Heart Conditions: Cut to the Heart

Acts2:36-41, Luke 24:13-35, 1 Peter 1:17-23

In our readings this morning the heart is mentioned three times.  The Jerusalem crowd on the day of Pentecost seeing and hearing the promised Holy Spirit being poured out upon the disciples of Jesus realized they had missed the mark and they were cut to the heart by it.  Two disciples on Easter morning not knowing they were in the presence of Jesus raised.  Their hearts were burning within them as this Beloved Stranger explained the scriptures to them.  Finally, Peter writing to encourage many churches throughout what is today Turkey who were being persecuted for expressing the genuine mutual love they had in them as result of the Holy Spirit’s work.  He tells them to love deeply from the heart.  The next three weeks we are going to look at each one of these heart conditions.  Today we’ll look a bit at being cut to the heart.

The thing about a heart condition is that too often you don’t know you have it and what symptoms you do have can be easily explained away.  That fluttering and leaping sensation is just a tummy spasm.  The lite-headedness is from sitting too long. I don’t have the energy I used to because I’m getting older.  “Whew.  Let me catch my breath…but I’m just standing here.”

A heart condition can also really affect your drive.  You pushing yourself to get things done. You want to do things, but…maybe tomorrow.  It’s quite like the motivational problems that arise with depression.  Everything requires more effort than it should.

While we’re on the topic of the heart and drive, in the Bible the heart is the chief organ of human life, the centre of vitality.  The Hebrews believed that the blood held the life of a person and the heart pumped that life through the body.  More metaphorically, the heart is the seat of your drive.  You’re passion.

Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Lk. 12:34).”  But wait, treasure sounds like pleasure, or that’s the way the heart’s sin-sick buddy the mind makes it sound and, therefore following your heart is not always the best advice to heed.  The heart’s drive for what it treasures can deceive.  The LORD spoke through Jeremiah saying, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it? (Je. 17:9).”

Fortunately, God promises us a new heart.  Through Ezekiel he promised, “I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ez. 36:26).”  Since Pentecost, we have had a taste of that promise fulfilled in us in Christ by the gift of Holy Spirit who works within us changing our hearts and minds to be more like Jesus.

But back to the heart being the seat of our drive, our passion.  As I said following the heart can be misleading because the heart can be wrongly impassioned.  Similarly, the heart can loose its passion.  You hear this with athletes.  They played the game so well for so long.  It was their passion.  Anytime, anywhere, they’d play.  But then, it’s not that something happened.  It’s just their hearts aren’t in it anymore.  They’ll finish the season, but don’t expect them to do more than just show up.  Their hearts are rekindled with passion.

Congregations can get to the point of where their hearts just aren’t in it and will start to show evidence of a heart condition.  We show up, but that’s about it.  Many Psalms encourage us to “serve the Lord with our whole hearts”, but…“Meh.  I think I’ll just sit here. My heart is just not in it.  Another fundraiser.  Another meeting.  Another anniversary.  Meh.”  The passion is just not there anymore.  Church is a duty, an obligation among many,…and wouldn’t we just love a break from it.  But, that’s like quitting on God.

I think the root cause of this congregational heart condition is that passion for the church took the place of passion for the Lord.  You see, rightly impassioned hearts, hearts impassioned for the Lord, will be passionate about knowing him and serving him no matter what form of ministry that takes.  If we lose our passion with respect to the church, it is likely because Jesus is trying to get our hearts to burn with passion, to be impassioned for him.  The end result of hearts turned back to Jesus is usually a new way of being the people of God, a new way of being the church in which our passion is to love God, our neighbours, each other, and ourselves more deeply from the heart; a new way of being the church in this world that will be more in tune with the times.

Back when I was a kid I watched a TV show called The Land of the Lost.  It was about a father, son, and daughter going rafting down this “unexplored river”.  But they get either go over a waterfall or get sucked into a whirlpool and somehow wind up in this absolutely beautiful place with plant species and animals that have been extinct for millions of years.  They think they’ve found Paradise…that is until the T. Rex shows up.

The 80’s and 90’s was the end of the era of when non-churched people got on the raft and came to church because there was a cultural message that impressed upon them that people needed to come to church to find God and “peace”.  They came and often found something really special…the presence of the Lord in the midst of good people who cared about them.  But, these church people were a people lost in time and it didn’t take long for the T. Rex to show.  The vicious carnivore of “the institutional church” embodying our idols of “what churches do” and this is “the way we’ve always done it” hounded them and guilted into doing things they didn’t know how to do and criticized the mistakes.   Instead of hearts burning with passion as they felt Jesus speaking to them through the Scriptures these newcomers found themselves being chased into a cave by a dinosaur that kill and ate their spirits.  These T. Rex churches are still around today and are the ones where you can’t get anybody out for a Bible Study and they are beginning to fight about or just say “meh” to the all the things they have to do to stay afloat…and it is really rare that anybody just shows up.  Sound familiar?

We need to be cut to the heart as our Acts passage says. Cut to the heart…this is what happens when we realize our hearts have been otherwise or wrongly impassioned.  The Jerusalem Jews realized how far off the mark they had been about Jesus and what the LORD God was doing in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth.  The Lord was doing something new in their midst, but they couldn’t see it due to their wrongly impassioned hearts.  Instead of just saying, “meh…I think I’ll just watch.”  They tried to kill this new thing.  When God came to the people of God with a new revelation of himself, the people of God killed him and persecuted those who followed him.

Yet, because of the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst that day, the people there in Jerusalem realized that Jesus was truly their Lord and Messiah but they had indeed crucified him.  They realized this and they were cut to the heart.  They were remorseful, fearing the punishment they knew they deserved, needing to sit in holy silence before the Lord, felt lost, stung, humbled, indignant with themselves at what they had done.  So they ask the Disciples “Brothers, what can we do?”

Peter answers basically repent and receive the Holy Spirit.   The Greek word for “repent” literally means to change your thinking, to change your mindedness.  We need to commit ourselves fully to discovering and getting onboard with what Jesus is doing in our midst rather than just doing church according to the idols of what we believe churches are supposed to do and doing things the ways we’ve always done them.  We’ve got an awesome opportunity with this Coop.  We really do.  God is doing a new thing here…right here.  But are we passionate about it.  Our hearts need to burn within us and I’ll get to that next week.  But for now, I ask this question to each one of us, “What is the condition of your heart?”  Are you impassioned for the Lord?  Or, are our hearts just not in it?  Are we saying “meh” and in so doing stifling the Spirit’s work in our midst?  Pray about that this week?  Amen.

Peace and Forgiveness

John 20:19-31; Luke 5:17-26

One of the things I appreciate most about John’s Gospel is how the stories John chose to share with us tend to be very reflective of our experience of relationship with God. The line of thought John gives us is that we abide in Jesus by virtue of the Holy Spirit abiding in us and abiding in Jesus we then actually share in his relationship with God the Father. The Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus, unites us to him, and he is in the Father. We are in him, he is in us, he is in the Father and the Father is in him. We know the Father through him and we share in their relationship by the Holy Spirit’s abiding in us. Abide. Abide. Abide.

In fact, one could say that John’s Gospel is an exposition of what it is to have eternal life. You all know John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who is believing in him shall absolutely not perish but shall absolutely be having eternal life.” That translation sounds a little different than the billboard version we are accustomed to that is translated with an agenda for conversion. John 3:16 is not the formula for how a person gets saved is actually a description of reality of those who are believers in Jesus, not a contractual offer of what a person will get if he or she should decide to believe in Jesus. It says that those who believe in Jesus Christ have eternal life now.

Let me shake you up a little more. John doesn’t define eternal life as going to Heaven when we die and believing is the way you get there. Rather, John defines eternal life straight from the mouth of Jesus at 17:3 while he is praying his great prayer for the church. Jesus says: “And eternal life means to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, whom you sent” (GNT). That’s the Good News translation. If you need it to be more official than that, the King James Version reads “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” If you are a conversion-agenda-ed Evangelicals, the New International Version reads “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” If you are a liberal Protestant, the New Revised Standard Version reads “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” If you’re just kind of alternative and you’re from Vancouver or Seattle, Eugene Peterson’s translation The Message reads “And this is the real and eternal life: that they know you, the one and only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent.” That’s pretty much the full theological spectrum in translations from hippie to hypocrite and they all say that eternal life is knowing God and knowing Jesus.

Knowing another person involves being in a relationship with them. If it is the case that having eternal life is knowing God the Trinity (and I think it is), then it is not too far of a stretch to say that believing means being in a relationship with the Trinity. This definition of believing should change how we look at what’s going on with Thomas. Jesus told Thomas “Do you believe because you see me?” The question is not so much about whether Thomas believes Jesus has risen from the dead. Jesus reaches a little deeper I think and asks, “Thomas, do you have a relationship with God because you see me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have this relationship.” But how does one have a relationship with another whom we cannot see?

To answer that question, we need to step back to the beginning of that evening and look at how John has chosen this encounter to inform our experience of Jesus. The disciples are hiding in fear. Jesus shows up and says, “Peace be with you.” He shows them the scars. Jesus showed up. To have a relationship with God in and through Christ Jesus, Jesus must show up. Jesus must step into our lives with his blessing of peace. There is nothing we can do to conjure him up or make that happen. He must reveal himself to us.

Do you ever wonder why people in small churches always sit in the same place? We make jokes about this, but I am reasonably sure that it is because that spot in that particular pew has been the place where they have had some very powerful experiences with our Lord. It is sacred space. My sacred space. Here, Jesus showed up.

Jesus reveals himself to us as the wounded One, the One who was pierced because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities; the punishment that leads to our peace was on Him, and we are healed by His wounds (Is. 53:5). Jesus reveals himself as the one who was wounded because of our sin yet by his suffering we are healed. If we think we have had an encounter with a presence but have not eventually been lead down the road of transformative healing from our sin, then it is likely not Jesus whom we have encountered.

Just as he did on that evening with his first disciples, Jesus the wounded and risen One also sends us forth in his ministry as the Father sent him. He empowers us with the power of his own life, the Holy Spirit, to carry it out. Notice how he defines his ministry in terms of forgiving or not forgiving the sins of others.

The concept of forgiveness is a tricky one. I say that because what the Bible means by forgiveness isn’t exactly what we think forgiveness means. We think of forgiveness as a transaction involving apology and not holding a grudge. The wrongdoer must hopefully be remorseful, apologize, and want to change. The one wronged, even if there has not been an apology or repentance, must not bear a grudge against the wrongdoer and try to keep friendship. The Bible’s a little different here.

The Hebrew word we usually translate as forgive actually means to pick up and carry; to bear the burden of another. On the Day of Atonement in ancient Israel, the day they dealt with the sins of the people, one of the rituals they did involved what we call a Scapegoat. The High Priest would place his hands on a goat and whisper the sins of the people into its ear, thus transferring the sin to the goat. They then lead the sin laden goat off into the wilderness and let it go so that it could be destroyed by whatever was out there. By the death of the scapegoat the sins of the people were destroyed in death as well.

Looking at the passage from Luke that we read about the four men bringing a paralyzed man to Jesus on his mat we have a good image of forgiveness. They had to cut through the roof and lower the man down on his mat and then they picked him up on his mat and carried him to Jesus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all three say that when Jesus saw the faithfulness, the efforts of the men, he told the man on the mat that his sins were forgiven. They were carrying him, bearing him as a burden, in all his brokenness, lameness, and shame to Jesus so that he could be healed. That’s forgiveness.

I don’t think in this passage that Jesus is simply telling his disciples to forgive those who have wronged them rather than bear a grudge. I believe he is telling them to get involved in the muckiness of the lives of others and bear them to himself where they can be healed and transformed like the paralyzed man becoming able to pick up his mat and go to his home.

So how does a small congregation of elderly people who sit in the same pew week in and week out go about bearing others in their sinfulness to Jesus where they can be healed? Prayer is the place to start. Let me share with you a prayer an elderly matron of a small congregation once prayed out loud in a prayer meeting at church.

“Lord, I’m tired—so very tired. Please, Lord, I don’t want any advice. I’ve heard enough of that over the years. I don’t want to be told what I must do. I’ve been told often enough. Lord, I just want to sit here in quietness and feel your presence. I want to touch you and to know your touch of refreshment and reassurance. Thank you for this sacred little spot where I have heard your voice and felt your healing touch across the years. Thank you for these dear friends who share this pew with me. Together we have walked the tear-lined lanes. We know what it is to be lonely…we also know comfort and strength of one another and the joy of your presence. O God, the child of my womb has become a drunk…Daily I watch her die before my eyes. Where have I failed, O Lord? How can I find the strength to continue? How can I help my dying daughter find herself?

O God, soon I will be going home to be with you and my husband. I am ready, even eager. But until that day help me to be a help to others. Give me strength to live this day and peace to enjoy it. Amen.”[1]

Friends, I think this prayer is what forgiveness looks like. Amen.






[1] Dudley, Carl S.; Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-first Century; Abingdon Press; Nashville; 2003; pg. 49.

Return to Eden

John 20:1-18

We are all familiar with the Bible’s story of humanity’s beginning in the Garden of Eden.  God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden with the instruction not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil les they die.  God would also come around daily in the cool of the evening to visit with them.  It’s a very idyllic scene of unhindered fellowship between God and us.  But then, a serpent tricks Eve into eating the fruit and brutish and dull Adam joins her.  They suddenly loose their innocence, become ashamed, and begin to hide from God.  When God comes to visit that evening he discovers what they had done and banishes them from Eden lest they also eat of the Tree of Life and their diseased state go on forever. 

Among the consequences of their actions are death and the loss of face-to-face, daily fellowship with God ended.  Their relationship with the LORD God is distant and they no longer meet with him face to face.  Their own relationship becomes strained with a lack of equality.  Eve has pain in childbirth.  Adam must toil at his work.  And most traumatic of all, this spiritual disease they now have, which we call Sin, passes to the next generation and becomes all the more vile.  Their oldest son Cain murders their youngest Son, Abel, over a religious dispute.  The murdering continues into the next generations and they start to build those dastardly cities.

That’s the beginning of humanity’s story in and out of the Garden of Eden.  In John’s Gospel, the way John tells the story of Jesus he reverses all this.  He claims humanity has had a new beginning in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and also there is a return to Eden.  

Towards the end of John’s Gospel we find Jesus and his disciples spending a lot of time in the Garden of Gethsemane, time reminiscent of the unhindered fellowship that Eve and Adam spent with God in Eden in the cool of the evening.  This Garden fellowship abruptly ends when Judas the betrayer brings the Temple police and a Roman cohort to arrest Jesus.  This time the banishment is dramatically different for now.  This time it is humanity banishing God from the Garden and condemning God to death.  The powers of evil embodied in a collusion of religious authority and empire crucify Jesus at the execution grounds just outside the walls of the “Holy City” of Jerusalem.  Then two secret disciples of Jesus from among the wealthy religious elite do right by him and take and bury his body in a Garden tomb.  Is this the end of God and his Garden?  Has sin-diseased humanity finally done its worst?

(I’m sure the science fiction writers who first heard John’s Gospel are expecting a Black Hole to open in the tomb and all of creation to start spiralling in towards it’s ultimate and final destruction.)

Well, that’s Friday.  Then there’s Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the day of rest.  Jesus’ body lies dead in the tomb.  Our confessions state that he descended into Hell to proclaim release to the captives there.  Then, Sunday morning comes.  Sunday in the early church was called the Eighth Day, the first day of the New Creation.  On this day, as Paul says it in first few verses of Romans, God the Father publically declared Jesus to be the Son of God in accordance with the Holy Spirit by raising him from the dead in that Garden Tomb.

Early that morning Mary Magdalene who obviously held great affection for Jesus goes to the tomb.  (It’s okay to think about Eve here)  She finds the stone rolled away.  Not looking in and fearing the worst she runs and gets Peter and the beloved disciple (could be either John or Lazarus).  They sprint back to the Garden Tomb to find it empty with the burial linens lying about and the head cloth placed rather neatly aside.  Not knowing what to think the two men leave the Garden and go home.  (It’s okay to think dull Adam here.)

Yet, Mary, a very distraught Mary, (unlike Adam and Eve hiding in shame) stays behind in the Garden and is weeping near inconsolably.  Then a man whom she thinks is the Gardener comes and tries to console her.  She explains and pleads if he might know where Jesus’ body might be.  The Gardener calls her by name.  “Mary!”  She realizes it is Jesus and calls him by what was probably her pet name for her beloved Rabbi.  “Rabouni!”  Fellowship between God and humanity is restored.  Mary, symbolic of Christian fellowship, the new Eve and Jesus the New Adam have returned humanity to Eden. 

Jesus tells her not to cling to him because he had yet to ascend and be enthroned as Lord at the right hand of the Father, but to go and tell the others.  This she does.  She goes and tells them, “I have seen the Lord.”  I like how the Greek sounds here.  “Heoraka ton Kurion!”  It’s kind of like “Eureka!”  It means she literally had seen him.  It was not some sort of mystical experience.

What does this mean for us?  Jesus’ disciples (that includes us) gathered for prayer and study, worship and fellowship are now where Eden can be found.  When we gather, the LORD God is walking in our midst in the cool of the evening.  Personal devotion time is also time spent face-to-face with the LORD God in the Garden.  In fact Garden fellowship with the LORD God can be anytime and anywhere.  But, we aren’t meant to simply tarry in the Garden.  Like Mary, we are not to cling to him.  We who have seen the Lord bear the onus to go and tell others that the Garden is now open.  Especially we are to proclaim that Jesus is indeed Lord.  Idolatry, Empire, and Death are now his captives.  Amen.

From "I Am Not" to "I Am"

John 18:1-19:42

An interesting feature of John’s Gospel is the number of times the phrase “I am” occurs particularly from Jesus.  It is a phrase loaded in meaning.  Linguistically, in Greek we can say “I am” just by using the first person singular form of the verb “to be” which in Greek is simply “eimi”.  If you then wish to add emphasis to yourself, you add the first person singular pronoun “ego” (from which we get our word “ego”) so that it is “ego eimi” or “I am”.  Jesus makes some fairly significant “ego eimi” or “I am” claims throughout John’s Gospel.

Many scholars will say that Jesus’ use of “ego aimi” or “I am” is his claiming to be God.  They say this because the name that God gave for himself to Moses at the burning bush was the first person singular form of the Hebrew verb “to be”, which in Hebrew it is pronounced “Yahweh”.  So, when Jesus says “I am” he is saying “I am Yahweh.”

Here’s a few of Jesus’ “I am” statements.  First, when he is conversing with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well he tells her that the time is soon to come that the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and Truth. The Father seeks such as these to worship him because he is Spirit and must be worshipped in Spirit and Truth.  She then says that the Messiah is coming and he will proclaim all things to us.  We translate what Jesus says “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”  More literally Jesus says “I am, the One who speaks to you.”  When you push into what Jesus is literally saying there it is “I am Yahweh.  I am speaking personally to you.”  This is his claim to be the Word of God become flesh, more or less.

Next, we have some more familiar “I am” statements from Jesus.  “I am the Bread of Life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (6:35).  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever” (6:51).  “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (8:12).  “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am” (8:28).  “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” (8:51).  “I am the gate.  Whoever enters by me will be saved…” (10:9).  “I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (10:11).  “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (11:25).  “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (14:6).  “I am the True Vine, and my Father is the Vinedresser’ (15:1).  “I am the Vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:5).

This brings us to the arrest scene.  Judas, the Temple police, and a detachment of Roman soldiers (maybe as many as 600) come to arrest Jesus in the garden.  Jesus asks who they are looking for and they say “Jesus of Nazareth.”  Jesus answers, “I am” and they inexplicably fall to the ground.  There should be no doubt who is in authority at this moment.  The military of the strongest empire in the world at the time has no power over him, but rather are forced to lay at his feet.  Peter drew his sword and wounded the slave of the High Priest.  Jesus makes him put it away and heals the wound.  Under his authority there will be no war!  Jesus lets them arrest him and the disciples go free.

There are two instances in John’s Gospel where “I am” is said by people other than Jesus.  The first is in chapter nine when Jesus healed a beggar who had been born blind of his blindness.  The man’s neighbours couldn’t believe he was the same man.  Some said he was.  Others said he wasn’t.  They kept asking is this the man who used to sit and beg.  The man with great frustration kept answering “Ego eimi.” “I am.”  He been made a new person by the One who is “I am”.  Later after the man had been put on trial by the religious authorities for being healed on the Sabbath and suffered the verdict of expulsion from the synagogue, an act that showed the spiritual blindness of the religious authorities, Jesus finds the man and asks him if he believes in the Son of Man.  Son of Man is the Title for the Messiah.  The man says show him to me that I might believe.  Jesus answers, “The One speaking to you is he.”  This is supposed to remind us of what Jesus told the woman at the well.  Jesus is the Creating Word of God become flesh.  Jesus spoke and created this bling beggar anew by healing him.  Gave him a new personhood so that he can now say “I am.”

The second instance of someone saying “I am” is Peter when he denies Jesus.  Except, the wording is a bit different.  Peter is standing off watching as Jesus is put on trial and a slave-girl asks him if he is one of the disciples.  In English Peter answers “I am not”.  In the Greek text Peter omits the personal pronoun for “I”, “ego” and just says “eimi ouk”.  If we are close readers of Greek, we will notice that omitting “ego” is significant.  Peter’s answer reflects that in his denial of Jesus he has denied his own personhood.  He has no personhood apart from his association to Jesus who is the True “I am”.

Such is humanity.  So it is for every one of us.  We have no  true personhood apart from being in relationship to Jesus, to the One who is “I am”.  Jesus is the resurrection and the life; the Way, the Truth, the Life.  The is no life-giving, life-filled relationship to God except in him.  He is the Light of the world; the living Bread; the Vine in whom we must abide if our lives are going to amount to anything.  No one can say “I am” apart from the “I am” we are in Jesus who is the true “I am”.  Wow, I’m getting philosophical today.

Jesus is the Word of God become flesh who makes all things new.  The tragedy his trial and crucifixion reveals to us is that we humans are utterly messed up.  We are infected with a disease of the heart, soul, mind, and strength called Sin.  It is a spiritual disease that affects our relationship to God, to each other, and to all of creation.  Even creation itself is infected with it.  Death is its unavoidable consequence and outcome.

We are powerless over sin and by our complicity in it we are destroying ourselves and God’s good creation.  Like an addiction we cannot just stop doing it.  The great physicist Robert Oppenheimer said when he realized he had been used to create the atomic bomb, “I am become death”.  So humanity whom God created in his own image has become death. 

Getting religion can’t cure us.  The blindness of religion is demonstrated quite well by the religious authorities who of all people should have known who Jesus was but didn’t.  They simply felt their own power threatened by him and so had the Romans kill him.  Religious authority corrupts and it will sooner than later throw its coercive power behind the power of empire.  The history of power and war in the Western world for the last 2,000 years teaches us that.  Christians have killed Christians to gain the power of empire.

Empire, political power, cannot save us from our own demise in sin.  Thinking that we are smart enough to elect good leaders who are rational enough to solve the world’s problems is a delusion.  Pilate asked, “What is Truth?” when the Truth was standing right in front of him.  Then, he thinks that killing Jesus is the best political solution to the situation.  Empire kills.  Power is addictive and it inevitably becomes unmanageable, out of anyone’s control.  I am concerned that the current President of the United States who has demonstrated addiction to power in the course of his business career has now discovered (like many other world leaders) the ultimate “fix” in the relative ease of being able to make the command, “Bomb them.”

Religion and Empire cannot save us.  Let us not be deceived.  When the two of them collude it is antichrist. 

But, there is hope – Jesus is the Word of God by which God created everything became human flesh.  By his death he has dealt with sin and death to in the way according to Scripture, bearing it away once and for all unto death.  By Jesus death, God has put sin and death to death.  In Jesus, the great “I am” God has condemned sin and punished it with death, a sentence carried out in the flesh of Jesus who is “I am”, who is “Yahweh”; a flesh that will, come Easter, live again free of sin and death. 

Jesus death was the Big Bang of a New Creation of which his resurrection was the first sign.  Until he returns to put things to right he has given us the Holy Spirit who dwells in us and binds us to Jesus to share in his resurrection life.  The Holy Spirit creates community in the image of Jesus.  The hope of this world is now visible in small, neighbourhood fellowships of Jesus’ disciples.  If we want to escape the “I am not” of our sin infected existence and become somebody’s who matter, if we want to be able to say “I am” like the healed blind, following Jesus and loving each other and our neighbours as he has loved us is the vine in which we will bear that fruit.  Amen.

A Favourite Hymn

Philippians2:5-11

We all have our favourite hymns.  I have my list of favourites, my funeral list you could say, the songs I want played at my funeral.  I would like my funeral to start with “I Sing the Almighty Power of God” sung to a tune that I wrote for it.  I should probably record it so that the musicians will know it and don’t play it to the tune of Forest Green which works for “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, but not so much for “I Sing the Almighty Power of God”.  I am moved by the last two lines of that hymn: “While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care, and everywhere that I could be, Thou, God, art present there.” 

Next I would have everybody sing, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” the way my friend and contemporary Christian artist Glen Soderholm does it.  The melody is the same as in our hymnals, but I like his accompaniment.  I have found the end of verse two to be always the case and a helpful reminder.  “Have you not seen how your heart’s wishes have been granted through God’s kind ordaining?”  I would next have everybody sing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” to the tune of Nettleton.  To me that hymn most adequately describes what it is to be human before a gracious God.  We are “prone to wander” yet God tunes our hearts to sing his praise. 

I would also have a couple of Christmas hymns at my funeral.  “Come, Thou Long-expected Jesus” to the tune of Hyfrydol.  That’s a song of hope and my prayer for this messed up world.  We would also have to sing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”.  That would serve as the theology lesson for day.  It is all about God with us as the man Jesus.

Next, we would sing “I know whom I have believ-ed, and am persuaded, that he is able, to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day.”  That’s an appropriate hymn for when you’re leaving people you love behind.  That’s also a very special hymn to me because whenever I go back home Mom pulls out the hymnal and starts playing hymns and that’s the one I will always hear her voice singing in my head.  We’d also have to sing “In the Sweet By and By” because my sisters and I sang that with my Dad weeks before he died as best we could in harmony.  Dad always wanted to sing bass in a Gospel quartet.

I would have three passages of scripture read.  Psalm 23 KJV of course. Isaiah 35 about the desert blooming.  I’ve seen those deserts in bloom.  1 Corinthians 15:51-58 about resurrection and when it comes to where it says “Death has been swallowed up in victory.  Where, O Death, is your victory?  Where, O Death, is your sting?” everybody has to say it together and shout it.  And they have to shout it at the graveside too!  Whoever is preaching need not say anything about me, but rather proclaim Resurrection and New Creation.

Finally, the service will end with “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” to the tune of Hyfrydol.  I want all them grieving people leaving with a taste of our being “lost in wonder, love and praise.”

Oh well, talking about your funeral list may be a bit morbid on a Sunday morning but I think what he have in Philippians 2:5-11 is Paul’s funeral hymn.  Whether or not he wrote it is not known to us.  He wrote Philippians from prison.  He writes with confidence that he will be released, but he does so recognizing that it was highly possible that he might be martyred.  So, his death was on his mind and he uses this hymn to speak a word, maybe his last word, to a conflicted situation to the church at Philippi.  He wants them to get past their conflict by having in themselves the same humility that Jesus embodied

The hymn tells us that though he was equal to his Father, Jesus humbly set aside all claims to equality with God and became a man, a servant, a slave.  As a man he humbled himself unto death, indeed death on a cross.  So, God the Father has exalted him so that everything must bow to him, to the Father’s glory.

At the heart of the hymn is the message that Jesus did not do what worldly power does, which is exploit status for its own benefit.  He let those worldly powers who were claiming to be god’s or to have power over God do the worst they could do to him...death on a cross in utter humiliation.  The Prince of peace, Lord of all creation – the powers put him to death in the way they put treasonous thugs to death.  Behind the scenes were the powers of sin, evil, death, the Satan, all believing they had power even to put God to death. 

But Jesus stuck to the plan of humbling himself and not using his power as God to bully the powers aside and assert himself to be God.  Rather, by his humiliating death he unmasked the powers and shamefully exposed them for the petty tyrants they are.  The worldly powers kill the innocents, kill the good, kill the meek, kill the faithful, kill those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, kill those who mourn, kill those who show mercy, kill the pure in heart, kill the peace-makers, kill those who heal.  They kill to keep themselves in power.  By exposing their petty and shameful behaviour Jesus opens our eyes to see the powers for what they are and even to see ourselves for who we are as complicitors.  No one can hear the story of Jesus and his death and say anyone other than Jesus was in the right.   Well, not only did Jesus unmask the powers he showed us what God is like.  Jesus on the cross is the very nature of God. 

Something more than an unjust death happened that day.  Just as on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would place his hands onto the scapegoat and whisper the sins of the people into its ear and then it would be lead away into the wilderness to be set free only to meet its death by predators.  So, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, took humanity’s sin to himself, bore it into the wilderness of political power plays where the High Priest publically proclaimed false accusations against him and then he was destroyed in death by the powers of imperial predation.  By his death everything is now different.  His resurrection, his rising from death, is the first sign that things have changed. 

Jesus and his cross is the way God establishes his kingdom on earth.  His way, the way of humility of self-emptying oneself of power and status to bring forth healing to this creation’s brokenness is the way we his followers are to conduct ourselves…yet, not simply in imitation of Jesus, but because we have his mind in us.  He has poured his Spirit into us and we have the power to be humble as he is humble.  He has made us able to bend our knees before him.  Will we empty ourselves of prideful opinions, judgemental ought’s, and attempts to get our own way and yield ourselves to him?  Amen.