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.
