The Lord Is Our Pastor

Text: John 10:11-18
Audio Recording

Whenever a church comes into a new relationship with a new minister the question of what that new minister would like to be called always comes up and we are fooling ourselves if we do not appreciate it as a sensitive topic.  Speaking for the larger church most ministers these days do not want to be addressed by anything other than their name.  We don’t want a title because that makes us appear “entitled” or rather sets us apart from the rest of God’s people as if we are more holy, more special, or somehow closer to God.  It is a rule of thumb that  if a minister demands a title then you’re probably dealing with more ego than you want.  It is especially strange for us when you consider that most ministers in Mainline churches today are among the youngest people in the church.  I should be called “Sonny Boy”, not Reverend or Doctor.  We feel the same about wearing collars and robes.  The only reason I wear a collar on Sunday and other occasions is that I was raised to respect my elders and I know the elder church likes to see a collar.  I only wear the robe for high holy days.  I take Jesus as my lead there.  We don’t know exactly what he wore, but we can be reasonably sure that he did not dress like a Scribe, or a Pharisee, or a Priest.  The ministerial garb and titles, in my not so humble opinion, crosses the line into the realm of religion and superstition that Jesus confronted vehemently. 

But back to the topic at hand, people did call Jesus “Rabbi” which meant “Teacher” or “Rabboni” which was a term of endearment for a teacher.  This fact would seem to indicate that some titular designation is in order.  This is particularly so if there are young children in the church for many parents will want their children to respect the minister and will ask what title they should use and we have to respect that request.  Personally, I prefer simply to be called by my name, Randy…although, there is an unfortunate connotation there – the randy minister.  Down in West Virginia most people just called me “the preacher”.  Where kids are involved “Preacher Randy” is fine.  That said, you may call me want you want, but please don’t call me Pastor or Pastor Randy.  I’ll explain. 

Back when I was working on that Doctor of Ministry degree one day in class we were discussing the role of the “pastor” in the early church.  It seems that the early church liked to think of Jesus as being “the Pastor.”  Pastor, if you’re wondering, is just an alternate word for Shepherd.  Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd and indicated that all the other shepherds or leaders in the church were secondary to him.  It was the role of the pastor (actually overseer or elder are the New Testament terms) in the early church to point to the True Pastor, Jesus, and not to be “The Pastor.”  The pastor of the congregation was simply to feed the flock meaning teach them.

I think the Old Order Mennonites and the Amish are good examples of this.  They will pick a preaching “elder” by lot from among the “elders” of the community to shoulder the burden of the preaching responsibility for the community and this on top of fulltime farming work.  They believe that the whole congregation embodies Jesus, “the Pastor”, and they in the way they care for each other carry out Jesus’ ministry and this is especially true for the governing elders as a whole.  The preaching pastor just feeds the flock for a set amount of time so that no one person becomes forever identified with that role.  In my deep down heart of hearts, I can’t help but feel that the way they do it is the way it ought to be: Jesus ministry embodied by the whole community yet especially among the ruling elders of whom one of them takes the preaching/teaching office for a short period of time.

Now let me back up again to my discomfort with the title “Pastor”.  One of my classmates in the discussion that day shared that his wife was studying to become a counsellor and as part of her training she had to take a class in pastoral care.  She came home from that particular class one day livid.  He inquired.  She responded, “You guys just think you’re God.”  Now, having attended a few of these pastoral care classes myself, I knew exactly what she meant.  I remember one of my pastoral care professors saying to us “like it or not people will associate your presence with God’s presence particularly when they are in some sort of crisis like being in the hospital.  Be aware of that.” 

Honestly, sometimes ministers are too aware of this and we let it go to our heads.  We start to believe that Jesus cannot do his work without us.  Instead of pointing you folks to the One True Pastor, we usurp his place and in his place then has arisen the myth that a church isn’t a real church without a collar-wearing professional minister or as of late an articulate rockstar wearing a headset and blue jeans.  The result of this is that at one extreme we wind up with a congregation that is what could be called “a cult of personality” where instead of being a living extension of the person of Jesus Christ it just simply becomes the extension of the personality of its minister; a minister who is very good at eliciting, indeed manipulating, certain “religious affections” or experiences out of people.  When that minister leaves, the crowds that followed move on to the next best thing at the church across town.  Those who stay crucify whoever comes next.  At the other extreme of this usurpation of Jesus rightful place as our One True Pastor is that congregations demand we do it.  After all, you’re paying us for something, right?  No matter the extreme, when Jesus’ ministry gets usurped by ministers the fatal result is that his ministry withers away from its rightful place of being embodied in and by the people of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.

So, what then is it that a minister is supposed to do if not everything?  Notable in the Presbyterian Church is our requirement for seminary-trained ministers.  We have an educated clergy because we believe that it is the responsibility of the seminary-trained minister to preserve and pass on to the whole church first and foremost the Gospel of Jesus Christ, proper worship particularly in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism, proper interpretation of the Bible, the theology and tradition of the church, and “soul care”.  Ministers are teaching elders meant to equip a church for ministry and to prevent the church from withering in superstition.  The only thing specific that the Presbyterian Church in Canada has to say about the work of the minister is that we are in congregations as the extension of Presbytery as the moderator (not CEO) of the Session and that we are responsible for the content and conduct of worship.  This means then that everything else that congregations have come expect from their paid minister—the sole responsibility for pastoral care, Lee Iacocca-like leadership, and expertise on everything from Leviticus to toilet replacement realizing that toilet replace is more important—all that is actually the responsibility of the Session of which the minister is only Moderator and teacher. 

If we want a job specific title to tag onto a Presbyterian Church in Canada minister it would be either Moderator or simply Teacher, but definitely not Pastor. “The Lord is my Shepherd”, wrote King David.  Another way of saying that is “The Lord is my Pastor.”  Jesus provides for your every need.  He gives you rest.  He protects and comforts you when you walk in the valley of the shadow of death.  He sets a table before you—he blesses you with a feast—in the face of your enemies.  He has made it so that you—each of you—do dwell in God’s house all the days of your lives.  Indeed, he is always with you.

Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”  Jesus is the one who loves us so much that he gave his life for us.  He lived in our place the faithful and obedient life that we cannot possibly live.  He suffered death to free us from death.  God raised him from the dead so that all Creation will be made new.  Jesus prays for us continually.  His whole life is for us.  I’m just one of the hired hands.  I’m likely to flee when the wolf comes.  Jesus defeated the wolf.  Try as I may it is humanly impossible for me to truly and sincerely care for anybody but myself.  We’re all like that.  But Jesus, he cares for you and you only.  When you are ill.  He’s with you, in you, praying for your health and restoring it to you.  When you are sad and defeated he is there comforting you.  When you are excelling he is there proud of you, cheering you on.  When you slip and falter, he is your faithfulness and your forgiveness.  Jesus is your Pastor.  I hope you will accept Him, talk to him, listen to him, heed him.  And remember, you each have a share in his ministry to share with each other.  Elders, you especially remember that.  Amen.

Lavished in Love

Text: 1 John 3:1-10
Audio Recording

In my last church down in Caledon we had an artist, Merle Harstone of Silvercreek Studios. Merle births abstract creations. Going to her house is a real treat. If there is a loll in the conversation, you can always just stare at one of her pictures. Admittedly, abstract art isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Most people will want a picture of something and know what it is and appreciate the artist’s interpretation and skill. Abstract art is different. What you see in the picture usually tells you more about yourself than it does about the artist or anything else. It can be like looking at the clouds to see what shapes appear.

This is one of Merle’s paintings entitled “freedom with limits”. She gave it to my family a few years ago around the time my daughter was born because she knew I had formed a special attachment to it. At face value it seems just a bunch of shapes, lines, and colors. But the more I look at it the more I see. The very first time I saw it, the first image (or icon if I may) that drew me in to ponder is what appears to be the bare back and neck of a very elegant woman with a Victorian hairstyle and dress. That should tell me something about myself, but we won’t go there. If it helps, Dana saw it to. Then I saw this spot here in the upper left quadrant and for some reason it looked like a blackened eye swollen shut on a face that is angled down to look at me. And then here just above it is this series of dots that look like a crown of thorns. There is royal blue where there should be blood. The wrinkled tissue paper all over looks like capillaries on the human heart in some places and tree roots and branches in others. Here’s one of those Christian fish symbols. I asked Merle if any of what I saw was there by her intention and of course she said no. It was just what I was seeing. 

There’s a sermon in this painting that I don’t think Merle was aware she was delivering…a sermon for me that I share with you for which Merle through her creativity was the conduit. When I look at this painting I will forever see the face of King Jesus crowned in thorns and looking down to me from the cross. I see him. He sees me and I come to understand that he, the Crucified One, needs to be rooted deeply in my heart, as it’s very capillaries in order for me to have a life in him that is as majestic as a well-aged and very wise old tree. The fish symbol connects me to the early church because it was the symbol that identified Christians back then rather than the cross. It reminds me that Jesus is King Jesus, the Anointed King who fed all those people with a few loaves and a couple of fish and it also reminds that we are fishers of men as well. 

I'm not sure what to do with the lady though. I think she represents the church to me and I see two ways of seeing her. I could see her as being seductive with her hair pulled up and neck and back bared but then she’s done up in this Victorian dress and the Victorian age was known for its prudishness. Moreover, she looks away from her crucified Lover to something else. Is the message here that the Church is little more than a seductive, Victorian prude who spurns her Lord while wiling for another? I don’t know about that. Another way to see her is to say that a woman exposing the nape of her neck is a sign of vulnerability and it may be that she represents to me that the way the church is to embody Christ and indeed learn to love him, is to let herself be vulnerable and in that vulnerability lies her beauty.

Well, this lesson in abstract art is neither here nor there. But, you never know what you’re going to see until you actually take the time and make the effort to look at things, life, God. Nevertheless, keeping this lesson in mind let’s look at our reading here 1 John. You see, John wants us to look and see something here; something that when we see it we are going to understand who we are and what we are becoming through are relationship with God and one another in Christ Jesus by the work of the Holy Spirit. John says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” Children of God - God himself calls us his own children. This is a great love that God lavishes upon us.

I am a child and I have children and I know that it is something huge to say that God calls us each his child. I’m not poetic enough to be able say anything more than its huge, indeed staggering…you know, to take these feelings and all that I have towards my children and towards my parents and even those children I have felt parental towards and the people who have been like surrogate parents to me, to take those relationships, those bonds, those ties that bind and say that if you want to know and understand and experience what a relationship with God is, it is a bond quite like that. God calls us his children.

Yet, I don’t want to wax nostalgic about the love between parents and children and quite cheesily say that God’s love for us is the epitome of that. It’s not. God’s love for me as his child totally redefines how I feel and how I am towards my children and towards my parents. I can’t love my children with the same steadfast love and faithfulness that the Trinity swaddles me in. I can try…and I do try…but still the best I can do is point them beyond myself, beyond their mother to their Father in heaven and his love for them made real by the very mother-like loving presence of the Holy Spirit who in a great mystery bonds them, unions them, krazy glues them to Jesus Christ so that they know the love of God the Father just as he knows it through his union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. To be called children of God means we share Jesus’ relationship with the God Father in and through God the Holy Spirit. This is the great love that God has lavished upon us that John wants us to see.

I know I just threw a lot of theology at you. Theology can be abstract. When we describe what it is to be in a relationship with a God who has revealed himself to be Three in One and One Three, well, we’re going to run into some difficulties. But to talk of God in any other way than how has revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ as it is attested in Scripture is to talk about an idol that we have created in our own image. It is a waste of time and too often a harmful waste of time.

Let me send you home with an exercise in the abstract art of theology. When you look back over the work of abstract art that is your own life, do you see how God has lavished this great love upon you consistently at every turn without fail no matter how painful things may have gotten? I’ve had some nasty turns come up in my life. I’ve taken more than my share of wrong turns as well. Yet, through it all God the Trinity has be there and been faithful to me. Things aren’t perfect. Life is not one big episode of Leave It to Beaver with a little Jesus thrown in. This is a fallen, broken world but God is faithful. God is faithful.

One last thing, as a congregation we are God’s work of abstract art as well. We are collection of people whom God has called together and made it known to us that we are his children. If people were to look at us what would they see? Would they see, would they know that we are God’s children lavished in his love? When we practice righteousness, which is to know Jesus and live like him sharing in his relationship with the Father and his love for each of us and for everyone and when we love one another the world is supposed to see Jesus in us like I saw some very meaningful symbols in this painting. The world may not see it and in turn know who we are and through us see Jesus and know God and how God loves them. We are a work of abstract art in which God carefully and uniquely brushes images of himself and his love so that the world can see. Let’s not forget that, but rather put it on display by practicing righteousness and loving one another, indeed with vulnerability. Amen.

The Testimony to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus

Text: Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-23
Audio Recording

“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:33).  What a marked difference from the picture that we have of the apostles in our reading from John’s Gospel.  What happened that powerfully transformed them from cowering in fear behind locked doors to being a well respected community of people who not only boldly proclaimed the message of Jesus’ resurrection but they also embodied it to the extent of sharing all things in common and effectively eliminating poverty in their midst.  Something huge happened.

Just to recount the story, several days prior to our reading in John’s Gospel the “Jesus Movement” was huge.  Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem like a king to the accolades of a massive crowd only to have the same crowd nearly overnight shouting, “Crucify him.”  The Romans did indeed do that.  They beat him to the point that he was unrecognizable and then crucified him. And so we find the Disciples, a very small group, the Twelve and the women, cowering behind locked doors for fear that the same would happen to them.  In fact, they really didn’t know what had in the end happened to Jesus.  His body was gone from the tomb.  Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had gone there that Sunday morning and found the tomb empty as did Peter and John.  Some mysterious angel-like men told them that Jesus had been raised.  Mary Magdalene said she had spoken to Jesus, but at first she thought he was the gardener.  Then there were two of them who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus.  Luke reports that after seeing him they hurried back to Jerusalem and it is while they were telling the others what had happened that Jesus shows up there in the midst of them behind the locked doors and says ‘Peace, be with you” and showed them the scars and eats some fish. 

Then over the next forty days Jesus appeared to the Disciples several more times and Paul attests that at one point over 500 people saw Jesus.  He does many things to prove he was really alive and all the while he continued to instruct them on the Kingdom of God just as he had done prior to his death.  The last time they saw him, Jesus told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait until the Holy Spirit would come upon them with power and he disappeared into some clouds.  Two men in white said he would return one day in like fashion.  The Disciples then went back to Jerusalem and spent a lot of time praying… a lot of time praying.  There were 120 of them.

Jesus’ ascension was forty days after his resurrection.  Nine days later came Pentecost and the power came.  Pentecost was the day the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai and so there was again a great crowd in Jerusalem.  The 120 followers of Jesus were gathered together in one place and the Holy Spirit fell upon them like tongues of flame.  They began to speak in the languages of the Jews who had pilgrimaged to Jerusalem to worship on Pentecost and so they went out into the streets and began telling what God had powerfully done there in Jerusalem forty-nine days earlier, that God raised Jesus who had been crucified from the dead. 

Peter then stood up and answered the accusation that they were drunk by saying that what was happening there was what the prophet Joel had prophesied about; that the Holy Spirit would be poured upon God’s people.  He testified about Jesus, how he was the Messiah, how the Jewish authorities had had him crucified, how he had truly been dead, and that God had raised him from the dead and he had ascended to the right hand of God.  The Jesus whom they had crucified, God had made both Lord and Messiah.  (Lord was what the Romans called Caesar and yes, Peter is beginning to take on the Roman Empire here.)  3,000 people that day welcomed his message and were baptised.  They began to share their possessions in common, selling stuff and sharing with those among them who had need.  Day by day they went together to the temple to pray.  They met in each other’s homes for meals and to study the Scriptures.  The fellowship must have been incredible and the Lord continued to add to their number daily.

One day on the way to the temple Peter and John healed a man born lame and they did it in Jesus’ name.  The man leapt around praising God and Peter again testified that Jesus whom they had crucified God had raised from the dead and it was by Jesus name that this man was healed.  Then the Temple authorities had Peter and John arrested and brought before the High Priest, the chief priests, and the elders.  Peter testified again to Jesus’ resurrection, the one whom they had crucified, and that this man had been healed in Jesus’ name.  All that these “powerful” men could do to them was order them not to speak in the name of Jesus again.  And so Peter answered them saying: “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.”  Keep in mind, Peter and John some fifty days earlier had been cowering behind a locked door in fear of these very same men whom they were now standing before boldly testifying to the resurrection of Jesus whom they had crucified.

“We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard”! which is the testimony of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus.  Whenever I read these first chapters of the Book of Acts, which I just summed up for you, I stand back with my jaw to the ground in wonder and then I scratch my head in bewilderment as to how the church as I know it today compares.  The early church went from cowering in fear behind locked doors to being unable to keep from boldly proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus the crucified one and his Lordship and reign; a reign which they embodied in their communities to the extent that they virtually eliminated poverty among themselves.  The fellowship was so deep and rich in their communities that they daily got together in each others homes to pray and eat and study the Scriptures.  In comparison, yes, they had seen, touched, and talked to Jesus risen.  Yes, Pentecost was a very real and powerful experience for them.  But for us, we’re the ones about whom Jesus said, “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet are faithful.”  Blessed?  We look more like the Disciples when they were fearful and behind closed than when they were emboldened and unable to keep from boldly testifying to the fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  

Let me say something about this but first let me make it clear that the last thing I want to do is blame the people in the pew for the state of the church today.  For truly, in this day and time if you are in church on a Sunday morning you are one of what could be called the faithful remnant.  It is not for your/our lack of faith that the churches struggle as they do these days.  So, just shy of 70 percent of all Christian fellowships in North America particularly those in the Mainline traditions have less that 60 people at their worship services and they are all worried about their institutional survival because they are encumbered with the buildings and salary packages of a church that in its hay day in the 1950’s and 60’s really was what we could compare to a market bubble.  Active participation in Mainline churches today statistically resembles what it was pre-World War II.  We have undergone a market correction so to speak.  There have been times over the last 300 years that the church has bubbled but it has always returned to smaller fellowships.

Our particular challenge today is that we are very heavy on the Senior Citizen side of the spectrum in comparison to the young family side of the spectrum.  The faith needs to be passed on and this is problematic when, and I hope I’m not out of line on this, when most to all of us oddly grow mute when it comes to speaking about our resurrected Lord whom we know lives and has indeed been personally faithful to us each in a steadfastly loving way.  Again, I do not want to blame us for this muteness for indeed it was God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus the Son from the dead whom the Disciples saw and it was the God the Father and Jesus the Son who poured out the Holy Spirit on the Disciples and empowered them to speak.  If we have mute tongues, weak hands, and lame knees when it comes to proclaiming Jesus risen and reigning, then we must not blame ourselves rather we must look to the Triune God of grace for the words, the strength, and the joyful leaping in praise to be able to give our testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Fearful and behind closed doors, believe it or not, is a good place to be for it is here that we realize the church is not in our hands.  It belongs to Jesus Christ.  We must turn it over to his will and care.  Yet, there is something we should be doing here behind these doors – prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship around the tables back there, around your tables at home, and even with our folks at the nursing homes is what we need to be doing.  It is in this kind of fellowship that Jesus, alive and in the power of the Holy Spirit, becomes evident, just like the Higher Power works powerfully among the folks in the AA fellowship that meets here Wednesday evenings delivering them from the compulsion to drink and healing their broken lives.  It is in this prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship that the Holy Spirit begins to overflow.  When we get together and share our lives and pray for one another and we begin to see those prayers answered, the more this happens the more we will find ourselves unable to keep from giving our testimony to the fact that Jesus is risen and reigns.

One last thing to say, this prayer-filled, Bible study-filled, sharing our burdens-filled, sharing a meal-filled, loving one another-filled fellowship needs to happen and your ministers cannot do it for you.  I would be tickled pink and I believe Timothy would be as well, if it just started to happen that you folks just started getting together regularly just to share your burdens and to pray for one another, or just to open the Bible and read a paragraph or two and start talking about it (simple as that), and share a pot of soup and some homemade bread or just a cup of coffee (food always helps).  This needs to happen.  It does and you know what?  It works.  Amen.

Raised with Christ

Text: Romans 6:1-14; Colossians 3:1-4
Audio Recording

We disciples of Jesus Christ have some statements to make about reality.  I call them statements rather than beliefs because if you call them beliefs they are immediately thrown into the world of comparative religions and Christian faith is not religion.  Christianity can certainly be called religion, all the pomp and circumstance we have created and dogmatized around Christian faith, but Christian faith is not that.  What God is doing for his Creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah or Christ is not a matter of personal religious belief.  It is reality, real historical and indeed physical reality.

At the top of that list of these statements is that God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ God has revealed God-self to be Trinity - three Persons who give themselves so utterly completely and unselfishly indeed sacrificially to one another in unconditional love that they are One.  If we miss this, that God is loving communion of Persons then we miss what it is to be humans created in the image of God and certainly miss what it is to be the Church.  

Another statement about real historical and scientific reality that we followers of Jesus Christ have to make is that Jesus Christ is God the Son become human flesh.  This was a hard one to believe from the very start.  For a Jew, it was blasphemous to say the God became human.  Gentiles didn’t buy it either asking, “Why would divinity, which is pure and perfect, become human?  We are weak, dull, sickly, routinely break out with fungi, stinky, and we die.”  It wasn’t until the 300’s that the Christian church stated definitively that Jesus is God the Son become human with neither his divinity nor his humanity being diminished.. The reason we state this as fact is as Gregory of Nazianzus said back in the 300’s, “What was not assumed is not healed.”  To heal his fallen Creation and us humans of the futility of sin and death, God had to take upon himself our fallenness and die with it so that it would be once and for all dead.  Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection has opened up a new way to be human that will come to its fruition when Jesus returns.  The Apostle John in his Gospel liked to call that new way Eternal Life, a new human form of being in which we are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit through whom we are in union with Jesus the Son to share his relationship of steadfast love and faithfulness with the Father to the Father’s glory.  In, through, and as Jesus God has brought human being, history, and even physical matter into his very self, into the loving communion of his very self, and therefore he has and will heal it.

A third Christian statement that is readily dismissed these days is that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead.  Many not just scientists and philosophers but even Bible scholars today are resolute that this did not happen.  Many will say that Jesus' body was simply stolen by his disciples and buried elsewhere and then they made the whole thing up.  If that was the case, then why did the disciples of whom we have historical record live lives of poverty and die horrible deaths just to continue a lie.   If you are a fan of the DaVinci Code, then you say Jesus' disciples staged his death and he went on to live a long and happy life marrying Mary Magdalene and having children.  If you are bent towards psychology and looking for a quasi-scientific explanation, you will say that the post-resurrection experiences that his disciples had were just communal experiences of grief that involved a common hallucination of Jesus caused by mass hysteria among twenty-some people.  To my knowledge, such a hallucination has never been documented as ever happening among any group of people.  Most people just fall back on reason and say that Resurrection is impossible.  Therefore, it never happened.  Yet, they believe there was something God-special about this Jesus and so they follow his teachings and enjoy private spiritual experiences.  And finally, there are Christians who wholeheartedly believe in re-incarnation because for some reason that seems more plausible than resurrection.  I could handle re-incarnation as long as I come back as a roach in the kitchen of a kind old grandma in rural Mexico; all-you-can-eat real Mexican food.  Sign me up.

The Gospel proclamation is that God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son become human, from the dead.  Jesus in his resurrection has a real human body that could eat and be touched.  Yet, his body was a resurrected body and that leaves us hanging a bit.  What is a resurrected body?  According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, it is a spiritual body that is immortal and imperishable.  That's a bit misleading for us, for whenever the word spiritual comes up, we start thinking ethereal or ghostlike wisps of energy.  But, by a spiritual body Paul meant not only a person who is personally related to God, but also a body that has been made alive by God that will indeed never die; a body in which every particle is infused with the life of God.

As Christians, the resurrection is at the heart of our very real hope.   Resurrection means that death is not the final answer; that though we die, we will not die.  We will live again in bodies; not as angels with harps sitting on clouds in heaven or as stars, none of those lies people tell their children.  Even though this physical fallen body will and must die, we will not experience death, complete cut-off-ness from God.  As Jesus told the thief on the cross, when we die we will be with him in Paradise, a (I presume) bodiless state, until the resurrection when we will be given resurrection bodies, bodies of real human flesh in which every particle about us knows the living and loving God and will never die again.

So, since it is the case that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is where this Creation is heading, we should therefore begin to live the resurrected life now.  Let’s talk about Baptism for a minute.  Paul says that if we have been baptized into Christ, we have then been baptized into his death.  Basically, we are already dead.  This old self of ours has been crucified with Jesus, in his crucifixion in order that this body of sin might be brought to nothing, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin for a person who has died has been set free from sin.  Hear this, in our union with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit at our Baptism (and it doesn’t matter whether we were an unknowing infant or even how it was done) we died with him and we are now raised with him to share in his resurrected life now by means of the Holy Spirit.  If his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, loving Communion of the Trinity lives in us, then the state of our being, our very existence is that we are free from death and our enslavement to sin and are now free to live in and for God. 

Therefore, Paul instructs us in Colossians to seek the things that are above where Christ is for our lives are hidden in God with Christ.  Live according to that hunger to be with your brothers and sisters in Christ in worship, in study, in fellowship.  Live according to that hunger to pray and read the Bible and hear the Trinity speak to you.  Live according to the hunger for seeing justice happen in this world, of seeing the poor fed and the sick healed.  Live according to the hunger to know oneself as always being in the presence of God.  Live in constant reminded that no matter what, you are a beloved child of God in whom he takes great joy”.  Live this way and you will be living Eternal Life.  Amen.

This Resurrection Sunday marks a new beginning in the life of this congregation and three others, a new way of shared ministry that I personally think resembles more what the New Testament Church may have looked like.  But, I am reluctant to can say that doing Church a new way is an example of Resurrection.  Resurrection is what happens when each of as are enlivened by the Holy Spirit to live our life in Christ.  So, today I think it is important that we remember our Baptisms and reaffirm our vows to be his faithful disciples.  It is in the midst of faithful discipleship that resurrection becomes evident.  Let us gather to the fount.

Yom Kippur and Good Friday

Text: Hebrews 10:16-25
Audio Recording

To understand Good Friday and the meaning of Jesus death we have to take a dive into the sacrificial system of ancient Israel and find our meaning for it there otherwise we are left with Medieval Christianity’s over use of the metaphor of penal substitution, that Jesus died our deserved penalty of death for our sins to appease the Father’s wrath.  If you take a plunge into the Book of Leviticus and look at what was done on the Day of Atonement, the day that Ancient Israel dealt with its sin, you will find something there that is markedly different than a sacrifice to appease God’s wrath or what is known as a sacrifice of propitiation meaning going towards a god to beg presumably for one’s life.

Yom Kippur was a very solemn day.  Everyone spent the day prayerfully reflecting on their walk according to the Covenant.  They fasted.  No one worked.  They knew the Lord God lived in the Temple and that their sins and the resulting stain of sin which we call iniquity (shame, guilt, regret, broken relationships) could drive him away.   Therefore, the temple needed to be cleansed from its contact with iniquity and the people’s iniquity was removed far from them.  Yom Kippur was the day they did this in the way that God told them to do it.  The sacrifices on Yom Kippur were sacrifices of expiation through which the LORD God draws forth and cleanse us from our sin.  

On the Day of Atonement the High Priest would take a bull and two goats from the people for this purpose.  The bull was for expiating the iniquity of the priesthood, those who stood representationally for the whole people and who dealt directly with matters in the temple.  Their own sin dirtied hands and lives and the iniquity they incurred for dealing with the sins of the people stained the temple, God’s abode, and themselves.  He would slaughter, or the word is better translated as holocaust, the bull.  He would then take a bowl of the blood and some incense and go into the Holy of Holies, the room at the back of the Temple where the Ark of the Covenant was.  The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat and it was there that they believed God sat enthroned on earth.  The High Priest would fill the room with the smoke of the incense, which represents the prayers of the people, so that he would not directly see God.  The he would dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times on the Mercy Seat.  Then he would take one of the goats that was chosen by lot from the two, as it represented the iniquity of the people, and return to the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat with it as well in the same way with its blood.  On the way also sprinkled some of this around the rest of the temple to cleanse it.  When he came back out he then took blood from both the bull and the goat and sprinkled each seven times upon horns of the altar upon which sacrifices were made and cleansed it of iniquity.

There is something significant happening here with respect to the blood that we can’t miss.  Leviticus 17:11-12 says something that troubles me for I like my steaks very rare: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore, I have said to the people of Israel, ‘No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood’.”  The blood of the bull and the goat represents life that has passed through death and as such it has the power to cleanse what it contacts from iniquity and one more thing – it unites God and the people.  The High Priest who stood in representation of the people gets this blood, this life that has passed through death, on his hand and sprinkles it onto God sitting one the Mercy Seat.  Thus the people and God are united in this life that has passed through death.  That’s what Atonement is (At-One-Ment).  I hope you see the foreshadowing here of Jesus and his death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  By his death and resurrection Jesus’ human life passed through death and is given to us through the work of the Holy Spirit.  When you hear all those metaphors about being washed in the blood of Jesus and so forth this is what it means.

We still have on goat to go.  The High Priest then took the second goat and placed both his hands upon its head and whispered the sins of the people into its ear.  Then somebody led the goat out into the wilderness and set it free so that it could be utterly destroyed by whatever befell it.  You have heard of the term scapegoat, when some innocent party takes the blame for somebody else.  This goat bears away the sins of the people to where these sins may be destroyed in death. 

There is something significant we must note here as well.  The Hebrew word for forgiveness does not mean a simple release of guilt from another. It is not a “legal” transaction where someone apologizes or not for a wrong done to someone else and the someone else decides not to punish them for it.  The Hebrew word, nasa, (the Space Shuttle would be a good metaphor here) means to bear, to pick up and carry.  If you remember the story of the four men who carried a paralytic to Jesus to be healed and how they had to tear through the roof of the house to get him to Jesus because of the crowd outside.  The Bible says that when Jesus saw their faith or rather their faithfulness towards their friend he said to the man “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  These men in love for their paralytic friend whom others would have called cursed by God for some concealed sin picked him up and carried him to Jesus.  That act of love and fellowship of friendship with someone everyone would have called cursed is what forgiveness is. 

Jesus, the Son of God become human, does the same thing for us as the Scapegoat goat did for Israel on Yom Kippur.  He innocently shares our fallen humanity with us and bears it away unto death removing it from us.   This bearing away of our sin is what forgiveness is and it is cleansing.  Just as you would put a tea bag on an infected wound to draw out the infection so does Jesus death draw out sins infection from humanity so God can heal it with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Looking at our reading from Hebrews Jesus has opened once and for all a new and living way to God.  He’s permanently cleansed the living temple of humanity and God the Holy Spirit now dwells in us and works to heal us from the inside out.  God has written his covenant upon our hearts.  And so as Paul writes in our passage from Hebrews: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

God has expiated our sin and iniquity by Jesus’ blood, his life that has passed through death.  There is no longer any need for any sacrifice of expiation or propitiation.  We are in union with the Trinity atoned by the Jesus’ life-giving blood, his life that has passed through death.  Moreover, he has scapegoated our sins away unto death where they are utterly destroyed.  The Trinity no longer counts anything against us.  There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  Amen.