From Hearing to Seeing and Points in between

John 9:1-41, Ephesians 5:8-14

One of my favourite things about early Spring is the smell of mud.  I enjoy getting out in the yard or in the woods when the snow’s all but gone and the ground is saturated with water and the smell of mud pervades.  To me, this is the smell of all things becoming new.  The death that winter is has passed.  The pall of snow is lifted and from the mud comes new life.  It is the smell of hope.

This is also the time of the year when the kids come in all muddy.  I can’t really say I’m happy about that, but I know how much fun they have playing in the mud.  They are exited that the snow is passing and on some days now it’s warm enough to get the bikes out.  Without fail they will play with the mud and make mud cakes, mud pies, and mud men.  For the child at heart, mud inspires creativity and is just plain fun.

Looking at our passage from John, besides singing a little Hank Williams, whenever I read this passage of Jesus spitting into the dust to make a mudpack to put on this blind man’s eyes to make him see I immediately think of Jesus/God being a little boy playing in the mud.  When God plays with mud, we have to expect something really creative that’s laden with hope.  That’s kind of the way the Bible depicts it “in the beginning”.  If you remember from Genesis 2 God played in the dirt and out came this man named Adam.  I like to imagine that dirt being not just dirt but the mud of spring and like a little child God made a mud man and breathed life into him. 

Well, I am inclined to think that John wants us to look back to Genesis with this story. If you want a little bit of Bible trivia, there is a huge Creation/New Creation motif in John’s Gospel.  He starts and ends it with Creation references.  At the beginning of his Gospel he says that the Word of God by which the universe was made and ordered became human as this man Jesus.  This leads us to expect that as he tells us about Jesus we are supposed to see that in every thing Jesus says and does God is making things new.  Then, at the end of his Gospel it isn’t just that Jesus raises from the dead.  It is that Creation culminates in Jesus resurrection and there’s a hint of the Garden of Eden in the scene with Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the Garden talking to the Gardener only to realize it’s Jesus.  Jesus restores the fellowship that Adam and Eve lost with God in the Garden.  There are also points in between where analogies to Creation/New Creation appear such as this one of Jesus healing this man born blind with mud made from the dirt of the earth and some of that “holy, powerful, life-giving, spit of Jeeesus”.  And, this is where we find Jesus playing in the mud.

To point out a few things about this man born blind, first, his blindness is not the punishment of anything he or his parents had done. It was a popular superstition back then that children born with disabilities were a curse by God for the sins of the parents.  That is never the case.  With respect to the man’s blindness Jesus said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”  That said, Jesus played in the mud and displayed a work.

This man’s blindness, though not the punishment for sin, was a metaphor for sin that in this case takes the form of spiritual blindness, which is the inability to recognize God’s presence and works.  The man himself is apparently naïve in this respect.  He like every human is born with spiritual blindness due to the general human problem with sin.  That’s the fact about life outside the Garden.

This spiritual blindness gets especially twisted when we mix it with religious authority and so Jesus gets quite pointed with the Pharisees about their “blindness”.  As religious leaders they claimed to be able to “see”, to be able to recognize God and God’s works, and also to have the authority to judge people in these matters.  Yet, the Pharisees, though they claimed to “see”, couldn't see who Jesus is.  Therefore, they were unable to grasp the significance of what Jesus had just done in healing this man born blind.  The Pharisees were “blind” to seeing this healing as being the Creation power of God, the Word of God at work.  The result is that they pronounced the judgement of calling this healing work of God evil and they excluded this living testimony to the healing work of God from fellowship, and then in the end became murderous towards God.

This healing is a sign in John’s Gospel, a sign of what God is up to as Jesus to heal and save his creation.  Jesus is the Word of God by which God made everything become flesh.  This Jesus took dirt, dirt from which Adam (Humankind) was first made.  He saturated it with his own saliva (the holy spit of Jeeesus) which represents the life and presence of God.  The result was that this dirt was no longer dirt but mud.  Like the Nicene Creed says about Jesus, two natures in one person.  

In essence, Jesus made a New Creation, New Humanity mudpack to cure that man’s physical/spiritual blindness.  The Bible says that when Jesus returns and we are raised from the dead we will be like him for we shall see him as he is.  This is possible because of the Holy Spirit living in us giving us a foretaste of it now.  This blind man now seeing become a sign pointing to this new humanity, a new humanity that doesn’t just hear about God and tries to live accordingly, but rather a humanity that “sees”, a humanity that is aware of God’s presence and his healing/saving work. 

This mudpack is quite symbolic of the healing/saving work the Trinity is doing in, through, and as Jesus to humanity.  Jesus himself is the fallen human flesh of Adam infused with God the Son. Like the mudpack made from dirt and “the holy spit of Jesus” applied to this man born blind, Jesus (the New Man) applied to the blindness of Adam (the Old Man) makes things new, makes humanity able to see God, to perceive God’s presence and work in Jesus.

This healing event is a good example of what grace is.  Grace is God the Trinity – God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – working as Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to create a new realm of human existence in which we sin-blinded and broken humans can see, which is being in relationship with God the Father through Jesus the Son by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit given to us.  God has made this new reality possible in Jesus by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  There is salvation/healing in no other place.

Something else that needs to be noted is that the blind man discovers his healing when he washes in the Well of Siloam, which means Sent.  This is how faith correlates to grace.  Paul says we are saved by grace through faith.  If grace is God’s opening up this new realm of existence of saved/healed humanity in Jesus through the Holy Spirit that is among us now in part but will be fully with us when Jesus returns, then faith is our participating in this new realm.  Faith isn’t just having beliefs or simply trusting God.  Faith is our participation in Jesus’ life and mission.  If you find he’s opened your eyes, then look around and live according to the Gospel, the Good News that God has and will in totality save his Creation from Sin, Death, Evil, and all oppressive powers.  With the eyes of faith we see God’s grace all around us and experience ourselves standing in the midst of it.

It is as Paul has said in our Ephesians reading, “For, once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.  Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”  How do we find out what is pleasing to the Lord?  Spend time with him in prayer.  Read the Bible.  Fellowship with fellow-believers.  Talk about what the Lord is doing in your lives.  Focus on loving your neighbour.  Think of yourselves as the minister to the people who live in the eight houses immediately surrounding you.  Get to know them and let them get to know you.  Ask the Lord to show you what he’s doing in their lives and make you a part of it.

Each of us as followers of Jesus who by God’s grace have had our eyes opened to know Jesus and his love by one form of healing or another, we are light in this world.  It is in the midst of actually be Jesus’ disciples that we go from simply hearing about Jesus to actually seeing and knowing him and because of his presence and healing work in our own lives we become light whos help others to see that in Jesus Christ, the realm of grace, the darkness is fading, that God is saving/healing his Creation an even these our neighbours.  Amen.

Is the LORD among Us or Not?

Exodus 17:1-7

“Is the Lord among us or not?”  That would seem to be a ridiculous question for the Israelites to have asked Moses.  They had seen the Lord smite the land of Egypt with ten plagues.  They saw the LORD part the waters of the Red Sea for them to cross and then drown the armies of Pharaoh in it.  At a place called Marah, which means Bitter, the LORD turned bitter waters to sweet for them to drink.  In the Wilderness of Sin the LORD provided them with quails and manna to eat.  Why would they doubt that the LORD was with them?

But here they were going deeper into the wilderness and god’s can be fickle, you know.  They were about two and a half months into this wandering stuff, a little bit south of just smack dab right in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula, and there they were at Rephidim.  It’s on a dry river bed, the Wadi Feiran, no water, just cliffs of granite.  Looks like this:
Amalekite_Canyon.jpg

It rains maybe once a year there.  When it does, there’s a fierce flood.  You get out of the way.  Had the LORD brought his people all the way out to the middle of nowhere to die of thirst?  We like to fault the ancient Israelites for their complaining while they were wandering in the wilderness, but when you’re thirsty and looking at nothing but granite cliffs “is the LORD among us or not” is a relevant question.

The people who live in that area today, Bedouin’s, are descendants of people who have lived there for thousands of years.  They know the desert well.  Unlike the Ancient Egyptians who had many gods, these people have for generations believed in only one God, the God of life and death.  They know that God has many miraculous means of providing food and water out in the desert.  This is the God who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush which was only about sixty miles from where they were, the God who said he was the God of the Israelite forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  This God sent Moses to lead the people out of slavery in Egypt.  But, this Rephidim was just a little too life and death for the Israelites, even more so than slavery in Egypt.

The ancient Israelites didn’t know how to survive in this land.  This was life and death for them.  So, they make their case known to Moses.  Moses, thinking he might get stoned, cries out to the LORD, and we know the rest of the story.  Moses, takes the elders, sees the LORD, parts a rock with the same staff that parted the Red Sea, and water comes forth for the people to drink.  There’s a rock in that vicinity that to this day looks like this. 
Rrphidim_1-787x587.jpg

It’s likely not the actual rock, but it is certainly a reminder of it.

I am inclined to say that on a whole the North American church doesn’t know how to survive in the wilderness it’s in today.  Denominations are shrinking.  Individual congregations are dwindling.  No matter what we try it seems nobody comes to church anymore.  Full-time single point ministers are becoming a thing of the past.  It would be nice to say like we used to say that we are just two funerals away from being able to make necessary changes.  Now so many churches are just two funerals away from having to shut the doors.  “Is the LORD among us or not” is a question that’s not too far from our lips, but we know better than to ask it.  Don’t we?  Regardless, it seems we are thirsty and looking at nothing but granite and, to be frank, where is the LORD in all this? 

Our Rephidim today is smaller churches surviving in this wilderness.  I believe that small churches matter.  I believe it so much that fifteen years ago when I finished at my church in West Virginia I made the career decision to get into small church revitalization rather than to move to a larger pulpit than what I was in.  I don’t have time to give all the reasons other than to say the small church, smaller than fifty people active, looks and acts more like the New Testament church than does the larger program church and certainly more so than the recent phenomenon of the megachurch.

As the church began as small Christian fellowships, I believe that the future of the North American church will arise from healthy small Christian fellowships.  By healthy I mean that they authentically love and thereby actually look and act like Jesus.  They devote themselves to prayer, Bible Study, and eat together often.  They make disciples with the intention of starting new small Christian fellowships rather than simply trying to get more bums in their own pews for the sake of their own survival.  This means equipping small churches to start new small churches rather than augmenting their own.

This is risky.  For, like ancient Israel in the Sinai Wilderness, we don’t know how to survive in the barren land of a de-Christianized and often anti-Christian atmosphere pervading our culture.  We are familiar with how to be the family church that has a program or two in a culture that is more than majoratively Christian.  Today, the two largest categories of church involvement are the ‘None’s” – those who’ve had no and want no involvement in the church – and the “Done’s” – those who are done with church and are not coming back.  Asking small churches to start new small churches in these times, well, that’s about as thirsty and looking at granite graveyard stones as you get in North America, but my gut says that’s where the water in the rock is at.

You know, I don’t get to come to Cornerstone too often, but I really enjoy coming here and not only because Bernice is here and I don’t say that to butter up to the Gowan legacy here.  I say it because Jesus is here and it is evident.  There is Living Water flowing from the Rock here.  You are living proof that small churches can go through a wilderness and do more than just survive.  Lay leadership is strong here.  Your elders and Jim do a fantastic job of pastoral care.  The Word is being soundly taught and proclaimed here.  There are those in your midst who would be absolutely lost without the love of this, their church family.  Jesus ministers through each of you.  Everything I said about healthy small churches pertains here.  The answer to the question “Is the LORD among us or not” is an obvious “Yes!”  I would challenge you folks with a different question: What would you have to do different to gear up to start another fellowship like this one?  Amen.

What Faith Looks Like

John 3:1-17; Romans 4:1-17

The words “belief, believe, and believing” are on my “bad word” list when it comes to trying to understand the biblical concept of faith.  “Belief, believe, and believing”, they fit well with Western Culture’s philosophical assumption that matters pertaining to God are simply ideas to be accepted or discarded according to personal whim.  Religions have beliefs and we choose to believe them.  Religions also place demands on our conduct and we call that believing.

For example, I can say that I believe that in love God created everything.  I can live like I believe that in love God created everything.  I’m sure you folks have seen many destructive farming practices based purely in a belief in profit.  I’m sure you’ve also noticed that farmers who believe that in love God created everything treat their land and animals a bit differently.  What we believe does have profound effect on how we live.

But, biblical faith is even different than simply believing ideas about God and living accordingly – fundamentally different.  Abraham believed in God and I’m sure he had his religious practises too.  So what?  Everybody back then believed in gods of some sort or another. Abraham is not called faithful and the father of the faithful until when according to God’s promise he left everything to go to the land God would show him where God would make a great nation from him, and through this people God would deliver his creation from its bondage to sin and death.

Faith is basically being faithful in a relationship.  Faith is the basis of marriage.  Marriage is a covenantal relationship that requires faithfulness for it to be a marriage.  One of the reasons so many people simply cohabitate rather than marry and why so many marriages fail is that our culture has relegated marriage to the realm of belief.  People believe in marriage.  They accept the idea of it, but when it comes to being faithful, well that’s hard work at which we fail miserably and then it’s so easy yet quite expensive to say, “well, it was a good idea that I don’t believe in anymore.”

Biblical faith as Abraham demonstrates is active participation in the covenant relationship through which God is putting things right in his creation that he loves.  It is living in the new reality that God is bringing about by bringing all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ by uniting all things to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  The end result this work of God’s is the renewal and healing of his creation.  And like marriage it is all about relationship.

Looking at John 3:16, when Jesus there talks about believing “in him” it helps to think of the “in him” as a place; as the sphere of reality in which we are in relationship with him through the Holy Spirit sharing in his relationship with the Father.  This is what Jesus calls “eternal life”.  At John 17:3 Jesus says as much.  It reads, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”  This means that eternal life is not going to heaven when I die.  It is rather knowing, being in relationship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to one another and the rest of creation accordingly.

John 3:16 does not say, “In this way God loved the world: he gave his only Son so that all who believe the right things about him won’t go to Hell but will go to Heaven when they die.”  That’s the way it so often gets preached but that is not what it means.  John 3:16 rather means: “In this way God loved the world: he gave his only Son with the result that all those who are participating in a covenantal relationship with him in him are absolutely not perishing according to this world’s futility but are rather experiencing eternal life, i.e., communion with the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit now and forever.”

So what are we to have faith in?  Well, at the beginning of his Gospel John says that Jesus is the Word of God become flesh.  This means that Jesus is the becoming human flesh and blood of that which God spoke to create the universe and give it order.  To say that in a simply more complicated way, human being was and is supposed to look like God the Son in-fleshed in the creation.  That’s what Jesus is and in him is where this reality is coming into being.  When Jesus died on the cross he opened up an entirely new reality that is free of sin and death that his resurrection was the first act and glimpse of, and this reality will come in its fullness when he returns and Creation is made new.  When Jesus says “all who believe in me” that’s what he means.  The new reality, the new humanity, he has opened up in his very self by passing through death and now included us in by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We are sharing the Lord’s Supper this morning.  This meal points towards this reality in Jesus.  It is a sign and foretaste of it.  We have been accustomed thinking of Holy Communion as this solemn ritual when we “believe” we should reflect on our own sinfulness and how unworthy as we are Jesus died for me so that I can go to Heaven and I’m supposed to be overwhelmed with thankfulness, but…we wind up not feeling it, not so much. 

Let’s try picturing this meal a bit differently.  Picture it as faithful participation in the new creation reality he has opened up in his self.  This meal is what faith looks like.  Jesus is here.  This Bread and this Wine are the signs of his life given for us and to us by which we are fed and nourished in this new life he has given us in the Holy Spirit until he comes and on that day we will feast.  But for now, little by little he is feeding and nourishing us with his very self and like Israel in the wilderness we are coming to know and to depend on him.  This meal is the sign and symbol of the life-giving relationship that the Trinity has given us in Christ Jesus.  God’s people gathered around this table, sharing this meal of new life in Christ Jesus, bound together by the Holy Spirit, and mysteriously being made new – this is what faith looks like.  Amen.

The Dominion of Death Has Ended. LIVE!

Romans 5:12-21

I want to start this morning by talking of something you all know something about, fields. But, I trick you. Not the fields we plant in and play in but rather Quantum Fields.  I’m going to inflict some Quantum Physics on you and please accept my apology for what I’m about to put your minds through.

This pulpit is made of wood.  The wood is made of cells that are made of molecules that are made of atoms.  Atoms are a bit like a miniature Solar system.  They are a nucleus (Sun) made of protons and neutrons bound together by something called the Strong Force otherwise known as the Z Boson.  There are other types of Bosons as well.  The photon, the light particle, is a Boson.  Then, around this nucleus, there are electrons orbiting analogous to planets.  Things get even smaller.  Protons and neutrons consist of even smaller particles called Quarks of which there are several types.  There are also several other types of particles that are like electrons and they form a group called Leptons.  So, this pulpit consists of various different combinations of Quarks, Leptons, and Bosons, otherwise known as Elementary Particles, relating to each other.

Elementary Particles are basically little vibrating blips of energy that are just everywhere to the extent that we can say there really is no such thing as someplace where there is nothing.  Even the vacuum of space is permeated with elementary particles.  Space is not really empty space.  Space is full of Fields of Elementary Particles.  Think of the fields on your own farms.  On your farms you have different varieties of fields; wheat fields, rye fields, barley fields, hayfields and cornfields.  We could also say dirt is itself a type of field and water too. If you spread a field of wheat grains over a field of dirt and then spread a field of water over it also, the interaction of those three fields – wheat, dirt, and water – produces a harvest of wheat.  That’s the way subatomic particles and Particle Fields work.  Each type of elementary particle exists in its own field and the relationships between these fields are what physical reality is made of.

There is a particular type of Boson newly discovered called the Higgs Boson. The Higgs is what gives everything mass.  It makes stuff to be stuff.  When a quark interacts with the Higgs all of a sudden it has mass.  It’s like the invisible man walking into a room permeated with flour.  Without the Higgs Field stuff just wouldn’t be stuff.  Everything would be energy. The Higgs Field consisting of an unlimited number of Higgs Bosons is the heart of physical reality.

That’s physical reality.  This pulpit is the by-product of fields of elementary particles interacting with each other.  But there’s more to this picture.  It took human being to design and assemble it.  We human beings, in fact life in general, are a higher level of this reality.  We have sapience.  We are the part of this creation that is able to understand it and give voice to it.  We are also the part of creation that can understand that there is a God who created all this and this God created us to be in a relationship with Him, a relationship that a rock cannot have with God.  We are also capable of having relationships with each other, with the animal kingdom, and with all of creation in a way that is similar to the relationship that God has with this creation.  God created us in his own image.  We know.  We speak.  We relate.

It is into this level of reality that sin entered through Adam and there is now death as the result.  This futility affects the whole creation.  One man transgresses and the result is the many, the all of it dies.  Death reigns…or at least it did.  It was God’s plan all along to infuse his own life into his creation.  Ephesians 1 tells us this.  God has infused his own life into his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ who is God the Son become human.  Incarnation is the big theological word for that.

And, let’s not sell the extent of the Incarnation short.  It isn’t just that God the Son became human.  He became physical matter too infusing himself into the elementary particles and particle fields.  Just as humanity is now different because of Jesus, so is all of physical reality different.  Jesus is the seed of the New Creation sown into the dirt field of the old creation and is being watered by the Holy Spirit.  When Jesus returns and there is resurrection all of creation will become new and as the prophet Isaiah says, “full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the sea” (11:9). 

It is often said that Jesus lived the faithful life that we cannot live.  This means that Jesus, God the Son, lived his life rightly related to others and to God the Father in and through the Holy Spirit.  This is something that humanity apart from new life in him in and through the Holy Spirit is not able to do. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are like the Higgs Field of New Creation. Jesus, God the Son, bound to himself the fullness of sinful humanity and died with it putting it to death and then by the power of the Holy Spirit God the Father raised him from the dead.  He went through death and came out the other side with a resurrected New Creation human body made of New Creation physical matter.  Like when you put a tea bag in hot water you no longer have a cup of hot water but rather a cup of tea, so all of physical reality is now different…especially humanity.

Paul wrote: “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s righteous act leads to justification and life for all.”  Due to Adam’s trespass the Fields of Sin and Death permeate all, but now because of Jesus, the Incarnation and his faithfulness, a Field of Life permeates all.  Paul also says; “If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.”  For now, God has chosen to bring some of humanity to new life by pouring the Holy Spirit upon them making them to be the body of Christ, the church.  That’s us.  It is God’s intent that we will live life faithful like Jesus lived his life, rightly related to God and to people as evidence of what’s coming.  Death is not the last word.

By the gift of the Holy Spirit and the help of the Holy Spirit God has made us able to do this.  Paul talks about our exercising dominion in life through Christ.  I am pretty sure what he is talking about there is a life that is deeply rooted in and flows forth from prayer, a type of prayer in which we know ourselves to be always in the presence of God and talking with God.  I came across a homily by an ancient church father we call Pseudo-Chrysostom that I thought described prayer quite well.  I’ll share it with you:

“The highest good is prayer in conversation with God, because it means that we are in God’s company and in union with him.  When light enters our bodily eyes eyesight is sharpened; when the soul is intent on God, God’s inextinguishable light shines into it and makes it bright and clear.  I am talking, of course, of prayer that comes from the heart and not from routine: not the prayer that is assigned to particular days or particular moments in time, but the prayer that happens continuously by day and by night…Prayer is a go between linking us to God.  It gives joy to the soul and calms its emotions.  I warn you, though: do not imagine that prayer is simply words.  Prayer is the desire for God, an indescribable devotion, not given by man but brought about by God’s grace.  As St. Paul says: ‘For when we cannot chose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself intercedes on our behalf in a way that could never be put into words.”

Jesus is present in all of our lives.  The Presence of the Holy Spirit makes us aware of him and to desire him.  Children have imaginary friends.  We have Jesus and he is far from imaginary.  Part of prayer is training our minds to be aware of his presence.  If it helps, set up a chair in your room when you pray and let it be as if Jesus was sitting there.  This is opening space for him.  Soon you will realize he’s always with you.  You will find yourself changing because of his presence with you.  By the work of the Holy Spirit he makes us to be people like him. It is a judgement and a grace to know oneself to be always in his presence.  If he’s with us, we might as well talk to him and listen.  I’m really serious about this.  Open up space for him and he will be there to fill it with himself.  And, by his presence in our lives he changes us by his gracious working through the Spirit to be like him.

The Dominion of death has ended.  Live the New Creation life now.  Pray.  Amen.