Led by the Spirit

Text: Romans 8:12-17
Audio Recording

I don’t think that it is any secret that what we believe about a person, about who they are, will affect our relationship with them.  The same thing holds true for our beliefs about God.  What we believe about God can profoundly affect our growth in Christ as his disciples.  Let me expound on this a bit.  When I was a young teen I memorized The Apostles’ Creed as part of the catechism program for young people to join the church.  I believed the Apostles’ Creed, but…what I really believed about God was detrimental to my faith. 

When I made the confession “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth” what I really believed was that God is this bearded old man Creator and Ruler of the universe who sat on a throne in some far away place called Heaven watching and judging - the bad go to Hell when they die and the good go to Heaven.  Other than that he really wasn’t all that involved.  It was my responsibility to be good so that I wouldn’t go to Hell.

I also made the confession “and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into Hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”  But, my true beliefs regarding Jesus?  Well, I was fairly properly Sunday Schooled with the message that Jesus who is God’s Son loves the little children and that God is like Jesus – loving – but that still wasn’t enough to shake that image of the bearded old man who judges.  I believed Jesus to be the Son of the old man who became human for a bit to provide us with a means to forgiveness, basically a way to get out of Hell, if and only if we believe in him and come to church and be good.  After Easter he went back to Heaven to be Peter’s supervisor at the Pearly Gates and took over the Judge job.

I also confessed the third part of the Creed; “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”  Well, I knew that the Pope was important as well as taking communion, that the bearded old man probably forgives the sins of good people who go to church provided they don’t backslide, and going to Heaven was what resurrection and the life everlasting meant.  Yet, I had never really heard anything about the Holy Spirit other than that’s how Mary got pregnant.  In my later teens I began to hear a little more about the Holy Spirit and figured that he was the domain of Christians who were paranormal and TV preachers who used the same tricks that psychics used to turn a buck.  

So, as you see even though I confessed The Apostles’ Creed, my personal beliefs about God were far from the Trinitarian direction in which the Creed takes us.  I simply could not see beyond God being the bearded old judge who demanded I be a good, moral person or else.  Regardless of what the Gospel has to say about Jesus being God the Son become human to save God’s very good Creation from the effects of sin and death; and about God the Holy Spirit being given to us in Christ to make Jesus’ saving work effectual in us that we may be the living testimony of God’s promise to save his Creation; and all this because of God the Father’s great love and gracious plan for his Creation and our role in it as those who bear God’s image and give voice to Creation’s praise of its Creator…regardless of this biblical revelation of the true God, I still could not conceive of God other than as the bearded old Judge who demanded from me the fearful duty, the obligation, to be morally good, come to church, and believe pseudo-christian beliefs or else fear him and his threat of Hell.  

The bearded old Judge is not the Christian God.  He is rather the god of our culture and our belief in and service of him that is based not in grace but in our own ability and desire simply to be moral is a, if not the, primary factor in how and why the Christian Church in Western culture is dwindling.  If the Scripture holds true that says we become like the idols we worship (Ps. 135:18), then the church that worships and serves the bearded old Judge, persists as bearded old judges.  That being the case, why would the true God, the Trinity, want an institution that worships and serves a pseudo-version of himself to persist?  Our belief in this bearded old Judge has lead the churches of Western culture to be either overly focused on societal morality or being reactive to itself and going to the other extreme of being overly morally permissive.

We Christians need to get our God right if we are going to thrive into the future rather than perish.  The Church that will emerge and persist in the very near future will know and worship God the Trinity and be led by the Spirit to participate in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father.  We must seek to abide in the mystery of knowing God as the heavenly and almighty Father whom Isaiah found himself in the presence of, and as Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son who has become human flesh so that we might be born from above, born anew; and as the Holy Spirit who unites us to God in Christ and works in us the re-creation which the Son came to accomplish for us.  This is what Paul calls adoption.  God the Father Son and Holy Spirit find their unity, their being in giving themselves so completely to one another in mutual love that they are the One Triune God who reaches out to us in unconditional grace to build a community of people that loves as he does and therefore looks like him.

We are beloved children of God.  The Trinity’s acceptance of us is not based on how good and morally upright we can be.  His acceptance of us comes solely from his own decision to adopt us as his own and to infuse us with his very self, his very own DNA if I might make that analogy.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us putting to death our sinful nature.  Our work is not to focus on being good and morally upright in fear of losing God’s favour.  Our work is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit.  We must focus on being led by the Spirit and this is our work together as a community of God’s children.

AA is about the best example of this I can think of.  We should not call AA an organization.  It is an association of groups that exist for the purpose of helping the still suffering alcoholic.  These groups are unconditional in their acceptance of alcoholics (who incidentally are so often judged by churches) for they all know “there but for the grace of God go I”.  Judgement does happen in AA but it is a self-judgement, self-diagnosis brought about by hearing the stories of others who have been there, done that, and caused themselves and others to suffer dearly.  AA is a spiritual program not just a group of people helping each other abstain from substance abuse.  Its admitting powerlessness over alcohol and turning one’s life over to the will and care of God. It’s coming to grips with yourself and confessing to another. It’s forgiving and seeking to be forgiven.  Its participating in a group and helping each other and new comers.  Its having a sponsor, studying the Big Book, and fostering a prayer life.  They have a saying, “Keep coming back” because in simply coming to the group God works and changes a person.  Somewhere and some point in the process sometimes sooner sometimes later God takes away the compulsion to drink.  If you want to meet some really outstanding examples of what it is to be a human being, go to an open meeting of AA and talk to some people and hear their passion and compassion for each other.

Friends, this is the way the Church is supposed to be.  We are all broken.  We all suffer an –ism.  We’ve no right to judge another person for it is true, “there but for the grace of God go I.”  All we can do is share our own stories and how God has been faithful.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us often in spite of us making us to be more Jesus-like.  We need to read the Bible, foster our prayer lives, and mentor one another.  We need to come together and share our struggles.  We need to diagnose our sins and confess them to someone so that we know what it is to have our sins born away.  Most of all, we simply need to keep coming back and at some point in all this maybe sooner or maybe later we ourselves no matter our age or backgrounds will experience the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and be made new.  Amen.

The Work of the Holy Spirit

Text: Acts 2:1-21
Audio Recording

My Grandfather was a good man.  He was raised on a farm in tough times through the Great Depression, fought in World War II, came home and became a police officer.  He retired as Chief of Police of my hometown of Waynesboro, VA, which is a city about the size of Owen Sound.  He was quiet, calm.  I never saw him rattled. I remember one day he made the news for talking an armed man out of killing himself.  There was a bit of a stand off.  Granddaddy knew the man.  So, he just walked into the house, sat down, and talked the man out of it.  Just thinking of that still leaves me awestruck.

As far as church went, Granddaddy never went much.  When he did it was Baptist.  He rather got his church on TV.  I remember one evening we were watching a PTL Club Camp Meeting and they were singing praise songs and the singing stopped, things got kind of quiet, and then people started speaking in tongues. Granddaddy looked at me with a “What the Heck” look on his face and changed to The Nashville Network.  That apparently struck him as weird.

This was when I was about nineteen.  At that time in my life, Jesus had gotten a hold on me in a very real way.  I had left my Presbyterian roots and started to attend a Nazarene church.  At that church, things were different.  They didn’t speak in tongues or anything like that though they did sing a lot of praise songs and wave their hands.  The church was different in that the people didn’t go there because that’s what good people do.  They were going because they were experiencing the presence of God and their lives were changing.  They met in an elementary school cafeteria.  I remember the first time I walked through the doors into their fellowship.  I felt the presence of the Lord…the Holy Spirit.  This was new to me.  I was nineteen, troubled, broken hearted and all that and to know that God is real, to know that “It is well with my soul.”…well, things were changing for me too.

Well, Granddaddy’s world and my world collided one evening that summer.  I was living with them at the time.  It was the summer before I started university.  I happened to be studying my Bible that evening and came across a passage in Acts where Paul was in Ephesus and he asked the elders of the church there if they had ever received the Holy Spirit and they responded that they had never even heard of a Holy Spirit.  A conversation ensued and the Holy Spirit fell upon them just like he did in Jerusalem in Pentecost and they began to speak in tongues.

It was a little after ten and Granddaddy was still up watching TV.  I decided this moment had been ordained for me to probe a little into my grandfather’s spiritual state.  I went to the living room and read the passage to him and asked him if he had ever experienced the Holy Spirit.  He looked at me with that same “What the Heck” look and answered, “All those times in the war…I just had to of.”  He stood up and made his way to the stairs to go to bed and turned at the foot of the stairs and looked at me and shook his head in confusion wondering what was going on with me and then went on up to bed, end of conversation.  I had never seen Granddaddy irritated like that before.  At that moment, I realized that if you’re going to talk about the Holy Spirit you better be ready to talk about life in its most difficult times and about how people make it through by the grace of God sometimes not even knowing that God is there.  Death, grief, trauma, war, victimization, moral injury these are all times in which we are especially not alone.  God is there.  But not everybody feels the presence of the Holy Spirit in them.  Just because I was involved in a charismatic church did not mean we had a monopoly on the Holy Spirit. 

But anyway, the Holy Spirit is a difficult person to talk about.  The work of the Holy Spirit is to make it so we can experience God the Trinity and he does this by coming to be present with and in us.  He is real and can be felt.  This morning I’m going to take a different approach that what I took with my grandfather.  I going to sing a song called All Is Made Well by Glen Soderholm from his album World at REst.  Glen is a Presbyterian minister, Christian music artist, and a friend of mine.  He writes good music.  This song very beautifully sums up the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit comes and shows us the Father

And sings his dream over his sons and daughters

The Holy Spirit comes and shows us the Son

And breathes his mercy over everyone

And all is made well

It is well

In this embrace

The world is placed

And all things are new

The Holy Spirit comes and shows us Wisdom

And strengthens her people for the kingdom

The Holy Spirit comes and shows us each other

And moves us to live as sisters and brothers

And all is made well

It is well

In this embrace

The world is placed

And all things are new

The Holy Spirit comes

And shows us the Father

And sings his dream over his sons and daughters

The Holy Spirit comes

And shows us the Son

And breathes his mercy over everyone

And all is made

It is well[1]

I think this song really says it all when it comes to the work of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit brings us to the Father through the Son and makes us to know that we are in their presence regardless of our unworthiness or brokenness, that we’re there by the loving mercy, the favour, the grace that is in Jesus, which is the Holy Spirit and his work in us.  The Holy Spirit gives us the Father and the Son, brings us into their relationship so that we are daughters and sons too who know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God just as Jesus does;  and we get a taste, a vision, a dream, the Father’s dream of all things new…and it is well.

The Holy Spirit comes and gives us wisdom, the knowledge of how God wants us to live…an experience of the love of God so that we can live accordingly.  The Holy Spirit writes the ways of God upon our hearts so that we come to know intuitively how we are to live.  The Holy Spirit builds community in our midst.  He causes us to see each other as God sees us each.  He causes us to see each other with compassion and helps us to see beyond where people are at to what they could be and are in Jesus Christ and he moves us to help them in that journey.

Well, how do you put poetry into prose?  The Holy Spirit is with us, working.  Know that you are beloved children of the Father just as much as Jesus the Son is.  Open yourselves up to that reality.  Let the Holy Spirit make you new.  Amen.

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[1] Lyrics reprinted with the permission of Glen Soderholm.

Take Your Seat

Text: Ephesians 1:11-2:7; 4:7-16
Audio Recording

One Sunday after church a few months after Dana took her charge at St. Andrew’s Owen Sound one of her parishioners, knowing I was a minister too, asked me how I was enjoying just being able to come to church and sit in the pew and just be a part of the congregation.  I answered that I found it very difficult to sit in the pew.  I joked a bit about how God had given me a back that tolerated standing in the pulpit better than sitting on those hard pews.  But that aside, I had been a minister for fifteen years, all my education and experience eggs are in this basket, what I do and who I am is all tied up in being a minister, and not to mention I really enjoy the pulpit…not being able to do the ministry God had called me to and gifted me to do was brutally difficult.  I felt like I was being wasted and at times punished.  What had I done that Jesus didn’t want me for a sunbeam.  It is difficult for clergy to just be laity.  Ask any retired minister.  It is truly difficult for clergy to take your seat there in the pew.

Oh my.  Did I just say that?  You must be thinking “How arrogant of him, that pompous collar-wearing master of obsequiousness.”  But I suspect you are not thinking that at all and that you saw nothing wrong with me saying that it is difficult for clergy to just be laity, to take your place in the pew.  This difficulty would seem obvious to us and obvious because we have bought into a model of church that relies on a clergy/laity dichotomy, a dichotomy that only works to keep the majority of the body of Christ functionally dependent on a handful of trained professionals for its existence.  Let me flesh this out a bit.

What do you think of when you think of clergy or minister?  You probably think of someone who has been set aside or called to go into the ministry, one who serves the church.  When I have to describe to Revenue Canada what I get paid for it is conducting religious services, ministration of sacraments, administrating a congregation, pastoral care, teaching doctrine.  I’ve received specific education for this work.  And, I’ve been ordained for it, authorized by a particular religious body.  Clergy take the lead in doing the ministry of the church.  In the Presbyterian way the same can be said of Elders but to a lesser extent.

It is also nigh impossible to think of the clergy apart from its institutional counterpart, the laity.  The laity are those who receive the services of the clergy.  They assist the minister in the ministry.  But there is something wrong here.  John Stott, a very widely respected British theologian and apologist, in his book One People writes about how the word ‘lay” has been debased in the church.  He says: “‘Lay’ is often a synonym for ‘amateur’ as opposed to ‘professional,’ or ‘unqualified’ as opposed to ‘expert’” (p. 29).  This debasing gets reinforced even here in our Coop when we talk about training ‘lay’ worship leaders, ‘lay’ preachers, and ‘lay’ pastoral care givers.  It seems that to be a ‘lay’ person is somehow less than being clergy.

Paul seems to reinforce this dichotomous way of thinking to the extent of calling the ‘ordained’ more or less “God’s gift to the church” when he says here in Ephesians 4:8-11: “Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.’ (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?  He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.)  The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers…”.  If we left it at that partial and out of context quote, it would seem a good justification for our dichotomy between clergy and laity. 

Yet, the verses immediately preceding and following this passage note that we are all gifted by Christ Jesus with a share in his ministry and those offices or tasks of ministry that Paul designates here are for equipping us all for our common ministry in the body of Christ.  Verse seven reads: “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”  Verses twelve and thirteen follow that the purpose of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers is “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.  Ministers or clergy were never supposed to be set aside to do ‘the ministry of the church’ but rather to equip the whole church for ministry.  Everyone of us is gifted for Christ’s ministry.  He gives his ministry to all of us.

Did you know the word clergy derives from a New Testament Greek word?  The word is kleros (cleric) which means “lot” as in “chosen by lot” or “one’s lot in life”.  Kleros is also the root word for “inheritance”.  In our reading from Ephesians this morning Paul speaks of an inheritance, a kleronomia, that we all have and will receive in Christ…his ministry.  But it is not just clergy who get the inheritance.  Each of us has been chosen by God the Father for a share in the inheritance that belongs to Jesus, the Son, of which the Holy Spirit’s presence with us now is a down payment on.  This inheritance is a share in Jesus kingdom, in his reign…in his ministry. 

This Sunday is Ascension Sunday.  We don’t talk about Jesus’ Ascension all that much and this is unfortunate.  Jesus’ Ascension is as important as his becoming human and dying for us, as important as Easter, as important as Pentecost, and as important as his one day Coming Again.  Today we celebrate that Jesus, our Jesus, has taken his seat at the right hand of God the Father as Lord of all Creation.  If he has not Ascended, he is not Lord.  As Lord he shares his reign with us through sharing his ministry with us through the gift of the Holy Spirit to us all.  If he is not Ascended, then there is no Pentecost.  His reign, his ministry is reconciliation, justice, peace, forgiveness, and healing gifts that he extends from Heaven here to Earth through us, through each of us.  The Christian faith is not about how we get to Heaven.  It is about how God is bringing his heavenly reign to Earth through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” not “God get me out of here.”

The effect of Jesus Ascension is that we are all his ministers, his servants chosen by God to share in his ministry, in his reign and he has gifted us each for this universe-transforming work by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  But for now, Paul wrote here in Ephesians 2:5-6 “he (God) made us alive together with Christ (by grace you are saved), and raised us together and seated us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…”.  We are now seated with Jesus where he is in the heavenlies.  I started out this sermon remarking how difficult it is for clergy to take your seat, the pew.  Conversely, it is difficult for you, the laity to take my seat in doing ministry in the church.  This way of thinking, this dichotomous way of thinking is killing the Church, the Body of Christ.  Timothy and I are not clergy who do the ministry to which you are an adjunct.  We are your teachers here to equip you for your share in Jesus’ ministry.  You are not ‘laity’ as opposed to our being ‘clergy’.  We are all the ‘laity’.  Laity in New Testament Greek means simply the whole people of God.  Jesus invites us all to take our seat with him in his heavenly reign, his ministry.  This invitation requires that we change our way of thinking about ministry in the church and get out of our pews and out of the chairs behind the pulpits and get outside those doors and have a look around, because Jesus is Lord out there too and if he exercises his loving reign through us, then bench-warming in here is not our place.  Take your seat with Jesus.  His ministry happens everywhere you are; in your home, at your work, over the fence with your neighbour.  Take your seat.  Amen.

Born a...What?

Text: 1 John 5:1-6; John 3:1-10

A few years back I was performing one of my presbyter duties conducting what’s called a Triennial Visit to Knox Presbyterian Church in Ospringe, ON; if you know where that is.  After the meeting a woman who appeared to be well into her 80’s came up to me and began to share how good that particular church was for her because she was “born again” and they were quite accepting of her and had helped her to grow.  She went on like that for a bit and finally, as a “born again-er” will, she brought it around to me and asked, “Are you ‘born again’?” 

Well, what do you do with a question like that?  I believe she was trying to tell me that at some point in her life she had been born into a living, life-giving relationship with God through Jesus Christ that she didn’t have prior and that she was sincere about being faithful and not just one of those nominal Christians.  But, I’ve grown suspicious of that question over the years.  Twenty years prior to that conversation I would have quite emphatically told her “yes” and been quite relieved that someone of the Presbyterian persuasion was talking like that.  But, I’ve since come to see that the term, the label, “Born again”, means different things to different people and can get used in ways that are quite contrary to the nature of someone who has been “born of God.”  To a good many “Born again-ers” the question “Are you born again” isn’t a sincere question about a person’s relationship to God in Jesus Christ but rather a litmus test as to whether you share their moral, social, and political stances.  It winds up being a vehicle for being judgemental towards another’s faith.  Moreover, I personally know more than a few very faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who have not had a “born again” experience nor made the walk down the aisle at an evangelistic crusade which is what some people mean by the term, but were simply raised in the church by faithful parents who passed it on and some how faith got caught.  So we have to be careful with our terminology and more so what we’re doing when we start trying to determine who’s a real Christian.

The best answer I’ve heard to “Are you born again was a by a Scottish Presbyterian theologian, pastor, and professor Thomas F. Torrance.  He was once Moderator of the Church of Scotland and during his tenure someone decided to see how “Christian” their leader was and asked him when it was he was “born again”.   Torrance, ever the teacher, answered and I paraphrase, “I was born again two thousand years ago when Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin Mary and was born and lived faithfully for me, suffered and died for my sins, and was raised from the dead for my justification.”  That answer totally makes being “born again” not about me and any decision I may or may not have made or any experience I may or may not have had.  Torrance points us to what the Triune God of grace has done not just for me or for you or for humanity, but for all of his Creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

So, “born again” what do we mean by that?  Well, I should note a few points from the Bible so that we have a sure footing while I take on one of the most popular catch phrases in cultural Christianity of the 20^th Century.  First, we shouldn’t be saying “born again”.  We should be saying “born from above”.  The Greek term γεννεθη ανωθεν (gennethe anothen) is best translated as “born from above”.  It can also mean “born anew” and “born again”.  Translators use “born again” because it fits with the context of what Nicodemus is saying about going back into the mother’s womb.  But, remember Nicodemus is as dull as a butter knife on trying to understand what Jesus is talking about here so why should we look to him to help us understand what Jesus means.  That makes us look dull as a butter knife too.  “Born anew” is better because we are talking about new life.  But, “born from above” is best and here’s why.

Looking at John’s letter we must note the phrase “born of God”.  In the Greek language there are two verbs for the child-making process.   The first one is τικτω (tikto), which means the physical act of giving birth, the female role.  The second one is γενναω (gennao), (our word here) which stresses the male role or siring aspect of things and conception.  When in his letter John says we are “born of God” what he means is that we are fathered by God or sired by God.  Chapter 3 verse 9 is very clear on this: “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.”  I am sorry to use words like sire and seed, but most of you have lived around farms…and this is what it says.  I also realize that it’s Mother’s Day and I’m not exercising good tact at this moment, but stay with me.  So, when Jesus says to Nicodemus “You must be born from above (anew, or again)” he is saying that you must be conceived of or sired by the very life of God, the Holy Spirit.  To be “born of God” is to have the Holy Spirit living in you.  Without the Holy Spirit living in us we cannot enter or even see the Kingdom of God, the Trinity’s reign and work in this world right now in and through us.  We wouldn’t have faith apart from the gracious work of the Holy Spirit.

Let me kick this up a notch for you since it is Mother’s Day.  Romans 8 (Paul’s great chapter on the Holy Spirit) says at verses 18-25: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.  For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.  And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

What Paul is saying here is that all of Creation, all the hundreds of billions of galaxies in this universe and everything in them, is eagerly awaiting to give physical birth of a new child, the new humanity in Christ Jesus.  Indeed, it is groaning in labour pains and is about to give birth to this new humanity through resurrection.  We who are “born from above”, “born of God”, are the foetal form of this new humanity.  We now live by faith towards that new day coming of being born anew into a life that is outside this womb into a creation that will be as Isaiah says “full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).  Living by faith doesn’t mean just believing some things about God and Jesus and all that and being good and hoping you’ll go to heaven when you die.  Having faith is the same as being faithful and being faithful is obeying God’s command that we love one another as he has loved us; that just as Jesus gave up everything of who he was to come and be born of human flesh and die, so are we to give up everything in order to love one another.  This looks like forgiveness and reconciliation, listening to and praying for each other, not judging each other, helping each other become more godly people.   If there are things about us that keep us from loving each other like pride, being opinionated and unwilling to talk, grudgefulness, greed, and so on, we must prayerfully lay elements of who we are aside aside and be here for each other.  Through being faithful, by loving each other in this way, we who know Jesus is the Son of God and the Christ because we are born of God, born of the Holy Spirit, we overcome this world in its evil and brokenness.  Through being faithful, we are the living testimony that what the Trinity is doing in his Creation now that will culminate in Creation itself actually physically being born again.  The day is coming when Creation is going to give birth to the children of God and all things will be new.  The futility of death and decay will be no more. 

So, to close it down, if I were to be asked today “Are you born again” I would answer: “Not yet.  I am born from above.  The day will come when I will be born again in resurrection into a new creation.  Until that day, you and I we are paternal siblings in the womb and we had better learn to love each other if this is going to go well because we will have to go through birth, you know.”  Amen.

** There is a term in New Testament Greek that we can translate quite literally as born again – παλιγγενεσια pronounced palingenesia.  It is the combination of palin which means “again” and genesis which means “birth”.  It appears twice, Matthew 19:28 and Titus 3:5.  Matthew 19:28-30 reads: “And Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you that in the palingenesia (renewal of the world ^NIV, regeneration ^KJV, new world ^ESV), when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me—you also will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields on account of my name will receive a hundred times as much, and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”  Titus 3:4-7 reads: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of palingenesia (regeneration ^{NIV, KJV, ESV}, rebirth ^NRSV) and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”  In both of these passages palingenesia points us to a future new birth in which we as the children of God will receive and inheritance of life eternal, a new birth that was set in motion as Jesus the incarnate Son of God who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary and lived, suffered, and died faithfully for us, and who was raised from the dead by the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  By the work of the same Holy Spirit in us who are in Christ we experience now, though not in its fullness, the regeneration that is to come.

As God Is So Are We in This World

Text: 1 John 4:7-21
Audio Recording

The Apostle John finishes this letter with a very cut-to-the-chase word of practical advice that I think we in our day and time tend to dismiss as ancient babble that is no longer applicable in our very civilized, very progressed, very sophisticated day. He says, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Idolatry, we don’t do that anymore, do we? We’ve lived through Modernity. We don’t make little stone figurines in the image of things we believe to be gods and put them on pedestals in shrines and make offerings to them in the hopes that they will favour us. We don’t do that anymore. We’re beyond all that, aren’t we?

No, we’re not. We have our idols. We worship celebrities, sports stars, political parties, trees, technology, Science, medicine, family values, Church, Capitalism, Socialism, Idealism, Realism, Alcoholism and so on. These are all idolatry. Seriously, if it weren’t for our propensity to worship idols the advertising business wouldn’t exist. Every billboard, every commercial, every Tim Horton’s cup littering the side of the road tells us that we worship gods called money, sex, power, hockey, and the unholy trinity of me-myself-and I. We are disgustingly idolatrous and this, my friends, is a problem. Psalm 115 verses 2-8 identifies this problem very well. It reads:

“Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”

Humanity has a problem in that we tend to become like that which we worship and serve. The Psalmist says that idols are deaf, blind, mute, can’t smell, can’t touch, can’t walk, can’t even go “uh”; basically, they have no life in them. Therefore, when we worship and serve idols we become just like them; i.e., dead. It is popular to say that if there were no religions, there would be no wars. I would agree with that if what we are calling religion is idolatry. When we worship and serve money, poverty results. When we worship and serve sex, women and children get abused. When we worship and serve power, war results. When we worship and serve me-myself-and I, relationships and community dissolve into narcissistic pursuits of entertainment and pleasure of which there is never enough. Because of self-olatry, we North Americans have the social development level of pre-schoolers who play beside each other rather than with each other. There is only one way, “my” way. We take what we want and we scream and fight and bite when someone takes from us. We have a problem. “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

So, if humanity has a tendency within itself to become like what it worships and serves and idolatry leads to death, what happens if we go the other direction with this? God created humanity in his image so that when we worship and serve God the Trinity, the loving communion of Father Son and Holy Spirit, we become like God and live. Actually, it goes a bit beyond that for us who are in Christ. John says here in verse seventeen, “…as he (God) is so also are we in this world.” As God is, so are we in this world. One of the major points lurking behind John’s whole letter here is God cannot be seen apart from our worshipping and serving him. God is love. So, when we love as he has loved us, we are in this world as he is in himself and his intended purpose for humanity is brought to its fulfillment. In essence when we love as he has loved us God is seen. We are like a mirror reflection of God, except we are a living reflection.

How best can I explain this? Well, if we love God (because God loved us first) we will begin to experience ourselves as under obligation to love others. It’s like being swept up by a strong current in a swollen river and the only way you can swim is to go with the flow, to love as God has loved you. When you try to swim by just doing what makes you happy, you know it’s not enough to live on. You just know it. When God in his love gets a hold on us, there arises in us an awareness not only that God loves me, but also I must love as I have been loved. There arises in us a new desire to want to be and do what is pleasing to God, rather than just a blind sort of being and doing of what I want to do. There arises in us a new turning outwards in love, that wasn’t there before, a desire to forgive when before we’ve only wanted vengeance or vindication. There arises in us a desire to be proactive in the lives of others that they may come to know the love of the God as we do. This new awareness does not replace who we are as persons. It re-orders us. Its presence in us is very tumultuous for it comes against our deepest beliefs and instincts. It’s like a dandelion growing in the middle of a parking lot. When the tiny seed of these little flimsy things takes root, the power of its growth can push through asphalt. As fellow Christians, we must learn together to live out of this life-transforming urge to love that God has placed in us. It is the perfecting, the completion of God’s love. His love grows in us, matures, and bears fruit so that as he is so are we in this world.

I guess we should define love. John says God is love. In the Greek language there are four words for love. There is eros from which we get the word erotic. It means romantic love. This is not the love John speaks of. Another form of love in the Greek language is storge or family love. This too is not what John means by love. The third form of love for the Greeks was philia, love between friends. Once again, this is not the kind of love John means. All three of these loves can become an idol to us and in turn become destructive. God is love, but God is not the passion of being in love. God is not the love around Grandma’s table at Christmas. God is not being someone’s BFF.

John says that God is agape. At 3:16 he defines this love as what Jesus did by laying down his life for us. The Greek word John uses that we translate as life is psyche, which is usually translated as soul. The psyche or soul is the totality of one’s life before God and others. It is the entirety of who I am. In love Jesus set his self aside to be obedient to God the Father and to give his psyche so that we might have life. So our obligation to love, to agape means that we too must lay aside who we think we are, what we want to be and do, so that we together with our brothers and sisters in Christ might find out who we are in our new life together as children of God. Agape requires we be proactive in each other’s lives rather than simply reactive. Agape requires we get into each other’s souls and bear one another’s burdens and one another to forgive as we each have been forgiven.

You see, the Church is not where we go on Sunday morning for religious or spiritual self-edification; where we sing our hymns, say our prayers, laugh a little, and nap a little because that’s what good people do and it’s the way we’ve always done it. The Church is the community of people God has called together to agape one another as he has done for us in Christ Jesus, who laid down his soul to become who he was not so that we might have life. He who is life became death, so that we may live. Moreover, God has shown us agape by giving us his own soul in sending the Holy Spirit to abide in us that we might abide in his relationship with Jesus as children of God. God is the loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit who seeks us out to bring our dead souls to life in his own. As God is so are we in this world. We are not the Church when we do our own things, go our own ways, and see each other in passing on Sunday morning. We are more than just friends. We are more than a church family. We are the community where people because of God’s love actively set their self’s aside to be for others, where the love of God is, where God is. As God is so are we in this world.