlight by describing Adam and Eve hiding themselves from the Lord God in the Garden after eating the fruit after clothing themselves inadequately. Despite our hiding of ourselves and the ill-fitting “clothes” of self-image we portray. We need to be heard and understood most particularly in the parts of ourselves where we feel the greatest shame.

In the Roman Catholic church they have a ritual of listening called regular confession. They understand that God has given confession to us as a gift of his grace to help us give our sin to the Lord and let him bear it away. Outsiders looking in think that Catholics do this because they believe that God won’t love them unless they confess their sins to a priest. That is so wrong of us to say. The Trinity has given his people confession because it is so incredibly freeing to have another human being listen to you and know your deepest, darkest secrets. People in Twelve Step programs for recovery from addiction know full well the benefits of steps 4, 5, and six where one takes a “fearless” moral inventory of oneself and then confesses it all to another person and then knows that God will in time heal them of these hurts and character flaws. Step Five the confession part is remarkably freeing. To confess sin is to confess one’s brokenness. It is incredibly restorative, incredibly healing when we confess our brokenness and find forgiveness there.

The concept of forgiveness in both the Hebrew and Greek languages is much richer than the penal almost contractual exchange between victim and perpetrator that we have in Western thinking. Forgiveness for us follows the pattern of an offense occurs necessitating an apology and forgiveness may or may not follow. Or, an offense occurs which necessitates an apology yet the apology never comes but we teach we must still forgive meaning not hold a grudge. The Hebrew word we translate as forgive means to lift up or carry away. Likewise, the Greek word means to let go, to release, to leave behind. The concept is one of expiation like putting a teabag on an infected tooth to draw the infection out and cleanse the wound. The forgiveness which the Trinity has extended to us by Jesus Christ through his death is expiatory. He takes the infection of sin in our inner being and cleanses us with his very self.

           Well anyway, I’m beginning to get the cart before the horse here. In our passage from Jeremiah the Trinity says there will come a day when people “will no longer teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” Ever since God’s revealing himself in, through, and as Jesus Christ as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that day has been in effect. In Jesus Christ the Trinity has revealed himself as the one who forgives our iniquity, our wickedness, our unfaithfulness, indeed our shame-stained inner-selves. The Trinity has come to us and revealed that he knows the bum-side of our hearts and forgives us. All the brokenness that is in us by our own hands and by the hands of others, the Trinity has heard and says, “Forgiven.” That is who the Trinity is in himself. The Trinity is as he does. We’re not. The effect that the Trinity has on us, the change that is rendered in us that we know by encounter with God is forgiveness – the bad stuff is taken away from deep within us. To know this forgiveness is to know the loving communion that is at the very heart of the Trinity. It is to be heard and healed by hearing the Trinity say “I know who you are and you are forgiven and welcome in my presence. Live a new life.”

           Sin is something greater than bad behavior. It is that we are alienated from the Trinity. We don’t know who the Trinity is in his heart. The Bible says we should. We were created to know the Trinity as the Trinity is in himself, but we rebelled by wanting to be god ourselves and wanting to know as he knows without any limitations. Sin is also a problem with our perception in that we can’t see the Trinity because “all I can see is myself.” This problem of perception also affects our relationships. I cannot see Dana, my wife, for who she really is because all I can see is myself. I don’t think we were created to know one another to the point that there is no longer uniqueness of person where we all mold into one. The Trinity created us so that we would look at one another seeing one another not through the warped perspective of myself, but rather with the love the Trinity has for us each. We are created to see each other from the Trinity’s perspective. To know the Trinity is to see the world from the perspective of the Trinity’s love and grace. That is what it is to live without sin.

           In John's Gospel who recounts an incident of a woman having been caught in the act of adultery and being brought by an angry mob of men to the temple. Fortunately for her Jesus is the first person of “religious” authority they run into. So they decide to test him and hopefully drag him down with her. They say, “The law of Moses said we should stone her. What do you say, Teacher?” I love Jesus’ response here. He just squats and starts to write in the dirt. He’s not going to get caught in their little power game of morality. So they keep at him. Eventually, he stands up and says “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.” Then he squats down again yet by that question he has dragged them down with the woman. They leave in silence. One by one they walk away beginning with the elders; the one’s who had authority to render a verdict concerning the law of Moses. So we’re left with Jesus and this woman face to face. “Woman,” (a term of affection) “where are they? Has no one condemned you?” He asks. “No one, Lord.” Lord…she has realized who he is. Then Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go about your life and from now on sin no more.”

           By telling her to sin no more he wasn’t just telling her not to commit adultery again. Nor was he telling her to go and live a perfect, sinless life. That would be impossible. He was pointing out that now that she knew who he was and now has come to know the loving heart of the Trinity in forgiveness, she would no longer live by sin but rather by faith knowing the Lord…just as the Trinity said through Jeremiah. The mob, they thought they knew the Trinity because they knew the law of Moses. They taught one another to know the Lord meaning to learn what it says in the law of Moses about the Trinity, but the law wasn’t on their hearts. If it were, then they would have had a right to stone the woman for her adultery. But as all people sin and fall short of the glory of the Trinity, the Trinity’s choice would be either to destroy everyone as in the days of Noah or to forgive us and give us his Spirit and give us a new life to live knowing the Lord.

           Friends, the day has come. We know the Lord. He has revealed himself, shared himself with us. There is now therefore no sentence of death for those who are in Christ Jesus. The Trinity seeks a relationship with us each, a relationship that changes us as any relationship does, but this one is different for the Trinity really is as the Trinity does. He really does forgive us. He bears our sin away and makes us able to leave it behind. What he uses my mouth to say to you right now, I hope he is saying to you himself by his Spirit as we are gathered here in Christ. The Trinity says you are forgiven and he remembers your sin no more. Go live you life knowing the Lord Jesus and sin no more. Amen.

The Day the Manna Ceased

Text: Joshua 5:9-12

One of the most memorable Saturday Night Live skits for me is from a show when Steve Martin guest hosted. The show ended with him walking out on stage and looking up with a great deal of “what the…” on his face and he says “What in the h…. is that?” and then he says it with more emphasis, “What in the h…. is that?” Then Bill Murray comes out and gives a very priceless look of “What the…?” and says, “I don’t know. What in the h…. is that?” They just keep staring up into the air and asking that question and eventually the whole cast and crew is on the stage looking up asking, “What in the h….. is that?” The skit to me was just a great bit of comedy; very simple and required the cast to use their faces and vary the way they asked a simple question. So now we’re going to have a little acting class. I want you all to pick up your hymnal and look at it with the best “What the…” expression you can muster and with great puzzlement ask, “What in the heck is that?” Do it. Do it again.

Well, that’s a hymnal with songs of praise, prayer, encouragement, devotion, and overall a great help to your spiritual walk. Many churches use a video projector to project the words to some of the hymns and so forth and unfortunately one of the draw backs to that is losing the sense of having an unexplored repository of spiritual knowledge in your hands. A hymnal is a great witness to the voice, indeed our voice of praise and prayer and lament and joy, indeed, our relationship to the Triune God of Grace in song. We can hold the hymnal in our hands and, especially after singing one of the weirdest songs we’ve ever tried to follow, ask “What in the heck was that?” The answer to that question is “Even that weird dirge of a hymn was somebody’s attempt to bring manna to the people of God.”

The hymnal is full of manna for us. Well, you probably don’t know it, but in Hebrew the word “manna” simply means “What is it?” So, you’re out in the desert just freed from slavery in Egypt and you have no food (or water) and so you complain to Moses, “The LORD has brought us out here to die of starvation. Let’s go back to Egypt. At least there we had cucumbers to eat!” In response Moses rants on you a little and then the next morning you wake up and there’s this stuff on the ground with the dew. It looks like coriander and smells like bdellium (a type of myrrh) and so you ask “What in the heck is that?” Moses explains to you that it is manna. It is “What is it?” You get you some. You can grind it up and make cakes out of it and eat it. The first five days of the week gather just enough for your to eat. On the sixth day, gather enough for two days because it won’t come down on the seventh. Oh and by the way, if you gather more than you need it will become worm ridden, rotten, and stinky.” (Imagine if global economics worked this way.) So, the thing about which you said. “What in the heck is that?” is the very thing that will sustain your life for the next forty years and unfortunately your children’s life for 40 years of their lives.

Pick that hymnal up again. “Ask what is it?” It is manna. It will help sustain you for periods of time throughout your life. Pick up your Bible. It is manna. Through those words your Father in heaven will speak to you the words of life, the bread of life, the Word of life – Christ Jesus – the word, the bread that will sustain you in this life. Indeed, you will not find life-giving words elsewhere.

Worship, prayer, Christian fellowship, Bible study, singing hymns, these are manna for us. They sustain us in the wilderness as we are wandering from slavery to the old life of sin and feeling God-forsaken to the Promised Land of new life in Christ and God’s presence with us. But, let me push you a bit here. We also live in a day when the manna has ceased. Friends, we are eating the produce of the Promised Land. What I mean by that is we’ve been given the Holy Spirit who makes us to eat of the true bread from Heaven and be nourished in him. The Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus resurrected and ascended and therefore makes it so that we are being created anew in the New Creation life. Because the Holy Spirit indwells us and is at work in us and in our lives, we therefore are partakers in Jesus’ life, the new life of resurrection. Without the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, without his working the life of Christ in us our worship, prayer, Christian fellowship, and Bible Study are all just empty religious ritual and superstition. Without the Holy Spirit our faith is not real trust in the Trinity whom we have come to know as the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Rather, faith is nothing more than belief that there is a “God” because of our putting too much into coincidences. The Holy Spirit with and in us is real forgiveness, real reconciliation to God. Jesus death and resurrection was not simply some great exchange of his life for ours that is external to us and about which we must make a decision to believe it or not. Everything God accomplished for us in the very fact of becoming human as Jesus of Nazareth and the reconciling work he carried out in his life, death, and resurrection is made real in us by the gift of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is not given to us then we are not truly and utterly forgiven and reconciled to the Trinity for the Trinity would still be withholding himself from us. It’s like telling a person you forgive them and then refusing to trust them and rebuild the relationship anew.

Well, that’s enough theology for one day. I guess I need to give you some practology, a word which my spellchecker kept trying to automatically change to proctology and for some odd divine coincidental reason I’m sure. And since were speaking of odd coincidences, the name Joshua is our anglicized version of the Hebrew name Yehoshua. Yehoshua is rooted in the word Yeshua which means salvation or saviour or deliverer. Yehoshua translated into Greek is Yesous which we pronounce as Jesus. Moses was with the people in the desert where they ate manna. The Trinity was with them there also, providing for them, until the day when his promise to make them a nation and give them a land would be fulfilled. In the wilderness they became a great and numerous people and were made ready to receive the land and become a great nation. Joshua, on the other hand, led them into the promised land where they would eat of what it provided for them. No longer were they to wander aimlessly. Now they were to go forth with the purpose of taking the land that the Trinity was giving them and then become a nation.

Similarly, Jesus our Deliverer has brought us to a place where we are now eating the produce of his kingdom, his reign, as it is breaking forth into our day from the future. We eat him and are nourished on him by the gift of the Holy Spirit. We are being changed by the Holy Spirit bringing us to know the person and personality of Jesus Christ and this is indeed a way of life that is modelled upon the way of the cross. Yes, to live this life we need our hymnals for this. So also we need our Bibles and prayer. We need Christian fellowship. We need worship and teaching. We need the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. We need time just to sit in the presence of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit uses these forms of manna to open us up to meet Jesus personally.

But, unlike Joshua and the conquest of the Land by force, Jesus is leading us forth to do the work of forgiveness and reconciliation. Paul says in Colossians “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” All things are reconciled to the Trinity. This is evidenced to us by the presence of the Holy Spirit who is our real forgiveness and reconciliation to the Trinity.

Paul further says in 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 that the Trinity has therefore made us to be ministers of reconciliation. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed 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. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” By the work of His Spirit in us the Trinity is making us able to speak the gospel, able to speak the truth to people that brings about real reconciliation.

We cannot separate our doing from our being. Our first order of conquest having crossed into the in-breaking of the promised day of New Creation by the gift of the Holy Spirit is to forgive and work towards reconciliation with those we need to forgive and those who need to forgive us whether they be in our families, in our church, in our workplaces, or in our community. Our second order of conquest is to help others do the same. Reconciliation is the in-breaking of the reign of Christ.

Reconciliation simply means “to meet again”. It is to re-establish a trusting and proactive relationship with those whom we were at enmity. It is restoring mutual respect between those who have lost respect for each other and become disrespectful. Reconciliation begins with getting people to come to the truth. When we reconcile a bank account truth is established by making sure that personal records concur with bank records. So also in reconciliation truth is established by getting people to sit down together and have them each say what they believed happened, what they felt and why they did what they did. Truth comes about when they come to the same account of what happened and understand each other and each others feelings and apologies are given and received. Then reconciliation means learning to live together in the wake of the hurt and not trying to hurt one another again. It means striving to understand what went wrong in the first place, changing what patterns need to be changed, and working together to build a stronger, deeper relationship.

Reconciliation is the produce of the Promised Land for us. It’s easy for us to play at being spiritual by eating manna. We can come to church and Bible study and pray and worship and all that stuff, but the real food of the Christian faith is the real work of pronouncing that the Trinity has reconciled humanity to himself in Christ and getting on with the real work of forgiveness and reconciliation. Do that and I guarantee you people will be looking at you saying “what in heaven’s name is that?” and wanting to be a part of this New Creation. Amen.

The Thirst of Faith

Text: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13

           Agnosticism is a word that has gained in popularity the last 50 years. It is not the same thing as Atheism which denies the existence of God. Rather, agnosticism simply claims to have no evidence one way or the other as to the existence of God. The Agnostic is unknowing. There has been nothing in his world of experience that either proves or disproves the existence of God.

          I mention this because Paul begins our reading from 1 Corinthians expressing the desire that he did not want them to be unknowing about the Trinity’s actions towards the Hebrew people when they were wandering in the wilderness between slavery in Egypt and arriving at the Promised Land. Some people translate that word unknowing as ignorant, which is inappropriate. The word is actually the word from which we get agnostic. Paul does not want them left without evidence either way of the Trinity and his steadfast love and faithfulness while they themselves were going through the wilderness of disunity in their fellowship. He did not want them to become functionally agnostic.

           Paul uses this idea of unknowing quite a bit. Most strikingly he uses it in Romans Chapter Ten where he explains why his fellow Jews were rejecting their Messiah. He says it is because they are unknowing or agnostic with respect to knowing the Trinity’s steadfast love and faithfulness. The Jews of Paul’s day were a generation or so of the Trinity’s children who had not experienced the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Trinity. They had nothing real to base their faith on and unfortunately did not look back to their story which claims the Trinity’s abiding presence, love, and faithfulness. They were functionally agnostic meaning they believed in the Trinity, but had no proof either way of the Trinity’s existence. They were trying to serve a God they no longer knew and, thus turned their relationship to the Trinity into a religion centered on their own faithfulness rather than the Trinity’s faithfulness to them. That is why they couldn’t/wouldn’t see who Jesus is.

           Many churches today are filled with functional agnostics. We’ve been taught to believe in God and things about God. Note that I have not called God Trinity here for most Christians in Western Christianity do not have a Trinitarian knowing of God but rather have a unitarian conception of something we call God, an “in God we trust”. We will serve this unitarian God dutifully usually through serving the church because we believe serving the church is good people are supposed to. But, with respect to having personally experienced the Trinity's acting on our behalf according to his steadfast love and faithfulness we are functionally agnostic. We have no personal proof as to whether or not the Trinity is steadfastly loving and faithful or present to and with us. Therefore, we wind up being Christians who place our faith in our beliefs and dutifully serve those beliefs which we institutionalize in the Church. Worse, some of us will regard those who say that they have experienced the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Trinity who is present to and with us as if they were crazy. The worst cases wouldn’t know an act of the Trinity in their lives if it bit them because they are too set in their own beliefs and ways of doing their duty to allow themselves to be open to the possibility that the Trinity would and does act in our lives.

           Whole congregations also fall into functional agnosticism. We forget or are just plain unknowing that the Trinity is acting in and through us and in turn just do what we believe churches are supposed to do. We do worship. We have Sunday School. We do fundraising. We help charities, visit one another, and have potlucks. Yet, somewhere in the mix of things we loose sight of what the Trinity is actually doing in and through us. God the Trinity works to build community in the Trinity’s own image by pouring his Holy Spirit into us that we may love each other and the world outside as Christ Jesus has loved each of us. The sure sign of functional agnosticism in a church is that it winds up doing things for the sake of doing things rather than taking the risk to build deeper relationships among itself and with the surrounding community.

           Paul writes the Corinthians hoping to prevent them from falling into this functional agnosticism. Their churches were being torn apart by factions competing for control and the resulting disunity was causing them to loose sight of their Christ-mindedness. In actuality, they were slipping back into being just like all the other cult-like charismatic religions in Corinth. So Paul reminds them of how the Trinity provided for the Israelites in the wilderness. Together, they followed the cloud and passed through the sea. Together, they followed Moses, their leader. When, together, they hungered, the Trinity fed them with manna and quail. When, together, they thirsted, the Trinity gave them water from the rock. They had provision everywhere they went because Christ, the Rock, was with them.

           Yet, regardless of the mighty acts of the Trinity’s steadfast love and faithfulness and even though the Trinity was personally present to and with them, many of the Israelites fell into a most tragic form of functional agnosticism by declaring that none of these mighty acts were for sure the acts of the Trinity - the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they made an idol of an Egyptian god and rose up to worship it with a feast that culminated in an orgy. They also put the Trinity to the test, routinely complaining and wishing to be back in Egypt where the food was better. Most strikingly, because of fear they refused to enter the Promised Land the first time they came to it. So, along the way the Trinity struck many of them down and prolonged their time in the wilderness. Like the Israelites, the Corinthians were in the wilderness of disunity having to learn faith.

In the wilderness the Trinity teaches us to rely on his steadfast love and faithfulness by letting us hunger and thirst for Christ so that he may provide what we really need and prove his love and faithfulness. The wilderness keeps us from becoming functionally agnostic. In the wilderness we can find ourselves tempted to carry on like the ancient Israelites. We can and do create false gods out of our perceived needs and serve them hoping that in so doing we will satisfy our hunger and thirst for “in God we trust”. We will test the Trinity telling him to prove himself in a particular way making the bargain that if the Trinity does it, we will believe. We complain at the Trinity because life in the wilderness isn’t as fulfilling as doing our own thing was. We complain about what the Trinity provides us with thinking it doesn’t really meet what we believe our needs to be.

Yet, the Trinity provides us with exactly what we need. Learning faith is learning that the Trinity can and does satisfy our thirst to have faith. The Trinity leads us into the wilderness of trials that are common to life, very painful trials where the test is to trust the Trinity and let him show us his living and healing way out. As Isaiah said, “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways are not God’s ways.” When we find ourselves wandering in the wilderness thirsty for faith, we just have to trust the Trinity is doing something for our good. Truly, when the Trinity speaks his word it accomplishes its purpose. Everything that happens in our lives good and bad is the Trinity working to establish our faith and to make us more Christ-like. When we come to the end of our time in the wilderness, and it does end, we truly do find that the Trinity has brought forth a new peace and joy in us that satisfies our thirsting. Somehow he speaks and things happen that teach us his love and faithfulness and we can’t help but draw closer to him in faith.

So, my friends, when in the wilderness seek the Lord because it is there in the wilderness that he certainly can be found. Pray, read scripture, spend time with Christian friends, share your trials and most importantly avoid doing anything that you now is just an effort to meet what you perceive to be your needs. the Trinity is working way deeper in you than you can understand. Friends, if you are in the wilderness, seek the Lord for in the wilderness he can especially be found. Amen.