What Time Is It?

Romans 13:11-14

In this passage I think Paul is using an image from the life of Roman soldiers to say what’s going on in the grand scale of history.  I invite you to imagine what reveille would have been like back then for a Roman soldier.  It is time to wake up.  The night has run its course.  It’s dawn and day is imminent.  It is time to get dressed for the day.  Take off the nightclothes, and like honourable soldiers put on your armour and go take your post on watch.  But, let’s not be so nostalgic and naively polite about this.  What soldiers did at night back then didn’t really involve nightclothes.  You just needed lots of food, lots of alcohol, and lots women for after when you finished bragging and fighting over who was the best in battle.  You would have a bunch of soldiers and their cohorts for the night (usually temple prostitutes) laying around on the floor in a temple feast room or back at the barracks and then, at just before dawn somebody comes to rouse the room full of you from your drunken stupor.  “Wake up!  Quit grumbling!  You gluttonous, drunken, over-sexed pigs, you know darn well what time it is!  Get up!  Put your armour on.  It’s time to get out and to be honourable.  You are soldiers of the imperial Guard and you represent the Emperor.”

Paul takes this image of Roman soldiers at reveille to describe humanity since Jesus was raised from the dead.  God is doing something new, something in the order of a new act of Creation that requires us to get up and get on with it, to get dressed for the day.  A new age in Creation history is upon us since the resurrection of Jesus.  Just as sure as night runs its course and darkness gives way to daylight, so God’s new day of salvation in Jesus Christ is upon us and it is time we dress for the day.  It is now dawn.  Let us begin to live in this New Day.

Paul here tells the Roman Christians that they know what time it is.  The word he uses for “know” entails they have experiential knowledge of the day of salvation to which he is referring.     Also, the word he uses here for “time” isn’t the one that means chronological time.  Actually, that word is chronos.  He uses another world for time, kairos, which means a decisive moment in history.  The set hour is upon us now for a moment in history bigger than the extinction of the dinosaurs, bigger than the fall of Rome, bigger than Columbus coming to America, bigger than the moon landing, bigger than the invention of the personal computer, bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall, bigger than 9/11, even bigger than the global fear created by the last American election.  This set hour is upon us for when God puts an end to the sin and death.  Jesus bearing our sin in his flesh took sin to its death and so then God raising Jesus from the dead put the nails in the coffin for death itself.  In that moment New Creation began.  Salvation!!!  N.T. Wright says it quite well what will come, “God is going to do for the whole Creation what he did for Jesus on Easter morning.”  That is the hope of the Christian faith.

Paul says that it is now the hour for us to raise up from our sleep.  “Sleep” in the early church was a metaphor for death.  In 1 Thessalonians Paul refers to those in Christ who have died as having fallen asleep.  Raising from sleep is a metaphor for rising from death.  By the gift of the Holy Spirit at work in us making us to become more Christ-like as individuals and especially so as a Christian fellowship, we participate now in Jesus resurrection life and thus in the salvation that is coming. 

Christian community is a foretaste of the day of salvation coming.  Please don’t let yourself be lulled into thinking the Christian faith is just a matter of private beliefs, or how to be a good God-fearing person, or simply the means to get to heaven when you die; or into thinking that church is just something good, God fearing people do.  To know the love of God in Jesus Christ is nothing short of being raised from the dead.  The Church, this congregation, every congregation, every fellowship in Christ is a light-bearing participation now in the future that is coming.

So here we are now on the first Sunday in Advent reminding ourselves of the very real hope that we have in Christ Jesus and the coming salvation.  The shear presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst gives us the certainty about this future that makes us able to live the way of the cross that Jesus lived – lives of faithfulness, hope, and love.  We don’t just believe the Gospel.  We are becoming the Gospel – a fellowship that actively embodies Jesus and his resurrection and we demonstrate this in living cross-formed lives.

This is the first Sunday in Advent the day we remind ourselves of the very real hope we have in Jesus Christ of the Day of Salvation that he is bringing.  Isaiah looked forward to that day.  He saw a Day of Peace (next week’s theme), a day when we will beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks and study war no more.  To carry on with what I have been saying, we as a Christian fellowship need to be actively engaging ourselves in making this hope of peace known in every home of this community.  We are coming up to Christmas and yet the primary sound being heard coming from our churches is the sound of sleigh bells when it ought the sound of sledgehammers on anvils. 

Friends, we know what time it is, but seriously, we need to wake up.  It’s God who’s blowing reveille for us.  We are slumbering in the early morning stupor of a privatized, nostalgic semblance of the Christian faith.  We are good, God-fearing people, who care about each other and this church.  Well and good, but how is the community around us seeing in us or receiving from us any evidence that God is present and cares.  If this church closed, would Chatsworth notice we were gone?  The Hour is upon us.  It is time for us to get up and embody the hope we know deep down in our aching bones.  Amen.

More Than an Endgame Strategy

Luke 23:33-43; Colossians 1:11-20

In the world of the church, for the last untold number of centuries Christian faith has overwhelming been pitched as an endgame strategy to give a person eternal security.  The preoccupying question has been “How are you going to spend eternity?”  Are you going to bliss in Heaven or eternal torment in Hell?

Endgame is a chess term describing the last few exchanges in a game.  Usually you have just your king, one or two key pieces, and a pawn or two.  In the endgame, your king suddenly becomes a key player.  The king is relatively weak.  It can only move one space at a time.  Yet when used in tandem with a more powerful piece, it can prove instrumental in trapping your opponent’s king so that it cannot move without placing itself in jeopardy.   

In the Church, we owe this fascination with the endgame to the Medieval European Church.  The Dark Ages in Europe were precarious times fraught with plagues, wars, pandemic illiteracy, and toilsome work.  Tyrannical kings and emperors ruled lands.  In the Church, popes and bishops liked to act like tyrannical kings and emperors.  Life was short, difficult, and filled with anxiety and so people were preoccupied with what happened to them after death.

The Church in Medieval Europe grew powerful on preaching God to be an almighty Creator/Judge who created us to live a moral life and if we did our souls got to go on to eternal bliss in Heaven.  But due to Adam’s Fall passed to us through Original Sin, we fail miserably and so God punishes us with death and eternal torment in the fires of Hell.  Nobody is good enough to go to Heaven.  But, the Roman Catholics did teach that if you were a good Catholic you could go to Purgatory and perhaps from there work your way into Heaven.  Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, the Lord or Emperor of all Creation, came and showed us how to live.  If we live devoted to the Pope/Church, go to confession, and infuse ourselves with grace periodically by partaking of his body and blood at Holy Communion our chances of climbing the Ladder of Salvation into heaven improve greatly.  Yet, there was no ultimate assurance of one’s eternal security.   The Medieval Church’s endgame strategy was simply an imperial edict to kneel to the Pope the representative of Christ on earth or you will assuredly go to Hell.

  The Reformers, mainly Luther and Calvin (picking up on St. Anselm’s lead) came along and taught that the best endgame strategy is to give recognition and your whole-hearted trust and faithfulness to Jesus the king, the incarnate Son of God who sacrificed his life for you.  He satisfied God’s righteous demand for us to live moral lives and he also fulfilled the punishment of death for our inability to do so.  Have faith in Jesus and just like that thief crucified next to Jesus you are off to heaven and eternal bliss.  The proof of your eternal security lay not in yourself or your actions, but outside yourself in Jesus faithfulness unto death.  The assurance of one’s eternal salvation is the fact of the cross of Jesus Christ and who he is who died on it.  Jesus has done it all.

The problem with this endgame focused Gospel is that Jesus’ story doesn’t end with the cross and Jesus’ promise of being with him in Paradise.  As New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright rather humorously says, “Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.”  He also likes to say, “There is life after life after death.”  We have to continue past Jesus death.  Jesus death on the cross is more than simply our endgame strategy for getting into heaven when we die.  Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture on a Friday afternoon but come Sunday morning he rose from the dead and physical reality has been ever changed.  A New Creation has begun.  N.T. Wright likes to say that on Easter morning when Jesus rose from the dead a shockwave went out through all creation that changed everything.  We now look forward not simply to disembodied after death with Jesus in “Paradise”, but more so to re-embodied life after life after death in a New Creation where sin, death, and evil are no more.  As Jesus rose bodily from the dead so will it be with us.

After Jesus rose from the dead he ascended into heaven and sits enthroned ruling from heaven on earth.  He and the Father sent the Holy Spirit upon those whom they have called to be followers of Jesus and have empowered them, the church, to be living evidence that a Resurrection, New Creation, sin and death and evil defeating shockwave has presently gone out through creation. 

Paul says the Father has “enabled” us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.”  Light is a profound metaphor.  We can’t see light, but light makes everything else able to be seen.  So, we can’t see Jesus, but he makes the things of God seen.  The speed of light is the only universal constant in the universe.  Such is Jesus.  The new life that he has wrought in us each is the visible light of that Resurrection shockwave.  The Father’s rescuing of us in our present lives from the power of darkness and transferring us into the kingdom of his Son is like saying we were spiralling towards utter annihilation into a black hole from which no light escapes but God reached in and rescued us and has transferred our very existence now into the sure and certain New Creation reign of Jesus in whom all things and powers were created and hold together. 

You may wish to challenge me on this and say that due to the shear evidence that this world is very messed up, Jesus doesn’t seem to be reigning on earth and how can we the church be evidence of New Creation when the Church has been such a key player over the centuries in everything that’s wrong on Earth.  I will say yes.  Within myself, I, even I, have the propensity to be a stubborn, bone-headed jerk powerless over my propensity to hurt and disappoint those closest to me.  And the church as an institution, whenever it has tried to act on usurped imperial power it has sinned greatly. 

Nevertheless, whenever an addict suddenly loses his compulsion to use or an alcoholic his compulsion to drink; whenever the hearts of sworn enemies begin to soften and they begin to work towards reconciliation; whenever abusers suddenly begin to see themselves for what they are and begin to seek help; whenever victims suddenly find themselves empowered to heal and forgive; whenever broken families suddenly begin to see the elephants in the room and find themselves striving to deal and heal New Creation is showing up.

The nature of the kingdom is the nature of the king.  Jesus did not come with imperial power to impose his will upon the world.  On the cross we see the true nature of the king; love that is demonstrated in weakness, vulnerability, forgiveness, and dying for others.  Yet, this love in all its apparent futility confronts this old creation’s worst enemies of sin, death, and evil, and defeats them, even Old Scratch himself.  Jesus and the Father have poured their love into our hearts by giving us their Spirit who makes us able to consciously in lay our self-mindedness aside and in love for others be weak, vulnerable, and forgiving.  Jesus is king.  We are his kingdom.  Whenever someone is in Christ, there is New Creation.  May that New Creation Shockwave shock the socks off of us.  Amen.

Build That New House

Luke 21:5-19

During my last year of high school my parents decided to build their own house.  It was a big event for them.  In a sense it was a rite of passage into empty-nesterhood and a huge statement of financial independence.  They found a nice piece of land on a hill with a view.  Found some blueprints for the type of house they wanted; an A-frame with lots of windows to enjoy their view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  They contracted a trusted and gifted builder.  Chose carpets and wallpapering and the like.  They had enough left over in the budget to add a swimming pool.  This house was very much their house.

For me, the move meant saying good bye to years of childhood familiarity with a house that I knew the ins and outs of – which windows you could sneak out of in the night, the nooks and crannies where my big brother kept stuff hid, how to climb out the dining room window onto the carport then up onto the roof and I’m king of the world, the closet under the stairs where the monsters lived.  There were a lot of memories tied to that house.

The new house brought about a change in identity and family dynamic.  I suddenly found myself to be more of a guest in my parent’s house.  It was time for me to move on into adulthood.  This was their home, not mine.  I would have to go forth and begin to make my own.  Yet, that new house, my parent’s home, became the gathering place for the whole family, all the stepsiblings, on Sunday afternoons particularly in the summer around the swimming pool.  It gave us a place, a cherished opportunity, to begin to know each other as adults. 

The house my parents built and that leaving behind of a childhood identity and gaining of a new one for our family is part of the interpretive lens that I bring to this passage in Luke where Jesus tells his disciples not to get all nostalgic about that magnificent Temple for the days were soon coming when not a stone would be left atop another.  In 70 AD that day came.  The Romans levelled it.  The Jewish faith and its burgeoning sect, the Christian church, had to come to grips with being Temple-less.

The Temple in the biblical faith is important.  It is the place where Heaven and earth are open to one another.  In the Biblical understanding of the Creation both Heaven and Earth are part of the Creation.  Earth isn’t down here and Heaven way up there.  They overlap and there’s a veil that keeps us from seeing Heaven.  God is openly present in and to Heaven and in Heaven his will is done and it is from Heaven that his will is done on Earth.  According the Book of Hebrews the Jerusalem Temple was the image on Earth of the heavenly Temple and here on Earth in the Holy of Holies, the back room of the Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant sat behind a curtain, this was where the Presence of the Lord sat enthroned on Earth. The Temple was also the place on Earth where humanity’s relationship to God was maintained through sacrificial worship.

When God the Son became incarnate in and as Jesus, God’s presence on Earth moved from the Temple to him.  Jesus became the Temple: the place on Earth where God dwelt and the relationship between God and humanity was maintained.  This is part of what’s behind the meaning of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove when John the Baptist baptized him. 

That wasn’t the first time God changed his dwelling place. In the Old Testament, before the Temple there was the Tabernacle, which was an elaborate tent version of the Temple in which the Presence of the Lord dwelt among the people in their wilderness wanderings.  Then after Solomon built the Temple, the presence of the Lord moved into it.  When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the Temple in 586 BC and carried the people away into exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel had a vision of the Presence of the Lord leaving the Temple and heading east to Babylon to be with his people.  Oddly, we don’t hear of the Presence of the Lord coming to dwell in the Temple that the Jews built when they returned from exile, the Temple which King Herod the Great embellished and to which Jesus was referring to in our passage.  But we do know that the Presence of the Lord was again Tabernacling among his people in and as Jesus.

Now there’s a forth time that the Presence of the Lord changes his dwelling place, the Day of Pentecost when God poured the Holy Spirit into his people.  We are now the Temple of God.  He has made us his dwelling (2 Cor. 6:16).  We you and I gathered here, the people of God indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we are where God now dwells on Earth.  Everywhere each of us is we can say with certainty that God is.  This means that this church building or any church building for that matter is not necessarily God’s dwelling place.  It is indeed sacred space but it is sacred not because we’ve shut the Presence of the Lord up in a box here, but because we the people of God in whom he dwells gather here to worship.

Like my parents decided to build a new house, so God decided to build a new house and we are that house.  Jesus is the Cornerstone.  The Holy Spirit is the Mortar that holds us all together.  So also, just as my parents building a new house brought about a new identity in me and a new dynamic within my family (it pushed us into relating to each other as adults), so also we have to figure out our identity as the Temple of God apart from this building. 

My parents building “their” house in which I would no longer be a child growing up in but rather an adult guest in forced me out into the world to become who I was as an adult.  So it is with our being the dwelling place of God, the new house that God is building.  We don’t come to a building we call God’s house and do our religious stuff.  That house, the kind of building-based religion got destroyed once and for all in 70 AD with the Jerusalem Temple.

God lives in us and through us his presence is embodied all over the world.  And so, we must come to reckon with the fact that discovering who we are as the people of God is going to happen more when we are scattered out there in the world than here when we are gathered for worship.

How we are and what we do when we are scattered from this sacred place, particularly in this day and time, is more important than how we are and what we do when we are gathered here.  If people today are going to encounter the Living God who has made us his dwelling place, it is not going to happen within the walls of a church.  It is going to happen in our relationships with our friends, families, neighbours co-workers, schoolmates out there in the world.  Here are some interesting numbers for you.  Alan Roxburgh shares in his book Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time:

“If you were born between 1925 in 1945, there is a 60% chance you are in church today. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, there is a 40% chance you are you in church today. If you were born between 1965 and 1983, there is a 20% chance you are in church today. If you were born after 1984, there is less than a 10% chance you are in church today.” [1]

If we want people to know our Lord, then we have to come to grips with the wonderful reality that God has made us each his dwelling place and he will make himself evident, known and felt, through us wherever we are out there. 

Psalm 84, which I sang a bit ago, starts out, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.”  That’s you.  As a congregation gathered you are a lovely dwelling place of God.  You really are.  But, so are each of you on your own when we are scattered because God dwells in you.  Let God build his new house out there in the world through you.  Go out and be lovely in Christ with everyone you meet.  Invite people into relationship with you, be lovely in Christ, and through that relationship God will make him self known.  Amen.

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[1] Roxburgh, Alan J.; Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time; Morehouse Publishing, New York, 2015.

Build That New Temple

Haggai 2:1-9

The Good Ole Days, God by the hand of King David delivered Israel from all its enemies and united them into one great nation and established Jerusalem as the capital; the place on Earth where he would dwell.  God had kept his promise made to Israel’s forefather and progenitor Abraham to give to him and his descendants a land and make them to be a great nation.  God had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt and led them through the conquest of the land.  Then with David, there was a measure of Shalom – peace, well-being, security, enough – well mostly, his sons would occasionally revolt. 

It was the Good Ole Days.  Everybody had pulled together and built a nation, a great nation.  Jerusalem with David’s Palace was beautiful, a stately capital city to rival any.  Yet, there was no temple to honour Israel’s God who had made them who they are.  David wanted to build a temple, but God wouldn’t let him.  David’s hands were too bloody from war to build God a house.  So, God said David’s son, Solomon, would build the temple.

Under Solomon the Good Ole Days got even better.  Solomon was legendary for his wisdom, his love of science and botany, and his many wives and concubines.  Rulers came from all over bringing him gold and silver and their daughters.  He was a king unsurpassed in wealth and glory and women.  He built the temple for God and it was beyond being a marvel.  It to took him twenty years to complete it.  Everything was gold plated, silver plated, or made of bronze.  It glowed in splendour of polished metal.  The glory of the Lord dwelled within.  God finally had his place on Earth to dwell.

Those were the Good Ole Days.  Solomon’s temple stood for roughly 250 years until in 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the temple and took all its treasures.  They also took most of the people into captivity, back to Babylon where they resettled.  Apparently, idolatry and abusing the poor did not please God.

Our reading from Haggai picks up nearly seventy years later.  A remnant of the people had returned to Jerusalem.  The rest stayed in Babylon because they were doing well there.  Those who returned were expecting God to give them shalom when they got back, a return to the Good Ole Days.  But, it just wasn’t the same.  They began to do well enough to build nice houses for themselves but they never seemed to have enough.  Haggai prophesied that they were wanting because they had looked after their own houses while neglecting to rebuild a house for God.  The remnant got the message and got busy rebuilding the temple. 

Well, it just wasn’t the same as Solomon’s Temple.  It lacked the splendour, the gold and silver plating and with things just not being the way they used to be, enthusiasm waned.  The people felt the hopelessness of lacking the resources to do it like they used to.  No temple treasure.  Not enough people.  And there was the pervading question of where was God in all this.  The people needed a word from the Lord, a sure sign to go on.

Haggai rose to the occasion.  It was the 440^th anniversary of the day that Solomon completed his temple.  He started by acknowledging their profound disappointment.  The seniors in the crowd, the octogenarians, they would have been the only ones to remember the glory of Solomon’s Temple and they were few.  It was time for those who had never seen that temple to get on with building a new temple, a new temple for their day and time.  God would provide the resources and the splendour of the new temple would surpass the splendour of the old one.  “Take courage.  Work for I myself am with you standing in your midst.  My very breath is in you.  Do not fear.”  So says the Lord God himself.  This new thing happening in their midst, coming back to the Land and rebuilding the nation, was nothing less than God shaking the heavens and quaking the earth to churn up something fundamentally new into being.  Take courage political leaders.  Take courage religious leaders.  Take courage people of God.  Your God is doing a new thing.

It is quite difficult for me to read this passage from Haggai and not see and feel a correlation to our present day and circumstances.  It is Remembrance Sunday and when reflecting on those who made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in war in protection of our society from fascist tyranny we, like Private Ryan in the movie by that name should be asking ourselves have we been good people.  Have we continued to better the society they died for or have we spoilt it with narcissistic entitlement so that we never seem to have enough.

This is the also the Sunday before the American Presidential election.  The Good Ole Days are definitely gone for my home country.  As the world watches that election we must keep in mind that the American president is not the Saviour of the world who can fix everything.  The last time I checked that role was reserved for Jesus.  The American President is a servant of the people, and supposed to be a wise leader and role model.  An image of what it is to be an American.  Speaking as an American we have spoilt with narcissistic entitlement what my grandfather fought for and for which he saw many of his friends die right beside him.  America, though you have a right to them, put your guns away before you needlessly kill someone and learn to respect and help each other.

As the church, the Good Ole Day is gone.  The former splendour of Christianity in North America is no more.  Things will never be like they used to be.  Our society has changed too much.  Rick Warren, Pastor of the Saddleback mega-church and author of all things “purpose driven” said with respect to the way things are today for the church, “People aren’t looking for a church.  But they are looking for friends.”  People need loving community and trusted friends, but gone is any sort of notion that they can find that at a church.  People just are not going to come to church like they did twenty years ago and days prior because something culturally ingrained in them makes them feel like they need to go to church for things to be right.

Working the metaphor of Solomon’s temple and church buildings, there are going to be fewer to very few church buildings being built from here on out because the church building of the very near future will be somebody’s home or barn or a coffee shop or a storefront – something visibly open and directly present in the neighbourhood.  Old church buildings like this one will persist but the congregations that meet within are going to have to figure out, as this congregation is doing, how to open their doors to their neighbourhoods and be good neighbours.  The congregation that can get known for things like throwing block parties and its open-to-everyone-no-strings-attached front lawn Barbeque will have a likely chance of making it through the next thirty years.

The New Testament church was buildingless because the fellowship of the people is the temple where God dwells on earth.  The splendour of the new Temple is the presence of God in our midst.  God is with us, in us shining like gold and silver.  But, God is out there as well among our neighbours doing stuff.  Our neighbourhoods need Jesus people to be out there being good neighbours who listen, and help, and work at building good, solid, unconditional, compassionate friendship in our neighbourhoods. 

Finally, this congregation has its particular concerns to deal with.  I hear God’s word through Haggai speaking to us today.  Let us not be so lost in humble arrogance to think that we cannot take verses as a direct word from our Lord to us.  God does speak directly to us through the Scriptures.  This day God says to us, the remnant people, the people through whom God is building the future church here, God says,  “Take courage.  Keep working, for I am with you.  My Spirit abides among you.  Do not be afraid.”  We’ve a good, blessed fellowship here.  The Triune God of grace abides in our midst.  Let’s not be fearful.  Let’s take courage and keep at it.  And all God’s people say, “Amen.”