Obey? We're Not Dogs

John 14:15, 23-24; John 15:9-17

This is the fifth in a series of eight sermons based on Greg Ogden’s book Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for Mentoring and Discipleship.

So, Dana has been taking our dog Nellie to agility classes lately.  Agility is the run, jump, obstacle course stuff.  It’s fun for energetic little dogs who like a challenge.  Yet, to do this sort of thing, one needs a dog who will obey, which means do what it is expected to do when it is expected to do it. 

To get a dog to be obedient isn’t too difficult. You have to make the reward for your dog doing what you want it to do greater than the pleasure it would otherwise get from doing what it wants to do.  You have to spend a good deal of time with your dog showing it lots of love and playing with it to build the bond that will make it want to please you.  Then, when it is time to train, it will experience the training exercises as a really fun play time with you.  In time, the dog will learn and will obey without reserve even for no reward because it’s fun and it pleases her person.

  But there are some prerequisites to canine obedience training. First, the dog person needs to have the right kind of temperament, which includes patience, understanding, love, self-control, the ability to express affirmation enthusiastically, and the desire to feel the joy of watching one of God’s finest creatures learn and excel at completing tasks.  Second, you need a dog who really wants to please you.  This is most every dog so this is why the temperament of the dog person is most important.  Grumpy, angry, impatient people who yell and dole out negative, overly punitive consequences for undesired behaviour will have difficulty getting a dog to want to please them.

Some dogs are easier to train than others.  Our dog Nellie is quite smart and quite stubborn.  She requires a lot more patience and time.  We even had to get a shock collar.  The joy of harassing our cats is way more reward to her than a bland cookie treat.  To walk her, we have to use a gentle lead that fits on her nose instead of clipping a lead to her collar.  She can’t pull or go after stuff without a bit of discomfort.  One day she’ll figure obedience out.  She’s not even a year yet.  Dogs and obedience training, it’s an adventure.

When I think of the word obedience dog training is the most benevolent thing that comes to my mind.  Obedient and obey are two words that I really don’t like, I mean I really don’t like them.  They make me think of a relationship in which the parties concerned are not equals.  They make me think of someone of a higher standing trying to impose their will on another more vulnerable person.  Slavery was a system based on “obedience”.  It used to be, and unfortunately still is in many parts of the world, that marriage involves a system of obedience that is male dominated and abusive.  Raising children is too often seen as a system of obedience.  I don’t want my children to “obey” me.  I want them to respect Dana and me, their elders, their teachers, and coaches and strive to do their best in the many systems of rules in which they have to live realizing that we have their best interests in mind and there are consequences for their actions. 

I don’t like it when Bible translators put the word “obey” into the mouth of God, into the mouth of Jesus.  We are not dogs.  Jesus doesn’t call us his slaves.  He calls us his friends.  In the Great Commission when Jesus commissions his disciples, gives them the charge of making disciples and empowers them to carry it out, he instructs them to teach these disciples they’ve baptized into the life of God to keep, to observe his commandments.  Obey is about the worst word you can throw in there.  Let me explain (and this means a Greek lesson).

The Greek word here, “tereo”, primarily means to watch over, to guard, to keep safe; like a teacher or a sitter watching over children.  It is the idea of protecting something precious.  Jesus’ teachings are precious.  Jesus’ commandments are precious.  They are of value.  A commandment isn’t just a rule written on the books somewhere to be obeyed or suffer the consequences.  A commandment is a commission, a responsibility entrusted to us to carry out.  A commandment from Jesus is a precious responsibility he’s given to us for us to guard with our very lives by incorporating it into our lives.  His commandments are precious because they are life giving to those who follow him.  To incorporate his teachings into a system of “obedience” would be to legalize them and make them death-dealing duties that we grow to hate rather than a source of life that we love.

Looking at John’s Gospel, Jesus calls us his friends because he has made known to us everything that he heard from God the Father.  He has spoken to us the words of God the Father that he himself has heard.  The powerful thing about words from God is that when God speaks, what God says comes about.  In essence, Jesus has spoken words from the Father to us, into us in the power of the Holy Spirit; words that will take effect and grow in us.

The primary word to us that he has spoken is that the Father and Son by the Holy Spirit have come to us made their home with, in, and among us.  We have been given a wonderful gift.  God is here, among us, in us.  This wonderful gift in turn produces in us in us a hunger, an inexplicable compulsion to want to know Jesus and to live according to his ways, his teachings because it pleases him and gives us joy. 

There are two primary ways for us to keep Jesus’ his commandments, the words of God.  First, from Jesus’ word spoken to us arises the desire and capacity to carryout his command for us to love as he has loved us.  We lay down our lives for one another.  In Matthew it would sound more like “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.”  This precious commandment is a living word spoken into us that we are to keep safe and nurture by incorporating it into our lives as our way of life.  By doing this we will discover and experience the eternal life that Jesus promises us.

As Jesus’ commandments are a words of God spoken to us that get into us and have effect, they create in us a hunger to know Jesus and to love him by keeping his commandments.  We will find what Ogden calls “a spiritual growth plan” helpful.  This is incorporating into our lives daily devotional time to worship and pray and to read and study the scriptures and meditate upon them.  A spiritual growth plan must also include meeting together with other disciples to do the same with the added benefits of fellowship and sharing our lives.  Finally, God did not mean for us to keep this precious gift to ourselves, we must find ways of sharing it with those who don’t know they’ve been given the gift too.  Alcoholics know that the best way to stay sober is to help somebody else stay sober.  So it is with Jesus and the love of God.  The best way to know Jesus and his love is to share it with those who don’t know it.

We will have difficult choices to make.  Jesus’ way is utterly counter-cultural and will have us struggling with our own selfish nature’s.  There will be times when we wish Jesus would put a shock collar on us or stick us in our crates until we are refocused.  But one thing is certain, as we go along the way of discipleship we will more and more come to realize that God truly loves us, enjoys us, even likes us; and we will come to know just how patient and understanding God is, how God only wants what’s best for us.  God feels joy over us and is enthusiastically affirming.  God is not some grumpy, impatient, yelling, beat you with the paper because you peed on the floor tyrant who demands complete obedience or else.  God is the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and God has chosen you to be a part of his family.  Isn’t that wonderful.  Keep this precious word deep within your heart, soul, and mind, and heed it with all your strength.  Amen.

Baptized into the Name...

Matthew 28:16-20; John 17:1-5, 20-25

This is the forth in an 8 sermon series following Greg Ogden's Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for mentoring and Discipling.
Back in my university days, when I was a Bible and Theology major at Eastern Mennonite University, I remember getting on a side-track for a couple weeks wondering what it meant to pray “in Jesus’ name”.  This was back in the 80’s and the TV preachers were making a fortune telling people that God would give them anything they wanted as long as they asked for it “in Jesus name” and believed whole-heartedly that they would receive it (and a donation helps). 

Their magic formula wasn’t working for me and so I decided I wanted to debunk the TV preachers.  I talked to a professor.  He recommended a few books.  And off to the library I went to do some research.  I found that the phrase “in Jesus’ name” had a much deeper, richer meaning than it simply being a magic formula we tack onto the end of a prayer to make it official. 

As a child I was taught to always end my prayers with “in Jesus’ name” because you’re talking to God and that’s the proper way to do it.  The theology behind that idea was that with us being sinners, we are not worthy on our own to ask God for anything and so we ask our prayers on the basis of Jesus’ worthiness, his name.  In my research I did find there was a small taste of that Sunday School belief.  We don’t just presume upon God, but…God loves us and will hear our prayers regardless of whether we understand our sinfulness or use the proper format.

In my research what I found mostly was that the phrase “in the name of” has to do with location and association – where you stand and who you know.  When an ambassador is sent from one country to another she goes “in the name of” the country that sends her to represent its citizens’ interests.  She stays in an embassy which is considered by the host nation to be territory of the ambassador’s home country.  And, the work she does she does with the authority granted her by her home country.

Likewise, to pray “in Jesus name” means that although we are here away from the heavenly kingdom in which our citizenship lies, we are nevertheless located “in him”, “in Jesus” as he stands in the presence of God the Father.  We are Jesus’ embassy here on earth.  The Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus so that Jesus is in us and we are in him sharing in his relationship with the Father.  Our existential reality is as Jesus prays in John 17:20-22.  Jesus asks the Father (and his prayers are answered) that we who have heard the message he gave to the first disciples may be one just as he and the Father are one, the Father in him and he in the Father.  Jesus asks that we be in them and our unity be complete in them, we in the Father and Son and they in us because Jesus has given us his glory, the Holy Spirit. 

To be “in the name of Jesus” is to be in the existential reality of living in the eternal life of knowing the Father and knowing Jesus the Son whom he sent because they have given us the Holy Spirit.  Our location, where we are at, is in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  We are their representatives here.

So also, just like ambassadors sent abroad we are in the world—this broken, hurting, vicious, twisted, beloved by God world—“in the name of Jesus” as his ambassadors with a message of salvation to new life now and yet to come when Jesus returns, a message that we embody in our own lives which have been changed by him by the power of the Holy Spirit and which we embody in the love we share for one another which comes from God the Father and God the Son in the presence power of God the Hoy Spirit.  So, who we know is Jesus and what we represent from him is his saving reign.

Years ago when I finished seminary and was waiting for my first call I stuck around the school and got an additional masters degree in New Testament Studies studying particularly Paul and his letters.  So you can trust me when I say that when Paul talks about salvation he nowhere talks about it in terms of how we get into heaven when we die, but rather salvation is our being adopted right now into the family of God the Father and Jesus the Son; and, the Father claims us as his own children whom he loves as much as Jesus the Son something we experience right now by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Salvation entails a "saved from" and so salvation is deliverance right now from a life lived like parentless children enslaved by sin and evil who pursue their own demise, but now free to live honourable lives with the rights of being beloved children of God.

If Paul and John sat down and started talking about salvation, John would bring up eternal life. Like Paul, John would also not talk about how we get to heaven when we die but rather about knowing the Father and Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit.  Eternal life is what we have now in a relationship with God in Christ and that relationship is salvation, salvation from the life of perishing that comes about because we do not know the love of God the Father who loves the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son over to die for it.  Knowing the love of God, the love of God the Father for the God the Son, and the love of the Son for the Father, and knowing ourselves to be included in that love right now, this is salvation right now, eternal life right now, adoption right now as Paul would say.

When Jesus tells his disciples to go into the world discipling all peoples baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey his commandments, that command to baptize has two meanings.  One, as Christ Jesus’ ambassadors we baptize with, under, or “in” the authority of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that he has really vested in us by giving us the Holy Spirit binding us to himself as his representatives.  But two, we baptize people “into” the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  If salvation is that we are adopted into the family of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the act, the rite, the sacrament of Baptism is signing the papers.

Back to Paul, Paul’s primary way of talking about Baptism is that it is participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection so that it is no longer we, ourselves, who live but Christ living in us.  For the baptized disciple there is no more talk about me, myself, and I and what I want in life.  Rather, it is about allegiance (faithfulness) to Christ Jesus demonstrated through living in the new family in God in Christ and bringing honour to the new family name.  Understandings of Baptism being the sign and symbol of washing from sin and the Christian version of circumcision are secondary to baptism being our dying and rising with Christ to really live a real new life in him in the family of God, a life that really will endure for ever. 

Baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit means we are dead to all our old allegiances and are now really raised to new life into the loving communion, the loving Family of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and this new life in Christ is to be our foremost allegiance.  It doesn’t matter whether we were baptized as babies or as adults.  For now, we bear the family name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to do that honourably means being sacrificially compassionate, kind, forbearing, forgiving, generous, hospitable, joyful, peaceful, and self-controlled to everyone…and the Holy Spirit living in us, the Family DNA so to speak, makes us able to be this way.  Friends, you are a new creation, adopted children of God who are eternally alive in the family of God.  Live accordingly.  Amen.

Believing the Gospel

Luke 24:36-47

This is the third in an 8 sermon series following Greg Ogden's Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for mentoring and Discipling.

We have all experienced the death of someone very close to us.  In December of 1999 I lost my father to cancer.  The funeral home visitation threw me quite a bit.  It was one thing to see my father going down and quite another to see him and he not be there. I know how final death is. 

Yet, death isn’t the final word; not for my father, not for any of us.  The Gospel proclamation is God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son become human, from the dead.  God the Son took on sin-diseased human flesh to heal his creation of sin and it’s consequence of death by living the faithful life we cannot live yet still suffering sin’s consequence of death.  He died and yet powerfully came out the other side being raised bodily from the dead; thus, nullifying sin and death and setting in motion the rubrics of a New Creation in which sin and death and evil are no more; a New Creation which will come fully into effect when Jesus returns and all things will be made new and the dead will be raised.  For now, Jesus calls us to come experience a foretaste of this New Creation by living as his disciples bound to him and to one by the Holy Spirit who dwells in and among us transforming us, healing us, to be more and more like Jesus in every way.  Death isn’t the final word.  New life in Christ, New Creation, that’s our end.

We are called to believe this Gospel.  To believe it isn’t just to put it into that category of religious fantasy in which we say something may or may not be so but I of my own volition choose to accept it as the Truth.  To believe the Gospel is to live in the reality of it.  To believe the Gospel is to devote ourselves completely to Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit live together in Christian fellowship, New Community, as living testimony, living witnesses to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the coming reality of resurrection and New Creation, and the unveiled and unhindered reign of God.  To believe the Gospel is to live in the reality of it.

Looking here at our reading from Luke’s Gospel, I am curious as to why Luke says the disciples were “unbelieving” because of their joy and amazement at seeing Jesus bodily raised from the dead.  Why does he say they are “unbelieving”?  We can euphemize it and say it’s just a way of saying they are so joy-filled, gobsmacked, that they can’t believe their eyes.  But, I think there is more here than a euphemism because “unbelieving” is such a pointed word.  Everywhere in the New Testament that “unbelieving” occurs its meaning is to be unfaithful.  It doesn’t make sense here for Luke to the disciples are being unfaithful for the reason that they are filled with joy and amazed that Jesus has been raised.  What’s going on?

Well, here’s my kick at the can. In normal day to day life people rising from the dead just doesn’t happen.  It is a bit beyond our ability to comprehend, to process such a thing.  The disciples could not believe he had been raised.  Even though Jesus proved it was he, the same Jesus that was crucified by showing them his hands and feet; and even though he proved he was flesh and blood alive by eating food, the reality was just too big for them to comprehend and accept.  The dead don’t raise, but here is Jesus bodily raised standing right in front of them.  If being faithful—believing—is living the reality of the Gospel, how does one live the reality of Jesus raised from the dead?  I think they are clueless, and will remain clueless or “unbelieving” on how to live in the New Creation reality that has come about with Jesus’ resurrection until the Holy Spirit comes upon them.  Without the Holy Spirit living in them it was impossible for them to live faithfully.

In John’s Gospel it’s at this Easter evening appearance that Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on them.  But for Luke and Matthew, Jesus simply remains with them teaching them for several weeks until his Ascension back to the right hand of the Father and then the Father and he send the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost.  Pentecost is the point when they begin to “believe”, the point when they begin to live the reality of the Gospel of Jesus’ resurrection, to live the new life we have in Christ.  God the Holy Spirit comes to live in them and they are alive in Christ.

When the Holy Spirit came on the disciples three things began to happen.  They began to participate in the mission of spreading the Gospel that God had raised Jesus from the dead and new life was available now in him.  They became living witnesses to Jesus and the new life that is in him in all their relationships.  They are changed and continue changing to be more Christ-like.  And, they began to do things that gave other people real reason to have real hope in God, that in Christ God really is saving his creation from the futility of Sin, Evil, and Death; a salvation that is presently available.

I ponder the power of the movement that the early church was back in that day and how it was a “Go” movement and I say “Wow!”  Then I look at the state of the church today and I say, “What happened?”  We don’t “Go”, but rather keep expecting people to “come” to us…and they don’t.

Well, I know what has happened.  We’ve got the Gospel wrong.  We’ve inherited a Christian faith that does not take Easter seriously, that does not take Jesus’ resurrection seriously, that does not take new life in Christ seriously, that does not take the power and presence of the Holy Spirit seriously.  It is easier for us to believe a truncated form of the Gospel that says Jesus died in our place so that God can forgive our sins and we can go to Heaven when we die provided we believe this and be good people; it is easier for us to believe that than it is for us to believe we can have new life in Christ right now and live.  If believing the Gospel is living the reality of the Gospel, then we, like the first disciples on Easter evening with Jesus standing right in front of them, are unbelieving.  We’re not living new life in Christ and are rather just trying to live good lives in the hopes of pleasing God.

That’s what’s happened, how do we get out of it.  The answer to that question is discipleship—meeting together in small groups to be mentored in the Jesus way by more experienced disciples.  It’s like what sponsors do in AA.  Those further along the road of recovery will help others work through the 12 Step Program and in time those sponsored becomes sponsors themselves. 

I’ve got two groups of men that I am discipling now with a program developed by Greg Ogden in his book Discipleship Essentials.  In one of the groups we just passed the first third of the way through checkpoint and were evaluating how things were going.  The two men were saying just how good this has been for them and how confident they are becoming in the faith and they know they are changing.  They asked me how it was for me.  I answered them that you just have to know what it is like to spend a good bit of your time preparing sermons for Sunday morning to largely no effect and then getting to that to sit down with them and work through this stuff and watch them grow.

Here’s an analogy. There are people that I play my banjo and fiddle for with my obscure mountain tunes and they are so “Meh” about it or at most impressed with the novelty of it.  Yet, there are three retirement communities that I play in on a monthly basis.  I’ve seen people in those homes who are near vegetative perk up and dance to this music.  If I’m being rude, I’m sorry, but that is the difference between doing church and doing discipleship.  Amen.