Do Our Neighbours Notice?

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

I have been to several funerals at which the minister really upset me.  One in particular stands out.  It was for the husband of a woman who frequently attended my church in Caledon.  He was in a nursing home and had developed a relationship with this “minister” who came and did Bible studies.  During the service the minister highlighted that the man had faith in Christ, had lived a faithful life, and would now spend eternity in heaven.  He then went on to inquire of the audience as to whether the same would be true of them.  Would they spend eternity in Heaven or would they go to Hell.  For the grand finale he led them in the “sinners prayer” – all heads bowed, every eye closed, invite Jesus into your heart.  The prayer done, he told them that those who had prayed that prayer were going to Heaven.  They just had to believe it. 

In the aftermath of that funeral, several people in my church who were related to the deceased and also troubled by that minister asked what I thought about what the minister had done.  Well, I told them that I believed what the minister did constituted spiritual abuse.  He was trying to elicit a conversion decision out of people at a time when they were vulnerable.  That is coercion, not grace.  Oddly, ministers such as these do what they do believing that there is no greater act of love than getting a person saved for eternity.  This situation begs the question “What is it to be saved?”

I’ll start answering that question with another story.  There was an elderly Mennonite man standing in the subway in New York City waiting for the train.  As you can imagine, he was wearing plainclothes, a hat, and sporting the distinctive beard.  This was in the late 1960’s.  While he waited, a long-haired, hippy-looking man came up to him and explained he was with the Friends of Jesus (a charismatic movement back in the 60’s) and then asked, “Are you saved?”  The Mennonite man just stared at him as he pondered the question.  Finally, he answered, “Well, I suppose you should ask my neighbours.”

One of my theology professors in university would tell this story whenever the topic of salvation came up.  Incidentally, I went to a Mennonite university.  I think it pretty well manifests the tension we fall into when talking about salvation.  The Friends of Jesus fellow seems to define salvation as an individual thing pertaining to the afterlife.  Whereas, the elderly Mennonite fellow seems to have a difficult time separating the concept of salvation from his conduct now within the community in which he lived his faith.

For me, I’m a little more on the side of the Mennonite gentleman. Salvation is a new reality created among human existence by God through Jesus Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  It is something we experience now as a small taste, but yet we long for it to come in its fullness at a future day when Jesus returns which will be the day of resurrection, the day of new creation.  This new way of being is characterized by being reconciled to God and to one another in a fellowship created in the Holy Spirit who is with us now as a guarantee of what is to come.  There is a peace that is present with us – peace with God, with self, with one another – that exposes our lack of peace – with God, self, and others – and makes us hope for its completion so much that we radically change our direction in life – to deny self-gratification and the evil it fosters, indeed, to die to self, take up the way of the cross and begin to live in the resurrected life of Christ Jesus in his work to create communities of reconciliation.  We begin to live now for God’s peace, trusting completely in God for he is present with us.  It’s like turning a light on where before there was only groping in the darkness. 

We humans need to be able to trust in order to live together functionally.  We need to be able to trust our existence, which requires a trust in God.  We need to be able to trust ourselves to do what’s best for ourselves and others. We need to be able to trust one another.  Yet, because of our innate bent to self-gratify, which is what we call sin, we cannot trust anything in a way that is functional.  We trust idols instead of God.  When we think we are doing what’s best for ourselves and others, we almost always do what feels like it will give us the most pleasure.  It’s hard to trust one another when in the end we all just a bunch of self-gratifiers.  Therefore, our existence is marked by fear, anxiety, and trying to build and protect assets.  We try to do things our own way.

Jesus’ death on the cross exposes our sin; exposes the extent of how threatened we are by God’s presence in our lives, exposes how afraid we are to simply trust God.  But, God took the horrible death of Jesus and made it the means by which he created a new humanity built on the trust of the sure knowledge that God loves us, loves us enough to let himself be killed by us because that was the only way to show us who and how he really is.  Trusting God, the way to do what is best for ourselves and others is to do what God wants.  Trusting God we can stop pursuing our own wishes and humbe ourselves to serve one another in love. 

Therefore, salvation is the free gift of the Holy Spirit to us who plants in us the nature of Christ and makes us able to work it out in the context of a community of faith.  Salvation is a supernatural gift because God himself comes from beyond our existence to act upon us to reveal himself to us in such a way that it creates something utterly new in us.  As Paul says, ”if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.”  It is a supernatural gift that comes upon us in a very natural way in that we experience the love of God in the life of a community faith.  Salvation looks like people creating peace in their midst.  It is the work of reconciliation.

It is sad that this powerful, peaceful, hopeful real message of newly created communion with God and one another has been reduced to methods of coercion such as “Turn or burn” or “save yourself with this prayer so you can go to heaven and be with your loved ones after you die”.  Indeed, salvation is powerfully present with us now, only as a taste but it is here now, and if our neighbours when considering how we treat them cannot answer in the affirmative for us as to whether or not we who profess Christ have in fact been saved, then I think we’ve missed the boat all together.

I’ll finish these thoughts with another story.  There was an elderly abbot; an abbot is the head monk in a monastery.  He had seen his monastery through much over the years, but these days he was troubled because the number of monks was dwindling.  Fewer and fewer people were feeling the call to their way of life.  The abbot was out walking one day when he met an elderly Rabbi doing the same.  They struck up a conversation and the Rabbi invited him in for lunch.  These lunches went on for several weeks and one day the topic turned to the abbot’s concern for his monastery.  The Rabbi shared the same concerns for his synagogue.  The Abbot asked the Rabbi, “What should we do?”  The Rabbi, responded, “I’ve no idea what to do, but this I will tell you; the Messiah is one of you.”  (Messiah means saviour.)  The Abbot was flattered by the Rabbi’s remark, and asked “are you serious.”  The Rabbi again said, “The Messiah is one of you.”  The Abbot went back to the monastery and told the monk’s what the Rabbi had said.  The monk’s took it to heart and began to believe that one of them was the Messiah.  They all began to question in their hearts which one it might be.  They each ruled out themselves, but said just in case I am I will treat myself with the utmost respect.  Not being able to single out one of the brothers they all began to treat one another as if he were the Christ.  The bond of love began to grow deep in the monastery.  The brothers became legendary all over the countryside for their great love for all people and slowly over the years the monastery began to grow as more and more people came seeking what the brothers had.  Amen.

Be With-Minded

Luke 13:1-9
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The insurance industry has a term for when disaster strikes – act of God.  Your barn gets struck by lighting and burns to the ground at no fault of your own.  They call it an act of God.  A meteorite slams into you while you’re asleep in bed.  They also call that an act of God.  It’s amazing that the insurance lingo for a disaster is an “act of God.”  You break both legs while jumping out a second floor window singing “I believe I can fly.”  That’s not an act of God.  That’s a Darwin Award nomination, but OHIP will still pay. 

The insurance industry’s rationale seems to be that since disastrous events come without warning or explanation, the only plausible rationalization one can find is that for some reason God did it.  Therefore, since God does such terrible things at a whim, the only thing we can do is protect ourselves from the after effects of these “acts of God”.  Hence, sales gimmick number one of the insurance industry: protect yourself against God – buy insurance. 

Moving to this passage from Luke, we find what also appears to be a very troubling teaching on the topic of why tragedy happens and this one coming from Jesus.  Converse to the insurance industry’s explanation for disaster, that it is a whim of God, Jesus’ answer at first glance appears to be “blame the victim”; that it is human sin that causes these things.  Humanities inward turned and selfishly bent nature has so twisted the way things are that we cannot but expect bad things to happen to us.  In this line of thinking tragedy does not come as a whim of God.  Rather, it rears its ugly head as a result of the chaos that our human sin-diseased state has brought into the cosmos.  Try what we may everybody still dies, some more tragically than others.

Jesus gives what also appears to be a solution for protection against tragedy.  He says, “Unless you repent you will perish just as these did.”  But, we have to be careful how we hear this.  Jesus is not saying, “Get things right with God so that this whimsical, wrathful God won’t smite you for your sin.”  People do interpret this passage this way and it is quite appalling.  Let’s not do that.  Rather, let’s dig a little deeper.

This passage comes at the tail end of Jesus teaching his disciples to watch for the end of times and not worry or be afraid of the end because it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom when it hapens.  In response, some people brought up the tragic event of Pontius Pilate martyring a group of Galileans as they offered sacrifices to God wondering whether this tragedy might be a sign of the end.  You see, Jerusalem Jews often looked down on Galilean Jews as being less holy and so were suggesting that God might be starting his end of the age housecleaning by using Pilate to smite a bunch of “hypocritical Galilean sinners.”

Jesus then sets out to correct their prejudiced beliefs by bringing up an incident when the Tower of Siloam in Jerusalem just happened to fall on a group of Jerusalem Jews.  To paraphrase Jesus’ response: “No one is any worse a ‘sinner’ than anyone else.  We’re all ‘sinners’ and unless we all ‘repent’ we will all perish just as tragically and needlessly as those Galileans and those Jerusalemites who appeared to die tragically for no reason”. 

Jesus’ saying that we will all perish just as tragically as victims of tragedy unless we repent leaves me feeling a bit uneasy especially in the wake of several centuries of the Hell-fire and brimstone preaching that the Church has used so effectively to coerce conversions and grow wealthy.  We need to unpack what Jesus is saying and do so by looking at two terms: “Repent” and “perish”.

Let us first take a look at what it is to perish.  If you look back through the Gospel of Luke at the other places the Greek word shows up you will find it translated as to kill, murder, destroy, perish, or lose.  Apparently the word has something to do with death, particularly the futility of life being needlessly wasted.  Ultimately, it’s meaning goes beyond simply dying a tragic, accidental, or undeserved death that serves no meaning to mean wasting life in general as we live it.  Perishing is living with a sense of hopelessness with respect to God and of having not fulfilled any God-given purpose and it all just culminates in death.  To perish is to waste the life God has given to each of us.  Perishing is not God’s punishment.  Perishing for us is like what happens when a plant wilfully removes itself from the soil – if you can imagine the absurdity of that.  So, it is when we turn from God to ourselves to live life according to our own whims.  We perish.

Jesus offers a solution to this universal problem of perishing.  He says, “Repent.”  We have to consider what Jesus means by “repent” within the context of the Gospel he proclaimed.  The Gospel that Jesus proclaimed was not a matter that concerned what happens to us after we die.  His Gospel concerns life right now.  He proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe this Gospel.”  Our response to that Gospel involves what we do with our lives right now in the present.  “Repent and believe” is a compound phrase of two things that go together to make one inseparable whole like “pizza and beer”, “burgers and fries”, or Dr. Seuss’s “Thing 1 and Thing 2”.  To repent is to pick up and start following.  

The Greek word for repent literally means “be with-minded”; become of like mind.  Unfortunately, our English understanding of the word repent comes to us through the Latin language and the theology of the Medieval Roman Church which defined repent as “remorseful” so that “repent and believe” meant “be remorseful about your sinfulness and obey the Church so you won’t go to Hell”.  Luther and the Reformers turned it into, “Be remorseful for your sins, stop sinning, and believe you are forgiven because of Jesus death on the cross on your behalf so you won’t go to Hell.”  Somewhere along the way the Joyous News that the Kingdom of God is at hand was simply forgotten (actually it was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire.  Topic for another day.).

To repent means to be “with-minded” and to believe is to actively engage one’s loyalty.  In short, to “Repent and believe” is to turn away from perishing in “self-mindedness” to being an active disciple of Jesus.   It is the changing of one’s mind from one’s self-interested mindedness to sharing in the humble and compassionate mind of Christ freely given to us by the Holy Spirit as we strive to know Jesus personally and follow in his way.  This “with-mindedness” with Christ will bring about in us the fruits of the Spirit which are the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and not to mention the capacity to turn away from the old life of self-interest as he leads us to live according to the cross, by laying down our lives for others.

I use the word fruits above which comes from the book of Galatians because it fits in with the parable that Jesus told on what repentance is.  We as individuals and as a church and humanity as a whole are that fig tree that does not bear the fruit that it is supposed to bear.  That is the problem with sin.  Because of our self-mindedness we have alienated ourselves from God and thus cannot possibly bear the fruits God desires of us.  God would do well to put an end to it all and start over.  But, Christ in his love for us fertilizes us with the Holy Spirit, with the grace of his very own presence, who works in us to bring forth the fruit that God desires.  All we need do is yield to his work and we will grow in him.

In closing I would just like to briefly say how to repent.   Repenting involves more than simply not doing what you know you shouldn’t do.  Repenting is also more than simply feeling remorse for that which you have or have not done.  Repenting begins with a devotional life.  It is making and taking the time to pray and to read the Bible.  Moreover, it requires committing ourselves to a small group of followers who are striving to live as Jesus’ followers.  Jesus’ call to discipleship is a call to fellowship in him.  Repenting is becoming “with-minded” – “with-minded” with Christ while with one another.  Repenting is something we do together.  Christ-filled fellowship is the antidote to perishing.  Amen. 

      

A Fox, A Hen, and Chicks Who Won't Come (Take Two)

Luke13:31-35
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There are few sights more idyllic than a bunch of little baby chicks pushing their way in underneath their mother hen for warmth and security.  It is amazing that at any sense of danger they will instinctively seek to hide under their mother.  It is all but impossible for them to do otherwise.  If a dog comes into the run, without fail the chicks will flock together behind the mother hen start to burrow in under her.  The mother hen will start to look real ferocious.  She’ll stare the old dog in the eye and face it square on and fluff up her feathers making herself look big.  The brood pushing in under her adds to that effect.  If you’re a curious old farm dog who’s feeling a bit playful, you get the message.  “Stay away from my brood or I’ll poke your eyes out.”

A fox is a different story.  If he’s hungry, he’s got killing on his mind.  That’s what foxes do.  It won’t matter how ferociously fluffy the mother hen looks a hungry fox will just go ahead and kill her.  Unfortunately, she won’t flee.  She will still stand her ground.  The chicks will still try to burrow in under her.  Her grand display of ferocity unfortunately turns to defiant martyrdom and the chicks still get eaten.  Her noble maternal instincts sadly only make her a fairly easy grab for a hungry fox with killing on his mind. 

Looking at our passage here in Luke, Jesus has pulled out quite a powerful image to describe his love, God’s love, for his people.  Due to her instinctual love for her chicks a mother hen will stand her ground to protect those chicks, but sadly, against a fox, she becomes an utter example of futility and vulnerability.  Of course we are supposed to see an analogy here to Jesus’ death on the cross, a revelation of God’s nature by God the Son in which we learn that the power of God is marked by vulnerability and weakness.  God is not all-powerful in the way we think of power.  Rather, God is all-loving. 

Fox’s have power.  King’s have power.  Yet, there’s a rule of thumb when it comes to power.  Lord John Acton wrote in 1887 in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: “All power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”  That’s what happens when people have power over people.  If we remember last week’s reading, this is the sort of power that formed the basis of the devil’s second test of Jesus.  The devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in an instant and said he could give Jesus all that power and if Jesus would worship him.  Jesus didn’t fall for it, if you catch the pun.

Returning to our fox in the chicken yard image, it is kind of interesting here how Jesus, the mother hen, deals with the threat from Herod, the fox.  First thing to keep in mind here is that the Pharisees were probably lying to Jesus about Herod having a desire to kill him.  This particular Herod, Herod Antipas, was a Roman pawn who liked to throw parties.  He was indeed the Herod responsible for the death of John the Baptist.  But, we know he was a reluctant participant in a tragic turn of events in that case.  Herod actually enjoyed listening to John the Baptist.  We learn later in Luke’s Gospel that this Herod was equally curious about Jesus.  In chapter 23, after the Jewish authorities arrested Jesus, Pontius Pilate sent him over to Herod to see if Herod could find anything against Jesus.  According to Luke, Herod was happy to finally meet Jesus because he wanted to see Jesus do some sort of miracle.  But when Jesus refused and simply stood there silent, he had Jesus mocked and sent him back to Pilate who in turn stood before a mob roused by the Temple authorities and said that both he and Herod could find nothing wrong with Jesus.  That said, I think it is more likely that the Pharisees are just trying to mess with Jesus using an empty threat to run him off.

So, the Pharisees tell Jesus to get out of there because Herod is longing to kill him and Jesus in response gives a very “cocky” answer.  “You go in my stead and tell that fox that today, tomorrow, and the next day I’m going to be doing what I do – casting out demons and healing the sick – that’s what I’m going to be doing here while I’m on my way to Jerusalem.  Oh, and by the way it’s impossible for a prophet to get killed outside of Jerusalem.”  With that answer Jesus basically told Herod and the Pharisees that Herod was powerless to kill Jesus outside of Jerusalem.  Politicians have no power to stop God or the work of God.

 Jesus’ directs his next comments more towards the Pharisees than to Herod.  And we know about the Pharisees.  They were the hyper-religious people back then and they had the most political power at the populist level of all the groups in Jesus’ day.  Actually, they were effectually more powerful than Herod.  If the Pharisees were as in with God as they believed themselves to be, they should have been able to recognize by the things that Jesus was doing that he was imbued with the true power of God and was therefore their Messiah, but they just didn’t see it.  Powerlust blinded them.  And so, Jesus goes on to note that it’s not kings who kill prophets, but “Jerusalem”. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”, the power seat of religion, “Jerusalem” is who kills prophets and stones those God sends to them.  It’s impossible for Jesus to be killed by anything other than Jerusalem.

Next, Jesus creates an image that’s not so idyllic.  Imagine a fox coming into the chicken yard and the mother hen calling the chicks to find their protection underneath her.  But the chicks don’t want to come.  There’s something seriously wrong.  By the powerful drive of instinct alone the chicks should run to their mother and wriggle in underneath of her for safety.  But instead, the chicks – Jerusalem – attack and kill the mother hen.  What a bizarre scene.  

If you’re paying attention to the original Greek text in this passage which we obliviously can’t and it’s a shame that the translators haven’t done very well here for us either, if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that the root of it all is problem with desire.  The Greek word for desire, for longing shows up three times in this passage.  First, the Pharisees said that Herod was not simply wanting, but rather longing to kill Jesus.  The next two times is when Jesus says to “Jerusalem”, the religious leadership of God’s people, “How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you (Jerusalem) did not long for it.”  Shuh-mack.  So, Jesus tells the Pharisees that their house, the Temple, is left empty to them meaning God is not there anymore and they are not going to recognize him until they see the children of Jerusalem whom they are responsible to raise in the faith welcoming him, Jesus, into Jerusalem singing, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”  Please don’t miss the foreshadowing of Palm Sunday here.

The heart of the matter driving this whole bizarre scene of chicks turning on their mother hen when a fox is in the yard is a lack of a longing desire on the part of the political and religious leadership to find the security of a life giving relationship with their God.  “Jerusalem”, this interesting mixture of religious and political power likes its power to control others be it with empty threats or with rules for morality and proper ritual.  “Jerusalem” likes its power and will even kill God to keep it.

The moral of this story is that religion and politics make odd bedfellows.   Religious authorities should not use politicians to enforce religious values nor should politicians use religious values to seek power.  Presidents should not sign Bibles nor should they be asked to –even if it's Jimmy Carter.  That is bizarre.  Christian faith is not a religion to be used to undergird a nation.  Christian faith is new human existence, people indwelt by the Holy Spirit so that we are in a relationship with God in which nothing can separate us from his love and presence; a relationship with God in which God is a work transforming us to be more Christ-like, which means bearing--the-cross-vulnerable in our ways.  Like a mother hen God longs, deeply desires, for us to come to him...not to some religion about him.  The new human existence that God has wrought in Christ Jesus is new human being in which God is restoring his image in us, the image of a self-giving, loving communion of persons.  This new existence is not found in the observances of religious institutions for the sake of national solidarity.  But rather, in prayer and in meditation on Scripture and in heartfelt worship which are times when we are in his presence and his nature simply rubs off on us.  It is found as we learn to love our neighbours as we love ourselves with a love that is unconditional and unselfish and indeed sacrificial.  It is found when we forgive and love those who have hurt us and we try to bear them up understanding their woundedness.  It is found in extending hospitality and gracious fellowship, friendship, to all.  All who are in Christ are new creation, the old life is gone and a new one has begun – a new life filled with and transformed by God.  We, this congregation, we are new creation in the midst of the old, new humanity in the midst of the old.  The more we live it, the more we will know it. Amen.

Compelled to Confess

Romans 10:5-13    

Everybody knows Frank.  In fact, everybody kind of avoids Frank.  He is such a drain.  Frank is walking negativity.  He is negativity in the flesh.  If you ask Frank how he is doing today, you will soon find out that his neck hurts;  that his neighbors are stupid; that it’s so hot outside that he really just wants to die.  Frank never seems to have a pleasant thought and it does not take a rocket scientist to know that is because deep in Frank’s heart he is not a happy man.

I am sure that we all know a Frank and at times we ourselves have been a Frank.  Our outlook on life can sometimes be so marred by bad happenings that all we want to do is complain.  Then, this complaining becomes a habit.  And soon, every word out of our mouths is a complaint, all because deep down inside we’ve come to believe that life stinks.  We to believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths through our complaints that life stinks.  It is a rule of thumb that how we feel about life in general or rather what we really believe about the very nature of our existence will nearly always be revealed in our conversations, if not by what we say, then by how we say it.  What we believe in our hearts, we will inevitably confess with our lips.

Paul says that those who find themselves believing in their hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead and confessing with their lips that he is Lord will find salvation.  This means in its simplest form that if we have come to the conviction that almost two thousand years ago God did raise a man, Jesus of Nazareth, from the dead we will find true hope.  We will find a whole new world where we really experience the power of God at work.  We will find that the life we had that was so full of heartaches, complications and questions has passed away and we are being changed to being hope-filled people.

Because we believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead, we will inevitably find that what comes out of our mouths reflects that Jesus is Lord.  In fact, we will be compelled to confess that Jesus is Lord.  Just as our old friend Frank was compelled to complain by his fundamental belief that life stinks, so we by the hope that is in our hearts that God did indeed raise Jesus from the dead and will raise us from the dead and therefore death is not the last word in God’s good creation are compelled to confess that Jesus is Lord.  He is God’s last word.

When we confess that Jesus is Lord we confess that there is no power on earth greater than him, and we will demonstrate this by living by his teachings.  Confessing Jesus as Lord does not end when we speak the words.  The power in the hope of resurrection given to us by the Holy Spirit will enable us to live like people who are certain that what we hope in is true.  We will live with joy.

Our scripture today states that if we confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, then we will be saved.  Salvation has two aspects.  First, we are saved in the end from God’s final judgment on sin because of faith.  We know that God is our only hope, that the power which raised Christ from the dead will also raise us.  Secondly, we are saved now.  The hope that God has given to us keeps us from the self-imposed hell in which our old friend Frank lives.  The hope of our salvation compels us to live differently, to talk differently – to love.  This change in our hearts and in our behavior is a manifestation of God’s kingdom on this earth, a manifestation of our coming salvation.

Today is not Easter when we would typically hear a sermon like this.  Today is the first Sunday of Lent.  Sermons on this day usually deal with how to deal with Temptation – Money, Sex, Power, Chocolate, and Coffee.  But, we won’t consider that kind of temptation this morning.  Years ago the theologian Karl Barth said we should start the day with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Reading the news today it is obvious that there is a pall of hopelessness overshadowing the world.  Its like Frank suddenly became a news media mogul.  Our greatest temptation as a people of faith today is buying into this hopelessness and living accordingly.  Hopeless people do dreadful things in the attempt either to live for now or to not live at all.  Today, since it’s Lent, the Soul-searching Season of the Church year, let us each search ourselves to see what we really believe in our hearts.  Each one of us must ask inwardly, “Do I feel the hope?  Do I feel the change?  Do I feel the power which God raised Jesus from the dead raising me from the dead?  Am I being saved?”  If so, let us celebrate this meal together in the hope that God has given us by raising Jesus from the dead making him Lord and Giver of Life in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.