In Step with the Spirit

1 Kings 19:15-21, Luke 9:51-62, Galatians 5:13-25

So, it’s a good time to be in agriculture.  The government, the king, is behind the family farm.  With the people being established on the land now, he sees agriculture as being important.  Israel doesn’t need to worship that war God Yahweh anymore who brought them out of Egypt. Ahab worships the god Baal who brings the rain.  He’s also gone as far as to marry a princess of Sidon, Jezebel who has set up temples and shrines all over the place to worship her fertility goddess Asherah who makes the crops grow.  Yes, that prophet of Yahweh, Elijah just killed all the prophets of Baal trying to get people to go back to Yahweh.  But, what do you expect?  Ahab and Jezebel will soon have their way with him.

Well, your family farm is doing pretty good.  You’ve got about 200,000 acres of good land and twelve tractors to work it.  Your son, Elisha, manages the workers and drives the twelfth tractor himself.  He’s a hard-working young man, interested in learning the family business; so interested that you’ve already turned the business over to him and put the land in his name.  You’re retired. 

But, one day the prophet Elijah comes to Elisha, walks up to him and throws his cloak on him.  The next thing you know Elisha dismantles all the farm equipment and sells them for parts and gives the money to the workers and starts following Elijah to become his successor as the prophet of Yahweh.  You didn’t see that coming?

You’re sitting on the roadside outside a village in Samaria.  Jesus and his disciples are leaving the city.  You’re neighbours are yelling insults at them.  Usually, Samaritans got along okay with Jesus because he often preached on the hypocrisy going on in Jerusalem.  As a Samaritan you were often looked down upon by the Jerusalem crowd because they didn’t think your bloodline was Hebrew enough.  But today it seemed he had only come to town for some food to eat and maybe a place to sleep.  He was headed to Jerusalem for something obviously more important than hanging out with some “half-bloods”.  You think to yourself.  He’s not a Messiah for the Samaritans.  It’s all about Jerusalem.

But you keep watching.  His followers are quite upset.  Two of his more important acting “servants” must be thinking they are a couple of little Elijah’s or something because they said to him, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them.”   You don’t know if they’re serious or just trying banter back to the crowd.  Doesn’t matter.  Whatever the reason, Jesus lit into them.  “Calling down fire from heaven” on people who don’t accept him just isn’t his way.

Here comes Jesus and his band of followers.  You’re sympathetic to his cause.  He heals people.  Casts out demons.  Preaches against religious hypocrites.  Like Elijah throwing his mantle onto Elisha something comes over you.  You get up and go to Jesus and you say, “I will follow you wherever you go.”  He looks at you and points out that foxes and birds have it better than he does.  Is that the sort of life you want?  Do you really want to live by faith, hand-to-mouth at the hand of God?  Do you really want the way of life that leads to Jerusalem’s cross?

You’re sitting on a rock overlooking the road to Jerusalem.  Thinking.  Praying.  You’re father just died.  The family and the family business are now your responsibility, but you feel like there is something else you should be doing.  You’ve a lot on your mind.  Here comes a small crowd.  It’s Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of God.  He’s coming up to you.   He seems pretty urgent.  What’s he going to do?  Does he know your father has died and wants to come and raise him?  That would solve a lot of problems.  “Follow me,” he says.  It’s not a raising of the dead kind of thing, but it’s a way out.  Feeling like the recipient of Elijah’s mantle you agree, but it would be proper for you to at least first bury your father.  He says, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”  Do your family obligations not matter?

Here comes Jesus and his followers heading for Jerusalem.  For some reason you want to join with them, but you need to say good-bye to your family because that would be proper.  After all, you love them.  You run up to Jesus.  “Lord, I will follow you…but first let me go say goodbye to my family and explain what I’m doing.”  Jesus says to you, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.”  You get it.  Looking back instead of straight ahead when you’re ploughing makes your rows crooked and you waste land.  You have to go back, fix it, and plough again.  But, seriously is commitment to Jesus and his Kingdom more important than commitment to family?

I think it would be safe to say that for the majority of us our lives are “family focused”.  With respect tot he Christian faith we teach that being committed to "family" and being “good” families are at the heart of being “good” Christians.  Jesus and church are things we fit into our family lives for the benefit of a strong family.  But, to be honest we should admit that our commitment to Jesus is still only second seat to family cohesiveness.  We’ll put our hands to the plough as long as it’s ploughing in the family field.   

It is very hard to read these passages and not hear Jesus saying that commitment to him must supersede even the commitment to family.  Speaking from my own warped and jaded perspective, I know what it feels like to have your parents and siblings think I’ve gone crazy because something like Elijah’s cloak had fallen on me and began to rearrange my priorities around Jesus and following him.  I really got some looks when the ministry became my career path.  I know what it feels like to have a wife of ten years divorce me and the final reason being she didn’t want to be a minister’s wife.  I know what its like to have people treat me different not because I’m me and I’m strange but because I’m a minister. 

God has been good to me.  Now I have an understanding wife (she’s a minister too) and two kids.  Things are different now that I have a family.  I was talking to a man several weeks ago, the son of a prominent Presbyterian Church in Canada minister.  If you go to the national office in Toronto you will see his father’s name on plaques and pictures.  This man was quite embittered with his father and the church.  He said, “My father did a lot of good for the church, but he was never there for us.”  I don’t ever want my kids to feel that way about me, Jesus, or his church.  Yet, that day will come…and all the while I won’t get paid the overtime hours it took to write this sermon that was written at the expense of time with my family.  Poor, pitiful me.  Ministers have an idol that we dutifully serve and it’s obviously not family.  It’s the church.

Church members tend to put family needs before the church.  Ministers tend to put church needs before their families.  There’s something wrong with this picture.  That something wrong is that we tend to equate following Jesus with participation in the church as an institution that is a core element of a society.  This is not what following Jesus is.

One message that is clear in the New Testament that Paul spells out very adamantly in Galatians is that following Jesus does mean following him into a cultural, ethnic expression of a religion.  In our case, it is cultural Christianity as an institution with its buildings, paid leaders, and club-like patterns of behaviours.  Following Jesus is the expression of a new form of human existence – new life in Christ – where everything about the old life is dead and we are dead to it.  Yet, God has raised us in Christ by the Holy Spirit coming to live in us that we may live as a new humanity.  Everything about the old life is dead including “family values” and “institutional” church.

Paul says in Galatians 2:19-20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith/faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Jesus has clothed us with Elijah’s mantle, which is a metaphor of the Holy Spirit.  We like Paul are dead, crucified with Christ.  The lives we now live, we must yield to Jesus living through us because the Holy Spirit has bonded us to him.

Paul says “If we live by the Spirit…” Live means whatever it is that gives us biological life, consciousness, relationships, and a relationship to God.  If we live by the Spirit, then human life in its totality now is by and in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the very life of God in Christ.  “If we live by the Spirit, let us get in step with the Spirit.”  The fruit of the Spirit will naturally grow from us the closer we draw to Jesus and yield our lives to him – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  When we seek to follow our Holy Spirit instinct to love our neighbours as ourselves rather than “call down fire from heaven” in judgement upon them, we are walking in step with Jesus.

The Greek word for “in step” (guided –NRSV) means “get in a row with” like ducks in a row.  There’s a true story of a tractor-trailer on the 401 in Toronto just creeping along at an absolute snail’s pace.  Drivers in their cars were zipping by it only to receive what would probably be the greatest surprise of their lives.  This ginormous eighteen-wheeler was giving protection to a mother duck and her line of ducklings that for some bizarre reason thought the 401 was en route to their pond. The New Life in Christ, life by the Spirit is like that.  Those baby ducks followed their mother instinctively and because of the love of that truck driver they will grow up to be just like her.  So we must remember that our call to follow Jesus is not the call to family values or the institution of the church.  It is to follow Jesus and our Holy Spirit given inward instinct to become like him.  That task surpasses any other even being good family people and good church members.  Amen.

Forgiving Is More Than Apology Accepted

Matthew 18:15-22; 2 Corinthians 5:17-20

Last Sunday my family and some other families from my wife’s church had a barbecue. The adults did what adults do - sat around, talked, and ate chips. The kids went and played.  My son and another one of the boys had a bump in and the other boy, who wasn’t wearing any shoes, got the toenail on his big toe bent back.  My wife asked my son, “Did you apologize?”  Of course my son in his not wanting to accept responsibility for anything 9-year-old kind of way said, “It was an accident.”   My wife’s obvious answer to that was, “That doesn’t matter. You still hurt him.  You need to see if he’s okay and apologize.”  So my son sucks up his pride and goes to the boy and avoiding eye contact said, “Sorry.”  The other boy, also staring away, says, “It’s okay.  It was an accident.”

I wonder, what would have happened if it had not been an accident?  What if my son meant to hurt the boy to give himself the advantage in the game they were playing.  In that event I am reasonably sure that my son would’ve gotten punched and come running to mommy crying.  Then, the barbeque would have become a very uncomfortable situation for everybody – the other kids for the game is disrupted, the embarrassed parents, the other guests wonder if a feud might break out, and the host wonders if the party is now over.

There would then arise the formal process that groups of people go through to resolve such situations.  There would be interrogations to determine who is at fault.  Verdicts rendered.  Both boys would have been forced to make an apology that they would reluctantly make.  Wise parents would make them apologize to all the other guests and especially the host for disrupting the barbeque.  There would also be some sort of punishment dealt out for ”when we get home”.  Then, it will take time for the boys to trust one another enough to behave like friends and play together.

As conflict affects a whole community and not just the parties directly involved, both sets of parents would also have made uncomfortable apologies to one another and in order to relieve their embarrassment and fears of being seen as bad parents, they would have tried to explain why their child would have done such a thing.  Indeed, the fellowship over the chips would be strained until everybody saw the children getting along causing the suspicions of bad parenting and the fears of rejection to subside.

At some point the barbeque would “lighten up” again, but…things would not be the same as they were before the incident.  Something happened that pushed the boundaries of trust but that also created opportunities to change the nature of the relationships.  The relationships could possibly grow as all the parents shared their parenting woes and assured and encouraged one another and the hosts refilled the drinks and the chip bowls; or…we could just label one another “bad families” and find reasons to never do this again.

Well, what needs to be noted here?  One, when offence happens whether intentional or not it affects not just the two people involved but the whole community.  Everybody at the barbecue was affected by what happened between two children.  Second, there needed to be accountability for actions taken.  Third, reconciliation, the restoration of fellowship, is the work of the whole community – the kids, the parents, the other guests, and the hosts.  Four, forgiveness is more than just the act of apologizing and accepting an apology.  Quite often I find that apologizing is the very vehicle we use to skirt accepting responsibility for our actions.  Five, there is no reconciliation without forgiveness.  Thus, we need to know what forgiveness is.

In our reading here from Matthew 18 Jesus lays out for us a process for dealing with offence particularly within the Christian community.  It involves difficult advice about forgiveness, particularly forgiving those who will not accept responsibility for what they have done.  It is a difficult process that begins with the offended going to the offender and pointing out the offense. 

We tend to avoid this initial one-on-one encounter for fear of escalation.  And so, we likely involve a third party unless we are too embarrassed or afraid to speak up or there’s the tragic reality that being a victim is often accompanied by mutism, the psychological inability to speak about the offense.

Well, why Jesus would start the process of forgiveness with a one-on-one confrontation initiated by the offended one?  I believe he does this because retribution and/or restitution are not the goal of this process, but rather reconciliation is.  The process that leads towards reconciliation is different than the one the simply leads to retribution and restitution. 

Moreover, the context here is Christian community in which one disciple of Jesus offends another.  Christian community is radically different than other groups.  In the Jesus way, loving your enemy is the rule of thumb as opposed to simply exacting vengeance.  So, when dealing with conflict in Christian community we must be careful to guard the dignity of the offender as to not shame them.  Shame is not conducive to reconciliation.  Shame feels very uncomfortable and we will do anything not to feel it.  Avoiding shame is the likely culprit for why people do not accept responsibility for their offenses against others.  I believe Jesus begins with a one-on-one encounter with the offender initiated by the offended so as not to shame the offender who may not know he’s offended another.  Moreover, the fewer the outside people involved the lesser the felt shame and the more likely there will be reconciliation.

Let me say a little about forgiveness in the process of retribution and restitution.  We live in a culture that says “you hurt me therefore you owe me”.  Thus, we believe that there can be no justice and resulting peace unless and/or until you pay me what is due.   Even when the offender has served the penalty for his actions, the offended still has the right to sue for restitution.  In this process forgiveness is merely the offended “letting go” of one’s rights to retribution and restitution and “releasing” the offender from obligation. 

The Bible would seem to lead us in this direction – an eye for an eye, forgive us our debts.  The New Testament Greek verb which we translate into English as “forgive”, aphiemi, has among its deep well of meaning the concepts of “letting go” and “releasing from debt”.  It was a frequently used word to communicate those ideas in the first century Greek-speaking world.  Use of this Greek word in this way lends towards our locating forgiveness in the process of retribution and restitution.

But, let’s consider something here.  The writers of the New Testament were Hebrews and thought with Hebrew ways in mind, ways and words that didn’t always translate so literally into the Greek words and ideas embodied in the Greek language that they needed to use to function in the first century Mediterranean world.  The Hebrew idea of forgiveness is not rooted in the process of restitution and retribution rather in reconciliation.  There is another nuance in meaning for the Greek word aphiemi that the Hebrew writers wanted to use but we loose in translation because culturally the Western whites who have predominated the world of theology and Bible Study are predisposed to Greek ways of thinking.  Aphiemi can also mean “to send off”.  This idea of the “sending off” of our sins against one another is more in line with what the Bible has to say about forgiveness and particularly understanding Jesus death for our sins.

To understand how Hebrews thought of forgiveness we must look, of all places, to the Book of Leviticus and understand the Day of Atonement, the one day year that the Jews dealt with their perpetually broken relationship with God and their offenses against each other.  On this day the high priest took a bull and two goats and set about the process of reconciliation between Israel’s God and his people.  Forgiveness is forged in what happens to the bull and the goats.

First, the High Priest dealt with his own sins and the sins of the priests.  He took the bull and slaughtered it and collected some of its blood in a dish.  To Hebrews the blood is the “life” of the animal.  This blood that he collected from the slaughtered bull in essence was blood or life that had passed through death.  This points us towards Jesus and the Holy Spirit who is the blood of Christ who has passed through death.  The High Priest would take this blood into the Holy of Holies of the temple to the Ark of the Covenant.  The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat.  It was God’s throne on earth.  The priest would fill the room with the smoke of incense so that he would not see the LORD when he came to sit on the throne.  This smoke represents prayers.  He would then turn to the Ark and dip his hand into the bowl of blood and then sprinkle it onto the Mercy Seat and in this act the LORD God of Israel and the priestly family would be united in this blood, this life that had passed through death.  The Hebrew word used for this act connotes a covering over and washing away of a stain much like how bleach can remove a stain.  The priest would then go out and do the same thing with one of the goats and this goat is on behalf of the people.  The blood of this goat sprinkled on the mercy is the union of, the reconciliation of the LORD God of Israel and his people in life that has passed through death.

After this act of cleansing of the stain of sin and unioning of God and his people in life that has passed through death, the priest would go back out and take the second goat, place his hands upon its head and whisper into its ear the sins of the people.  Then, a Presbyterian, a chosen person, led this goat who is carrying the sins of the people out far away into the wilderness and then loosed and sent it off on its own where it would be destroyed in death by a demon called Azazel.  This is where we get the term “Scapegoat”. 

So, to the Hebrew forgiveness involved covering over and cleansing and carrying the burdens of others and sending off.  King David in Psalm 32 said “Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.”  The Hebrew word for forgive (NaSA) means to lift up and carry away.  The idea of covered there is like having one’s nakedness or shame appropriately clothed so that there’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore.  The lifting up and carrying away of that which we are ashamed by another so that we appear appropriately clothed as beloved children of God is what forgiveness means to the Hebrew.

Sounds foreign.  What’s it look like?  You remember the story of four men picking up a paralytic and carrying him on his mat to bring him to Jesus so that Jesus could heal him.  They came to the house where Jesus was and it was so crowded they had to break through the roof and lower him down in front of Jesus.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say that when Jesus saw the faithfulness of the men not of the paralyzed man, he said to the man on the mat “you sins are forgiven.”  They lifted up and carried this man on his mat of shame and brought him to Jesus who healed him.  That’s what forgiveness is.  Notice the absence of an apology-based transaction.

Forgiveness that leads to reconciliation is seated in the relationships of a whole community not just the relationship between the offended and the offender.  Forgiveness is when the Christian community picks up and carries the offender in all his offensive and in great love brings him to Jesus to be healed, where he can be appropriately clothed with the cleansing of the presence of the Holy Spirit in him.  It’s what recovering alcoholics do with still suffering alcoholics in AA.  We Christians should do the same with each other.

Today is Aboriginal Sunday and we gather together here as an ecumenical community to worship and fellowship.  Reconciliation will happen among our two communities the more we gather together in union with one another in Christ Jesus where his life that has passed through death can be applied to us by the presence of the Holy Spirit to cleanse and heal us with the sweet medicine of his very presence.  When we gather together in worship, in holy Mystery, knowing the Spirit is here Jesus will do his healing work of forgiveness. 

Moreover, we the body of Christ must take up participate in Jesus ministry of being the “Scapegoat”.  We must carry one another, bearing with one another in our sins against one another.  This means that we must patiently and compassionately understand that broken people do broken things and we have and will continue to sin against one another, but we must in the love of Christ seek each other’s healing in Christ that we may all be healed.  We must approach those who offend us in the love of Christ – the self-denying, even self sacrificing unconditional love of God in Christ Jesus which has been poured into our hearts richly and powerfully with the Holy Spirit.  We must go to our offending brothers and sisters in Christ and by the love of God in us by the presence of the Holy Spirit point them back to Jesus, draw them back to Jesus Christ doing all we can to guard their dignity.  So also, when people come to us to confront us in that we have sinned against them we must in the love of Christ accept accountability for what we have done for we have caused them shame.

We are now new Creation – the old life is gone and the new one has begun.  Like eating together after this service, this is what we do.  Forgiving is what we do.  The peace of Christ be with you.  Amen. 

Look a Little Deeper

Luke 7:36-50; Galatians 2:15-3:5

One thing that bedevils me is how we in the Christian community can still look at other people and do what Simon the Pharisee did – judge a person’s character, indeed that person, as rejectable/rejected by God and in turn label that person with whatever equivalent we have to the word “sinner”.  Simon said, “If this man really were a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this is touching him, a sinner.”  We are liars if we say we don’t do that. 

Jesus was known to have a very open heart towards “sinners”.  Simon didn’t.  He simply could not see who this woman was deep inside her broken, hurting self.  Hence, Jesus’ question to him, “Simon, do you see this woman?”  Simon needed to take a deeper look and see someone there who was broken yet very loved by God.  God is like Jesus.  Simon could only see in her someone whom, in his belief system, God refused love because her behaviour was out of line with what he believed to be God’s required way of life…and he had a list of Scriptures from which to make his case.  There was no way Simon was ever going to see this woman as beloved by God.  He inclination was to see her as repulsive to God.  

We in the Christian community can look at this Pharisee from nearly 2,000 years ago and say that’s just the way Pharisees were.  Yet, we still do exactly what he did.  If you don’t believe me just consider the warring that goes on between Conservative and Liberal types of Christians, or traditional vs. contemporary worshippers.  That’s just inside the church.  Consider how we look at people who have addictions, or are chronically on welfare, obese people, homosexuals, or immigrants who get government benefits that we don’t.  I hear otherwise “good” Christian people say very evil things when those topics come up.  Sober up.  Get a job.  Push away from the table.  Quit being queer.  Go back to where you came from.  One would hope that by our nature of being “in Christ” that we would see people, all people, as compassionately as Jesus saw that woman washing his feet with her tears, but we don’t.  We are bonded, Krazy-glued, to Jesus by the Holy Spirit, but we still look at people with eyes and hearts that are sighted for the “Law”, for behavioural matters.

I wish to offer an explanation for that.  Like the Galatians we have an understanding of the Gospel that is sin-filled and we need to repent of it.  The Greek word for sin, hamartia, is a word from archery that means to miss the mark.  Humans are inclined to always miss the mark when it comes to being what God created us to be.  We are wilfully bent in on ourselves and turning away from our source of life in God we die.  The Gospel that pervades the Western Church and Western culture (whether our surrounding culture wants to admit it its Christian rootedness or not) quite simply misses the mark.  It turns us back on ourselves and our own abilities to save ourselves.  The dire result of this sin-filled gospel that bends us back on ourselves for our own salvation is that the church dies - hence, the dying of the Church in Western culture and the increasing paganizing of our culture.

The Gospel is the Good News that God has saved and is healing his Creation of the disease of sin and death by what he has done in, through, and as Jesus Christ, the Son of God become human, in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father because he loves us.  It is about what the Triune God of Grace has done for his creation, for humanity, for each of us not what we need to do to get saved.  There is an invitation inherent in this Gospel to “come and see”, to come and be a apart of this New Creation because Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit is saving you and will heal you of the painful brokenness of sin and ultimately of death.

That’s the Gospel in a nutshell.  Now let me explain our form of the gospel that misses the mark.  In Western Christianity we lean heavily on a Medieval understanding of the Gospel known as “Penal Substitution” and/or the “Satisfactionary Theory” developed by the theologian Anselm of Canterbury.  The underlying ideas are that God made death the legal penalty, the punishment for our sin.  Anselm taught that God who is infinitely just is infinitely offended by our sin.  There is no way a finite human can make satisfaction for this offence – satisfaction meaning to restore God’s honour.  So God the Son became human and by his infinite power as Son of God lived the infinitely perfect life of obedience expressed most clearly in his dying for us; his bearing for us the deserved punishment of death.  This utter act of righteousness satisfied the Father’s offended honour.  The individual person can appropriate this salvation from the eternal punishment of death and Hell and live forever in the eternal bliss of Heaven by imitating Jesus’ suffering way, going to Mass, giving to the church, and almsgiving.  That’s Anselm in the 1100’s.

Protestantism, starting with Luther in the 1500’s, in its efforts to correct spiritual abuses by the Medieval Church which used the fear of Hell to undergird its political authority and to get people to give money to it added to that gospel a “Transactional” element that says a person receives the eternal benefits of this external legal transaction between God the Son and God the Father simply by professing faith in Jesus Christ and accepting him as Lord and Saviour.  We are saved by grace not by works.  This Transactional element came to the fore in the mid-1600’s with the Westminster Confession as the Protestant Church took up the mantle of the Medieval Church’s spiritual abusiveness by using the fear of Hell to further its own political power as opposed to the Roman Catholic churches political power.

Well, it is a catastrophic misunderstanding to say that death is simply the penalty or punishment for sin.  It is what has become because we wilfully turn from our source of life in God.  Sin is not just a problem of immoral behaviour.  Like addiction, it is a disease affecting every bit of our being that we cannot cure by our own efforts and which is serious enough that God the Son had to become a human affected with this disease himself and die because of it to cure us of it.  Sin is a gravely serious matter.  God the Father’s disposition towards us in our sinfulness is not that of some mafia overlord whose offended honour must be satisfied.  The Father and the Son are one.  God really is like Jesus.  Jesus death was not a legal transaction between the Father and the Son that satisfies things and faith is not the vehicle by which we gain the benefits of that transaction.

Let’s look at what Paul says here in Galatians for it shows that Jesus death and resurrection and faith are not an external transaction to appease God but how by them God has changed our very being, setting in motion our cure from sin.  Let’s use the King James Version for it predates the Westminster Confession.  Paul says: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”

Jesus living in us, in humanity is the cure for sin.  We cannot simply obey the law and cure ourselves of sin.  Nor does just believing that Jesus died for me the penalty of my sin make sin go away.  Jesus has come to live in humanity.  We must simply get on with being the new humanity in him.  Let me give you a children’s sermon kind of image to explain this.

This glass of water is humanity in all times and all places.  We shall name it Adam because God made it/us from the earth, which in Hebrew is Adamah.  The Bible tells us the Adam being made in the image of God was naively tricked to try to be God and we did what our dear Creator/friend God told us not to do or we would die.  We became stained (add food colouring) and by the process of diffusion the stain affects all humanity. God the Son became human and took upon himself all our sinfulness.  His incarnation, faithful life, death, and resurrection and the pouring of the Holy Spirit upon humanity has changed humanity.  I am using a syringe with bleach here to infuse the water – the old humanity, Adam – with the new humanity that is “in Christ”.  At first, the stain is not completely removed but there is an immediate change.  Humanity is no longer the same since Jesus.

As time goes on, you will notice a separation in colours.  I had to prepare one ahead of time because it takes a lot of time.  There is clear water.  Not exactly the same as the original Adam because it is chlorinated.  Jesus lives in it.  The separation in colours does not mean “good” people here and “wicked” people there.  Jesus, the bleach, is still working in the stained water.  The clear water simply demonstrates that Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit has obviously been at work and holds forth the promise that the day will come when everything is transformed.

The clear water represents the awakening of faith. Faith better translated as faithfulness is not what makes this transformation work in us.  It is as Paul says in Hebrews 11:1:  “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.”  Faith/faithfulness is not something we can come up with on our own but is rather the result of Jesus working in us in the power of the Holy Spirit to make us like himself.  What we can do is to get with the program – strive to be faithful.  Prayer, Bible Study, Christian fellowship, compassion – being the people of God is conducive to water clarity. 

This is the Gospel of what God is doing in humanity in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  You are the proof of it.  So, get on with it.  Amen.

The Life-Giving God

1 Kings 17:8-24

I had thought about calling this sermon “How To Know a True Minister” but I thought better of it.  I don’t think it would look good for me if I said a true minister is one that comes from a foreign country that thinks it has a monopoly on all things God and comes saying God is causing your hard times because you are idolatrous.  Then, he demands your last dollar all the while saying God says your resources won’t run out.  You do what he says and seem to keep going while others perish, but you just can’t shake the suspicion that all he’s doing is making his way on pointing out your sins and taking a huge chunk of what’s yours.  All the while, he spends all his time in prayer blaming God for everything that’s goes wrong in your life because it makes him look bad if they don’t go right.  The only thing that will make those suspicions go away is if he raises your dead. 

Well, humour aside, I won’t go that route because it hits to close to home especially that coming from a foreign country part. I think it might be more prudent to spend some time talking about this widow of Zarephath and her struggles and what she discovers about the kind of god the one true God is, the God of Israel, Elijah’s God.  This God, our God, is life-sustaining in the most hopeless of circumstances and life-restoring when it appears that death has won the day.  Our God isn’t the punish-you-god who is the head of the ministry of sin maintenance and behavioural modification.  Rather, our God is head of the ministry of life who cares for us and especially for the most insignificant and vulnerable among us in this sin-broken world.

A good place to start this look at the widow of Zarephath is with doing a comparison between her and Queen Jezebel.  They are both from the land of Sidon (Lebanon).  Jezebel was the daughter of a king married off to King Ahab.  She brought the gods of Sidon into Israel – Baal, the god of the storm and Asherah, his fertility-goddess wife.  They were key gods of agriculture in the Land of Canaan.  Baal gave the rain and Asherah made your crops grow provided you regularly visited with her temple prostitutes.  Jezebel brought the seductive promise of crop fertility to the burgeoning agricultural society of ancient Israel and the people lustfully welcomed her.  In response to her, Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh, proclaimed Yahweh’s power over these false gods and his judgement upon the people by declaring a drought that affected both Israel and Sidon.  In turn, Jezebel and Ahab wanted Elijah dead.

Yahweh sent Elijah to Zarephath where God said he has called a widow to provide for him.  Elijah went and immediately he came upon this widow, a young mother of a young boy.  As you know, widows back then were at the bottom of the social ladder because generally it was the husband or the father who provided while the wife or daughter looked after the home.  This widow did have a house, but she would have had to be very creative to find a source of income.  Add to that the effects of the drought.  The likes of Jezebel, the wealthy and powerful, would not have been too drastically affected, but this widow…well, when Elijah found her she was collecting sticks to build a small fire to cook a meal for herself and her son, their last.

For this widow, it was fortuitous that Elijah came her way; Elijah, the man of Yahweh the God of Israel who was proving himself more powerful than the gods of Sidon, Baal and Asherah.  It was the belief back then that if you showed hospitality to a prophet, you were in effect showing hospitality to the god whom that prophet served…and here was the prophet of Yahweh asking for a drink of water and a loaf of bread.  Hallelujah…but feeding him would come at the cost of her family’s last meal.  This wasn’t adding up.

At Elijah’s almost magical assurance that God will keep the jar and the jug from going empty she follows through on the hospitality.  And how!  You would think she was following the teachings of a 1980’s vintage health-and-wealth TV preacher.  She gives all she has.  She gives to him first.  She serves him.  She even gives him her “upper room” to lodge in.  And indeed, her hospitality to this “man of Yahweh” seemed to work magically.  The jar and the jug do not fail. 

But, then her son died.  To a young widow back then a son was guaranteed income in the future.  In a crass way of saying it, not only did her son die, but she lost her retirement too.  Regardless of her hospitality to the man of Yahweh, the widow now had nothing to live for or look forward to.  Hopeless.

One thing you notice when reading this passage is that this widow is wiley enough to stay suspicious of Elijah.  Is he really a “man of Yahweh”?  What’s his true motives?  Having a prophet in your house is like having a nuclear reactor in your backyard.  He leaves you always wondering when “judgement day” might come.  When are things going to melt down?  So, the widow goes to Elijah and accuses him of only coming to bring her guilt to the fore and “wrath” her for it. 

But, Elijah is just as confused as she is.  So, he took the dead boy and carried him upstairs.  In Old Testament Hebrew the word for “to forgive” is the same as for “to carry”.  I find that interesting.  Elijah touched the dead body incurring ritual uncleanness upon himself which means he took upon himself the boys iniquity.  He offers hospitality to the dead boy by taking him to his own room and laying him out on his own bed.  He cried out and accused Yahweh at the injustice he was doing to this hospitable widow by killing her son.  Then, he tried to take the place of the dead boy.  Three times he stretched himself out upon the boy.  Then, in a futile effort he begged God to return the boys life to him. 

Here’s the good part.  Yahweh gave the boy’s life back.  Raised him.  Elijah takes the boy back downstairs and says to the widow, “Behold, your son liveth.” (Got to love the KJV here).  She says, “Now I now you are a man of Yahweh and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.” 

Step forward to Luke.  Jesus and his disciples are walking along and come across a funeral procession.  The only son of a widow has died (a familiar tune this morning).  Jesus is moved with compassion and says to the woman, “Do not weep.” (Yeah, right.)  He touches the bier upon which the son was being carried. (Here again is that concept of being carried.)  He says, “Young man, ‘I’ say to you, rise.” (That’s Easter language.)  And the man sits up and starts to speak.  There are suddenly a lot of people there thinking about Jesus what the widow of Zarephath said about Elijah, “Now I know you are a man of God and the word of God in your mouth is truth.” 

The word of God by which he created everything isn’t just in Jesus’ mouth. Jesus is himself the Word of God.  As Paul writes in Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 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.”

Step forward to Galatians; Paul was a zealous Jew, faithful even to the point of being murderous towards the church.  He was dead in his sins until he met Jesus on the Road to Damascus and the Word of God came to live in him.  He says later in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  We’ll get into this passage next week, but needless to say we all like Paul have Christ Jesus living in us.  The Christian faith is not about blessings and curses or behavioral management.  It is about Jesus Christ living in us and transforming us with his resurrected life. 

The Word of God is dwelling in us giving us life.  Like the widow of Zarephath, offer Jesus hospitality.  Give him your all, your everything.  Serve him without reservation.  Offer him an “upper room” in your life.  Like Elijah, don’t be afraid to show hospitality to the “dead”.  Touch the “dead” and carry them in their “death” and cry out to God for them.  Show this kind of hospitality, to Jesus and to the broken.  This is the way of those in who the Word of God lives.  Amen.