Seeing Clearly

John 20:1-18
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There is a song I get in my head around Easter time.  It’s Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now”.  It’s about that moment of “I’m going to be all right” that eventually comes after your life has been utterly turned upside down with a loss.  Sorry, I’m just going to have to sing it.  If you know the words join me.

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone

All of the bad feelings have disappeared

Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

Look all around, there's nothin' but blue skies

Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

I like that song at Easter.  Because it does what a worship service on Easter is supposed do – be a moment of seeing clearly; seeing that nothing is greater, nothing is more powerful than our living, loving, life-giving God who raised Jesus from the dead and started a New Creation that will one day blossom to be the whole creation filled to the brim with his glory.  And just as God raised Jesus from the dead so will he raise us from the dead to live in the New Creation that is no longer diseased with Sin and Evil; no more Death; no more futility; no more grief and sickness.  Just everything healed and filled with the glory of God.

I got a taste of seeing clearly one warm December Sunday morning in 1999.  At about 4:30 that morning my brother called to tell me our Dad had finally gone to be with our Lord after a bought with cancer.  With it being Sunday and kind of late in the game I didn’t want to have to back out of the church services I had to conduct in my charge down in West Virginia.  Truth is I just wanted to be with God’s people that morning and worship.  I did the main service in Marlinton and then had to head up Elk Mountain to one of my little churches, Mary’s Chapel. 

With it being so warm that morning a fog had settled down bottom there in Marlinton.  The road up Elk was a main road but it climbs pretty fast and has a lot of turns.  I didn’t know what to expect with the fog.  About two-thirds up the mountain I drove out of the fog and the sun was bright and the sky was cloudless.  There happened to be a fortuitously placed overlook there so I stopped and got out and had a look.  It was absolutely beautiful.  The leafless trees were glistening silver in the bright sunshine.  The fog stretched out before me like a blanket as far as I could see.  I could see it clearly.  My Dad was my best friend.  That moment I knew everything would be all right.  God had set that moment up for me just to tell me that.

This morning we gather for worship.  It’s Easter morning and God wants you know everything is going to be all right.

Mary Magdalene, probably Jesus’ closest friend, went to Jesus’ tomb, looking to be with him, to anoint his body, say “Good bye”, to cling to him.  He wasn’t there.  Instead, there are two angels and the ask, “Woman, why are you weeping?  What are you looking for?” as if she should have been expecting to find the tomb empty.  I can’t imagine her shock.  Then there’s a man standing behind her.  She’s too shocked to see he’s Jesus.  “Where has he been taken?”  She demands.  “Mary!” the man says and she realizes this is Jesus.  They have a moment meant for her alone.  She goes back to the others and says, “I have seen the Lord.”

Occasionally, like Mary, we have moments with Jesus; moments in which we know he lives and so we will truly live; moments that he’s orchestrated just for us just to let us know that all things are in the hands of our loving Father in heaven and nothing, not even Death can separate us from that love.  In these moments we sense that Jesus comes to us as he did with Mary.  He calls us by name; he gets our attention in ways particular to us each…and we see clearly.

So also, in this moment now we see our Lord.  Gathered here around this table.  He is with us.  His body given for us.  His blood shed for us.  His presence with us.  We can see clearly now.   God raised Jesus from the dead.  We’ve nothing to fear.

As those who see clearly now, we must live as those who have hope; real hope.  As Paul tells, “…be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.”  In this world that is ate up with the futility of selfish ventures, we must conduct our lives in such ways as to give other people hope.  It is very easy for us just to do our thing hoping the Lord will take care of us and bless us and those we love.  But, Jesus doesn’t call us by name and give us clear sight for our own sake.  As those who see clearly we must live our lives in such a way as to create a hope-filled vision of God’s New Creation Day coming for everyone to see.  Amen.

Born to Die - Good Friday

Hebrews 10:16-25
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Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War.  It’s first line is “Am I born to die?”  That is quite a pertinent question if you are a young person not even twenty years of age and having to go fight a war that you likely will not return from.   You don’t understand the reasons for the war but you are convinced that if you do not fight you will lose your future and your children’s future.  You join up.  You spend your days walking, starving, wet, freezing in the winter, roasting in the summer, surrounded by the stench of too many humans in one place, and always fearing.  Then you come to battle and the barbarity, the screaming, the manic fear, the noise, and farms and entire cities ablaze.  Having not yet really lived and being surrounded by Death (capital D) you sing the question of despair:

And am I born to die? To lay this body down?

And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown

A land of deepest shade. Unpierced by human thought.

The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot? 

Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?

Eternal happiness or woe must then my portion be;

Waked by the trumpet's sound, I from my grave shall rise,

And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies,

Well, one doesn’t need to be in the midst of a war to wonder if the sum total of one’s life is simply death.  When we are younger we ponder and dream of what we will do with our lives.  The middle years make us wonder if we’re really doing anything useful because we’re beginning to realize how fast the years go.  The elder years hit and we look back wondering what part in the grand scheme of things we played?  Did we make a difference? 

All along the way we are confronted by the harsh reality of the death of friends and family.  One doesn’t have to look too far to garner the awareness that life in all its wonder and goodness has a monstrous beast lurking about that cannot be tamed - the futility of death.  One must either wear the rose-coloured glasses of denial or gird up with the hope that God gives us in Christ Jesus or we will perish in Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?

Am I born to die?  The answer to that question is an emphatic “NO!”  Death was not what God created us for.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made to praise and to bring praise to our awesome God who loves his creation with a love we cannot begin to comprehend.  We can appreciate the beauty of a flower, smell hope wafting from the mud of Spring, understand the wonders of a Black Hole, feel delight watching a baby smile, cure diseases, play, and feel joy.

Yet, something is dreadfully wrong in God’s very good creation.  With the same hands that will build little vehicles that explore the surface of Mars, we assemble weapons of mass destruction.  We can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to genocide.  That’s how we treat people different from us.  Do I really need to go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, and disappoint those we love the most.  I believe it was the fifth century theologian Augustine who was the first to say that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of everyone.

This dreadful wrongness in God’s good creation is the insidiously deceptive Power which we in our language call Sin.  It is a disease affecting everyone, a disease that leads to Death.  We are powerless over it.  We are both its victims and culpable of it.  It is a disease that affects the mind.  It blinds us to seeing, perceiving, and knowing.  It turns us inward with a compulsion to serve our own wants and needs.  It makes us want to be our own gods and to serve false gods in sick efforts of self-preservation.  It subtly makes Good seem Evil and Evil seem Good and with even more perversion it can turn the Good we that do into Evil and make doing Evil the means to doing the Good.

What does God do about this perversion of his very good Creation?  Well, it was God’s plan all along that at the right time God the Son would become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and crown God’s good creation with his very self.  Also in this plan was God’s pouring the Holy Spirit upon all humanity and upon his creation perfecting it so that what Isaiah prophesied long ago would be true, “the Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).  But, with God’s good creation infected with the disease of Sin and powerless against it, God’s crowning and perfecting of his creation with the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit had to take the horrific form of crucifixion and death. For now the power of God’s glory and love is seen, perceived, and known by us by the death on the cross of  Jesus, the incarnate Son of God and Lord of all creation. 

If we can say that anyone was born to die, it was Jesus.  In this act of incomprehensible love God took upon himself our Sin diseased nature by which we are all victimized in order to heal us of it.  He took upon himself His own judgement of condemnation against us for our culpability in Sin and suffered the sentence of the most publically humiliating form of criminal execution humanity has ever devised in order deliver us from our deserved condemnation and sentence of death. 

How perverted!  How twisted!  How wrong!  We humans in our blindness took the one who was God’s crowning and perfecting of us and crowned him with a crown of thorns, and enthroned him on a cross, and mocked him, and spit on him.  We judged it preposterous and blasphemous that he claimed to be the Son of God come to deliver us.  We, in the blindness of our Sin may say, “No, it wasn’t me.  I wasn’t there.”  But, as Jesus taught, whatever we have done to harm even the least of us, we have done to him.  We are liars if we say we have not hurt, harmed, and broken the trust of others especially those closest to us whom we say we love the most.

Well, we will have to wait for Easter for the full details of this story but by his death Jesus opened a new and living way to God.  It was on this day that Sin and Death were condemned and sentenced to death.  This is why we call it Good.  The great mystery of this tragic event is that God the Son become human as Jesus of Nazareth somehow experienced death himself when Jesus died on the cross.  God the Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son.  These are things too big for this small mind to comprehend.  It is enough to say that God the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die.

In the wake of the horrific event of our crucifying Jesus what needs to be said is that through the death of Jesus, the Christ, God the Son, God the Trinity has established in our hearts a new covenant, a new way to live in response to him, a new and living way of coming to him.  The result of our Death going into God was that the life of God, the Holy Spirit will be poured upon us.  We will have to wait for Pentecost for that part of the story. 

But to spoil the plot a little, God is flooding us with his very life and being recreating us to bear forth the living image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love that he modeled on the Cross.  He calls us to live according to the Way of the Cross.  If there is a sense in which we are born to die, it is that we have been born anew to live the cross-formed life of denying ourselves and laying down our lives for others in the war against Sin, Death, and Evil; a war that Jesus has already won.  In this new life we do not simply live as good people who live according to higher standards of morality and altruism.  No, rather it is that as we live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find God's continual presence with us bearing our old life away and transforming us with Jesus life.  Jesus' once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's life-giving, person-restoring work as we listen to Jesus with ears made alive by the Holy Spirit whom he has poured into us making us able to trust him and to follow. 

As I started out with a hymn, I will finish up with one.  This is The Way of the Cross Leads Home written in the more hopeful year of 1906 when missionary fervour was sweeping the North American Church by Jessie Hunter Brown Pounds who was the daughter of a pioneer Disciples of Christ preacher in Ohio.

I must needs go home by the way of the cross,

There’s no other way but this;

I shall ne’er get sight of the gates of light,

If the way of the cross I miss.

The way of the cross leads home,

The way of the cross leads home,

It is sweet to know as I onward go,

The way of the cross leads home.

I must needs go on in the blood sprinkled way,

The path that the Saviour trod,

If I ever climb to the heights sublime,

Where the soul is at home with God.

Then I bid farewell to the way of the world,

To walk in it never more;

For the Lord says, “Come,” and I seek my home,

Where He waits at the open door.

Jesus Is with Us...Not above Us

Matthew 28:16-20; John 14:15-27

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

You have probably wondered why in the last few years ministers don’t preach from those grand elevated pulpits such as we have here and rather prefer a lectern on the floor.  Part of the answer is that hovering about up there, above the congregation makes us feel conspicuous, overbearing, and stuffy.  Being down here on the floor makes us feel like we’re one of you.  It’s more personable and chummy.  Down here we feel more like a coach while up there we feel more like a pontificate.  

The rest of the answer has to do with what the location of the pulpit says about God to people visiting a church.  The high pulpit can give the impression that God is above us, always watching, and unapproachable no matter how much grace we preach.  One can make the argument that the high pulpit is for reasons of visibility and acoustics.  Maybe so originally, but couple a high pulpit with an obsequious, ashen looking, dower, pompous pontificator telling you that God is a voyeur to your every sin and indeed your every sinful thought.  Woe and curses.  Some people soften that impression saying God is watching from above making everything go hunky-dory for you.  But what happens when things don’t go hunky-dory?  Well, a distant God is just as easily kept at a distance and then just as easily dismissed…as has happened in Western Christianity.

Preaching from a lectern on the floor at the level of the congregation on the other hand says that God is with us.  Jesus did not make the promise, “I will be above you always, until the end of the age.”  His promise was that he would be with us. 

Just take a second and think about this.  What if Jesus’ promise to us was rather to be above us than to be with us?  The effect of placing Jesus above us rather than with us is profoundly deadly to the church.  If he is above, then he is not with us.  He is not presently involved the work of his church or present to us in our individual lives.  He has simply left us, down here, to fend for ourselves trying to figure out what God wants from us.  Trying to forge a way for the church in the 21^st Century in the wake of the death of cultural Christianity simply becomes our task rather than participating in what he is doing.  It is like he has left us to our own efforts to save his church from oblivion.  That’s just wrong.

If that’s what happens when the church thinks Jesus is above us, then what does it do to us as individuals?  If Jesus is above us, distant from us, a non-participant, then faithful living is just a matter of our own efforts, of doing what we think best hoping that God will bless it from above.  If that is the case, then no wonder we conjure up some sort magical power we call faith, invent rituals, and negotiate contracts with God (“I’ll do this for you God, if you do that for me.”).  If Jesus is above us, we are left to our own.  That’s scary.  But praise be to God! Jesus is with us.  He is not above us.  He is with us.  We are not alone and abandoned to our own efforts. 

Maybe the most significant change that needs to happen in the church today is a change in our thinking, in our way of understanding the very fabric of reality.  Everything about the way we do church and practice our own personal faith in Christ, I believe, is based in an understanding of reality in which God is above us, in which Jesus is above us.  Our perception of reality needs to effectually change to that of Jesus is with us.  For our churches to make the switch from being the religious institution that undergirded our culture in these days when the culture doesn’t want us to be that anymore to being a church that is out in the world in a missionary kind of way in this nation which is now a mission field, we must cease thinking of Jesus as being above and let Jesus retrain our thinking by letting us know he is with us.

I had this change of thinking and this is how it happened with me.  I was raised as Christian.  We went to church on and off with irregularity.  Going to church was something you knew you were supposed to do.  It was the super-daddy of all New Year’s resolutions.  It was a good habit to be into; one that would make the rest of life better because God, who was way off somewhere up there, would bless you for it.

Well, on New Year’s Eve when I was almost twenty I threw a party and nobody showed up.  Things got dark for me that night.  I started to think that if this was the sum total of my life Jesus could do a better job with me than I was and I decided my life was his.  I called my best friend’s mom the next morning and asked if she was going to church.  She said, “yes.” And I said, “I’ll see you there”.  That’s when I made the decision to start going to church on my own.

I also started sensing that God was calling me to the ministry and so I made a bargain with him.  I said, “God, I will go this route as long as I don’t have to go it alone.  Bring me a wife…the sooner the better.”  

  A year later I was in university and I just got dumped by the girl I thought was “the one”.  I knew I was called to the ministry, but it looked like I was going alone.  The bargain I made with God ended through no apparent fault of my own.  I sat there in my dorm room, all alone, having a pity party.  It is hard to describe what happened next.  All I can say is that it was like a door opened in my sense of reality and Jesus stepped in.  From that moment on I have had the awareness that I am not alone.  That he is with me.  Jesus is always with me.  I’ve nothing to fear.  It was also during those days that I really began to realize that God loved me, that I was one of his beloved children. 

I always feel like people look at me like I’m mentally ill when I tell that story.  That’s odd because the only place I ever really tell it is at church.  We church people should say that an awareness of Jesus with us, his disciples, is something we should all have.  Truly, we should expect disciples of Jesus to have an awareness of Jesus being with them and celebrate it when it happens.  It would also be great if we as congregations really had the awareness that Jesus is with us and that by the power of the Holy Spirit he is leading us.  But, like the song says, we persist in believing “God will be there, watching from above. Go now in peace, in faith, and in love.”  It would help us to change our way of thinking if we sang, “Jesus is here, leading forth in love. Go now in peace, in faith, and in love.”

Jesus presence with us isn’t something that only crazy people sense.  It is something he has promised to his disciples.  He is with us.  Like a presence in an empty chair, he is with us.  Amen.

The Hothouse of Discipleship

John 15:1-17; Romans 12

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

I like to make authentic fresh salsa.  By that I mean if you go to a dinner or picnic in southern Mexico and there is something on the table called salsa, I want mine to be as close to that as I can get it.  That cooked up stuff in a jar we buy at the store is obviously not fresh nor is authentic salsa either.  The manufacturers of that stuff make us want to believe it is the real deal and we buy it because we were raised to believe that the Old El Paso taco kit was real Mexican food too.

To make good, authentic fresh salsa you need fresh ripe tomatoes.  In late summer when the tomatoes are in season my salsa is really good.  Out of season, it’s still good but I have to use hothouse tomatoes, tomatoes grown in a green house.  Actually, almost all the tomatoes we buy in grocery stores and no matter the time of year are hothouse tomatoes, i.e., industrially produced food. 

Industrially produced hothouse tomatoes are deceptive.  The seeds are genetically modified to produce fast growing plants that yield tomatoes that will be visually appealing, have tough enough skin to endure packing and handling, and have relatively the same nutrient content as tomatoes grown outdoors in season.  But, we all know that no matter how ripe that tomato looks in the store, even the expensive and deceptively labeled vine-ripened ones, it will still taste like cardboard.  Ripened only means they started to ripen while still on the vine.  If you want them to “fully ripen”, you need to let them sit on kitchen counter for a week or so preferably in sunlight.  Even then, the taste is still wanting.

The hothouse or green house is not the problem.  The hothouse is actually a good idea.  It provides a controlled optimal environment for vegetables to grow in and out of season.  We can indeed have tomatoes in February that are just like the tomatoes we have in August.  The problem lies in the industrial modifications made to mass-produce vegetables that are at most visually appealing, picture perfect, regardless of what they actually taste like.  The consumer is at the heart of the matter here.  We are the ones who prefer to make food purchases based on visual appeal rather than the quality of its actual taste.

Now, let’s apply this insight of hothouses and industrially produced tomatoes to our life in Christ.  Bearing fruit is a frequent metaphor that Jesus uses to describe the goal of our life in him.  Ripening in Christ is our maturing to be more and more as he is.  This is true for us as individuals and for our life together as a congregation. 

Authenticity is the crucial word here.  We are to be authentically like Jesus.  We each and we together are to be as much like Jesus as we can be.  This authenticity requires our yielding to the work of the Holy Spirit in us.  This yielding necessitates the we daily we set aside time to just be in the presence of Jesus by means of the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and with Jesus worship God the Father thanking him for his love and faithfulness knowing that he will neither leave us nor abandon us; time to just be in God’s presence with a heart that says “Lord, make me who you want me to be.  This yielding to the Holy Spirit’s work also requires that we dive deeply and prayerfully into the scriptures, studying them not only to learn the details but also listening with an openness for God speaking to us through them. 

This yielding to the Holy Spirit also requires we do intentional Jesus time with some sisters and brothers in Christ.  A small group of three, four, or five followers of Jesus is the hothouse of the Jesus Way.  Small groups of believers gathered intentionally to share our lives and our journeys with Christ together is the optimal environment for bearing fruit in Christ.  Following Jesus isn’t simply a matter of belief.  It is a matter of relationship, growing to be more authentically like Jesus requires relationship.  The sooner we come to accept that relationship is the necessary condition for authentic growth in Christ, the sooner and faster we will begin to bear quality Jesus-fruit.  Small group discipleship is the hothouse of the Jesus Way.  Small groups provide accountability, support, guidance, and unconditional love; the prime nutrients for bearing authentic Jesus-fruit.

Now let’s take a minute to look at the other side of the hothouse tomato metaphor; the industrialized mass-produced fruit side of things.  The idea of what church is and how to do it that most of us have is primarily a post-World War Two phenomenon.  The church in North America probably had its greatest growth spurt between 1945 and 1965.  The reason for it was that those who lived through the Great Depression and the WWII wanted to have a lot of babies and build a better world for them. 

The suburb arose at this time and provided the church with a new model for doing things.  To plant a church in the suburb required no evangelism because most everybody moving out to the burbs was Christian already.  You just had to put signs up advertising your denomination, location, time, and minister and people would turn out in big numbers. 

Church programming came to its fore in this time as well - Sunday School Programs, Adult Education programs, Outreach programs, Stewardship programs, Women’s programs, Men’s programs, Fellowship programs, programs ad nauseum.  This programing model of doing church quickly became the way to do church.  It got to the point that if your programs, and particularly if your children’s programs were super-fantastic, people would even cross denominational lines to consume your product.

This is when Church began to look like industrialized agriculture.  The church was here to moralize and teach Christian values to our already Christian culture in the same way public education was meant to make good, employable citizens out of us all.  History has now proven that fun and exciting programming failed to produce fruit pleasing to our Lord.  Even though in its day it produced great numbers of church members,…well, let’s just say a really tasty tomato was hard to find.

In the food industry, the only way to get rid of industrialized food is for the consumer to stop buying it.  To demand their grocers bring in affordable, locally grown real food.  In order to do that, we the consumer have to stop being so swayed by what things look like.  So also, we who follow Jesus need to decide whether we want to bear authentic fruit in Christ or keep trying to offer the community around us the same industrialized Jesus-like fruit that they started to balk on en masse in 1965.  North American has since gone from being predominantly Christian to being a mission field.  Maybe the people out there would prefer we set before them authentic Jesus-fruit grown in the hothouse of discipleship rather than the industrialized not so authentic fruit that we don’t even have the resources to produce anymore anyway.  Just saying.  Amen.