Under Compulsion

Acts 5:27-35
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“We must obey God rather than man.”  That verse contains some cringe-worthy words – “God”, “obey”, and “must”.   Whenever those three words show up in a verse you know there’s going to be trouble.  Most people these days don’t think in such “fanatical” terms as “God”, “obey”, “must”.  If you try to throw that combination of words into a sermon these days, it’s a major downer, a downright preacher faux pas.  

In today’s world it is unwise to talk about “obedience” when it comes to the topic of God.  It conjures up images of that “angry old man” sitting on the throne ready to send everybody to Hell because we’ve been naughty rather than nice.  It is rather more prudent to stick to “Jesus loves me, this I know”.  We simply have a problem with the word “obey” and especially when it’s used in proximity to the word “God” and intensified by the word “must”.  Obey is what well-trained dogs do.  Compelled obedience is what that cruel institution of slavery was rooted in.  Religious groups that use the word so often tend towards spiritual abuse.  Ever since we discovered basic human rights we do not feel comfortable using the word obey in any context that involves humans. 

So that said, what do we do with this verse, “We must obey God rather than man”?  Well, if Randy were here we could expect a lesson in New Testament Greek right about now.  But he’s not so we’ll just ponder the question, “Have you ever felt like God wanted you to do something and you were restless until you did it?”  If so, then that’s what we’re talking about here – a God thing that we know we have to do. 

The Apostles felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to do what God was calling them to do in the name Jesus.  They were filling Jerusalem with blessing.  They were teaching what Jesus taught.  They were healing the ill and casting out demons.  As a group they were effectively eliminating poverty among themselves by sharing everything in common.  They were proclaiming that God had raised Jesus from the dead; Jesus, whom everyone knew had been crucified wrongly for treason by the Romans and blasphemy by the Temple authorities.  Yet, here they were saying the things he said and doing the things he did in his name to the same awesome effect. 

This was possible because the Holy Spirit was upon them.  The Apostles were proclaiming that a new age was upon them, a time foretold by prophets long ago.  A few weeks after the Resurrection during the Festival of Pentecost, which celebrated the giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai, God poured out the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus and they began to tell about Jesus in many different languages.  Accused of public drunkenness at only nine o’clock in the morning, Peter gave a rousing sermon explaining that this was the fulfillment of the prophecies of the prophet Joel about the end of times when God would pour his Spirit upon his people.  This had happened.  Jesus was therefore the Messiah.  He was truly bodily raised from the dead.  The Holy Spirit was indeed poured upon them as promised.  A new day of salvation had dawned.  This was God’s truth and the Apostles were compelled by the Holy Spirit to proclaim it.

Yet, the Apostles got in trouble.  The Sanhedrin, the religious authorities, their power threatened, got jealous.  They tried to compel the Apostles with threats to stop teaching in the name of Jesus and implicating the Sanhedrin in his wrongful death.  Finally, after one healing too many the High Priest had the Apostles jailed only to find them the next day again publicly preaching in the name of Jesus and claiming an angel had set them free.

Oddly, the Sanhedrin thought that intimidation could stop the Apostles; that fear of their power could compel the followers of Jesus not to speak in his name.  Yet, their life-threatening abuse of power was no match for the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit who was compelling the Apostles to preach the Truth that Jesus, whom the Sanhedrin had crucified but God had raised and who was truly the Son of God and the Messiah for whom they were hoping.  Just as the Apostles and many others were filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, so we find the Sanhedrin saying that the Apostles had filled (or rather fulfilled) all Jerusalem with their teaching in the name of Jesus.  

Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Jerusalem was being fulfilled:

2 In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and all nations will stream to it.

3 Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into ploughshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.

Come, descendants of Jacob,

    let us walk in the light of the Lord.”  (Is. 2:2-5)

As we can see obedience here isn’t about doing the right moral thing as opposed to the wrong for fear God will get you, which is the typical thought that comes up when we hear “God”, “obey”, and “must” in the same sentence.  Christian obedience is acting out of the compulsion that the Holy Spirit places in us to act on Jesus’ behalf.  The result of this compulsion to obey God by proclaiming the truth of Jesus in what we say and do is that the surrounding community begins to get transformed to look more and more like God is with us.  

So, how do we as individuals and as a church let ourselves be compelled by the Holy Spirit to act according to the Truth of Jesus and his resurrection?  Well, do you ever feel like you need to read your Bible more, or take a moment to sit and listen, or see a need and feel like “I’m the one to do something.”  That’s likely the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes the opportunity to talk faith with others comes up.  That’s a Holy Spirit created opportunity to listen and to share.  As far as we as a congregation, well, God places people in our midst who get hunches like we should have a Bible study, or we should have a potluck, or we should give that extra money to a particular need as Latona did when Willamsford flooded to the tune of $15,000.  We should listen to those people who have those hunches.  One thing that’s for sure, the more we all gather together, prayerfully and open to the Spirit’s leading, the Holy Spirit will lead us to something.  Things like Bible Studies are important.  Our enemy shows itself in the fear that tells us we are too old and too small, but the last time I checked the Holy Spirit provides the energy and the people and the JOY to do what he compels us to do.  We are under compulsion to bear the name of Christ, let’s discover the joy and the wonder of “obeying”.  Amen.

All Things Made New

Isaiah 65:17-25, Revelation21:1-7, 1 Corinthians 15:19-26
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I have to admit that I get pretty excited about new discoveries in the world of physics.  For example, in 2012 when CERN produced a Higgs Boson with its Large Hadron Collider I preached a sermon on it – professional faux pas.  The Higgs Boson is the elementary or sub-atomic particle that gives stuff mass.  Sub-atomic reality consists of fields of little blips of different kinds of energy – fermions and bosons – so that we are swimming in as well as consisting of a lake of different kinds of energies and don’t know it.  One of those fields consists of Higgs Bosons.  When fermions interact with the Higgs Bosons they get mass – they get heavy and slow down and start to stick together to make the particles that make atoms.  Without the Higgs Boson everything would just be tiny, little, sub-atomic blips of energy zipping about at the speed of light and we wouldn’t be here.  The Higgs is affectionately known as the “God Particle” because everything that “is” depends on it.  Back in 1964 a man named Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson, but it wasn’t until this last decade that we had particle colliders that could produce enough energy to smash one into revealing itself.  The Higgs Boson – predicted in theory, but now seen.

In February of 2016 scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory measured a gravitational wave proving something Einstein had predicted nearly a hundred years earlier; that when massive things in the universe start mixing it up the very fabric of space-time ripples like throwing a rock into a pond and unseen and unfelt by us every subatomic particle we are made of does a ride-a-wave thing.  The Gravitational Wave – predicted in theory, but now seen.

The oldest light we can see in the universe is a form of heat known as Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.  It was discovered in the mid-1960’s but lately with newer telescopes they’ve been mapping the universe with it.  It’s 13.82 billion years old and originated about 378,000 years after the Bing Bang.  If you want to see this light you can hear it if you listen to static generated by a television.  4-8% of that noise is the sound of the first measurable remnants of the Big Bang; i.e. of Creation itself.  The Bing Bang – predicted in theory but now seen or rather heard.

Wednesday a week ago a group of scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope produced a picture of a super-massive black hole that is 6,000 times the size of our sun and located at the center of a nearby galaxy 40 million light years away.  Black holes happen when too much stuff gets together and becomes a mass so dense that the force of gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape from it.  Black holes are like death.  The moment something passes the event horizon of a black hole we have no idea what happens to it.  This picture of a black hole is important because it is the evidence that black holes really exist.  Before, we knew them only in theory and math, and they even look like what we expected.  Black Holes – predicted in theory, but now seen.

Well, it’s Easter and for me when I think about Jesus’ resurrection I have to put it into the context the real stuff of real science.  As Christians we cannot with any integrity continue this charade of saying that Jesus resurrection from the dead is simply a spiritual matter which a person can chose to believe or not.  Rather, the Church professes that God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son incarnate, from the dead and it was a bodily resurrection.  This means that Jesus’ resurrection body brought back anew from the “black hole” of Death must still have a physical connection to this Creation that God Big Banged into existence roughly 14.1 billion years ago.  For Jesus to have been able to be touched by his disciples and to have sat and eaten with them after being raised from the dead he had to be made of real stuff.  Therefore what his resurrected body was made of must still interact with Higgs Bosons and have mass.  He is just as real as the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and black holes.  Since Jesus resurrected is still human we also have to add him into the categories of reality that we call life, consciousness, and sentience (which includes intelligence, relationability, emotion, reason, wonder, creativity) and we also have to add the highest category: that of knowing and relating to God.   

Jesus resurrection is an act of New Creation.  Jesus resurrected is everything we are yet he has gone through the black hole of death and come out the other side as New Creation.  In fact, he is the beginning of the whole Creation being made new. 

Since God raised Jesus from the dead everything in God’s good and wonderful Creation has begun to change.  New Testament scholar N.T. Wright often says that when God raised Jesus from the dead a shockwave went out through all of created existence.  Things are now somehow different.  I hear that and I think that a gravitational wave makes a good analogy.  We can’t see or feel them but when they come through, the space-time fabric of our very existence is part of it.  So it is with the effect of the Resurrection of Jesus.  We may not be aware that we are experiencing it, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are.

Just as science predicted the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, the Big Bang, and black holes so also God has predicted this New Creation that he has begun with the resurrection of Jesus.  God spoke to Isaiah and said he was making a new heavens and a new earth.  The picture he gives us of it isn’t of a non-physical, simply spiritual heavenly reality.  In the New Creation, life – real and physical – continues on.  Children are born.  People grow old.  We build houses and there make our homes.  We plant and we eat.  There are vineyards so that means wine.  Work is productive and rewarding.  There is joy and delight and lasting blessing.  No more will there be weeping and cries of distress.  No more futility or premature death.  No more losing everything that you’ve worked for.  No more children needlessly dying.  It even seems that predation in the animal kingdom will cease.  Our relationship with God will be such that we know God hears us before we even speak as opposed to this sense that we often have of just bouncing prayers off the ceiling not knowing whether God hears or cares.

The Book of Revelation also shows us a creation made new, a new heaven and a new earth where God is knowably present rather than hidden yet present.  It is a Creation healed of Sin, sickness, grief, and Death where God tenderly comforts all who sorrow.  Please notice that the New Jerusalem comes from heaven to earth.  God does not destroy earth so that we can all go to heaven.  In the New Creation heaven and earth open to each other.  Heaven is no longer hidden.

This New Creation that God himself has predicted is taking effect in us this very moment through the workings of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit calls us to come and be Jesus disciples and as we together as the body of Christ and focus more on the task of being Jesus’ disciples, the more we find ourselves being made new, being made to be more and more like Jesus.  By communion with the Holy Spirit we are partakers of Jesus’ resurrected life and this will culminate when at the end of this age Jesus returns and we, like him, are bodily raised from the dead and all things are made new and there will be no more Sin or Death or evil powers or chaos.  All will be made alive in Christ and God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).  The earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the see (Is. 11:9).

Lastly, God the Father himself is the one who has made this prediction.  He said to Isaiah “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.”  In the Revelation he said to John (and this is the only time God the Father from his throne speaks in the whole Book), “See, I am making all things new.”  In the world of physics a prediction is not like Nostradamus staring into a bowl or Jimmy the Greek predicting the Super Bowl winner.  Instead, in physics a prediction is something that will in time come about because it is the only way things add up.  Peter Higgs predicted the Higgs Boson knowing that there had to be an elementary particle mechanism that made things have mass.  We have found one.  Einstein predicted gravitational waves and black holes simply because the math said they have to exist.  We have found them.  The Big Bang had to have happened because that is the only way we can have Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.  The Big bang happened.  Likewise, God is making all things new.  This New Creation started with Jesus’ resurrection.  It is being worked in us now by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit.  But, the God-predicted Day will come when all things will finally be made new.  Resurrection and New Creation are as real and predictable as the Big Bang, Higgs Bosons, Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and black holes.  Just wait and see.  It will happen.  Amen.

Friendship with God - Good Friday 2019

2 Corinthians 5:11-21

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Back in the 60’s a form of mental health therapy called Reality Therapy erupted on the scene and proved to be revolutionary.  It helped people get their lives together not so much by dealing with the past to make the present better, but rather by making the present better and the past will resolve itself.  When we think of going to counselors or psychiatrists or psychologists, we imagine that we’re going to have to lay on a couch and start dealing with our childhood issues to understand how they affect our lives now.  There’s truth in that approach because we do pick up many emotional barriers to living life as we grow up and understanding them helps us to be free of them.  Reality Therapy doesn’t begin with mulling over the past.   It focuses on the here and now. 

Reality Therapy starts with the question: if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and as the result of some sort of miracle everything in your life was perfect, what would be different?  To answer that question you have to begin to imagine a new reality and then list a few things.  Then, the therapist simply asks: what do you have to do now to make those things a reality?  You then set about making that new, healthy life a reality with the help of the therapist who simply coaches them through and gets the client to acknowledge their fears and childhood emotional barriers and face them as they arise.  

Reality Therapy is a very practical approach.  It really helps people dive right into the nitty gritty of their own lives lives by the work of striving to bring about a vision of hope.  Moving to the nitty gritty of this sermon, I think Reality Therapy makes a good analogy of what God has done and is doing for us through Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Let’s just be honest about Reality for a moment.  Reality for us from the cosmic level right down to the personal level is plagued by a rift that exists between our loving Father, the Almighty Creator, and ourselves.  God created us to live in close fellowship with himself but for some reason we instinctively rather do our own thing as if we were gods of our own little worlds.  Even when we do our best not to be our own gods, things still remain fairly messed up.  We can’t seem to see past our own nose and doing what seems best for it.  Even when we say we are simply trying to do what is right and best for everybody self-interest still lurks on the backsides of our motives.

 This problem, which we call Sin is a relational disease.  It hampers our ability to know God and to have the close fellowship with him for which he created us.  And, as it is a disease it leads to Death.  Due to this relational distance from God we start coming up with our own ideas of what God is like – myths, religions, superstitions – and we start relating to false images of gods that we make in our own image.  The end result is that we just do not know God and wouldn’t know him if we saw him.  The crucifixion of Jesus proves that.  What we are left with is a relational blindness that results in us being self-willed, self-indulgent, and self-interest and we die.

Getting back to our analogy of Reality Therapy, if we were reality therapists and had nerve enough to ask God that if he were to wake up tomorrow and by some miracle overnight it was now a perfect world, what would be different?  I think he would answer that by saying, “My creation right down to the last sub-atomic particle of it would enjoy friendship with me as I intended it to enjoy.  This rift would be no more.  There would be no more sin and death and sickness and disasters and people hurting people and people just plain hurting.  They would love as I love for they would know me as I am.”  Playing the roll of the therapist a little more we would have to push God a bit further and ask him what he’d have to do to make this perfect world a reality.  Well, if we take what Paul writes here seriously, God’s answer is not to keep making us miserable until we break and get ourselves right with God so that we can enjoy his blessing.  God’s answer is that he is going to have to become as we are, knowing sin, and by the power of his very being destroy it within himself and heal this cosmos by uniting it to himself…and then we would see God for who he is.

According to Paul this is exactly what God has done in Jesus Christ.  “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  In Jesus of Nazareth God the Son became human.  He took upon himself our self-willedness, self-indulgentness, and self-interestedness but never acted out of it.  Instead, he took it to the cross and there as an innocent man wrongfully suffered the death deserved by the most heinous of us.  He died.  God within himself suffered death.  The mechanics of that are beyond our understanding.  Needless to say, God knows and has experienced death.

Well, death has no home within the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The rift that human sin has brought about between God and humanity cannot exist in the loving communion of God.  God raised Jesus from the dead vindicating him, proving that God is righteous and faithful because God is Love.  In the very being of Jesus the Christ the rift has been healed.  In him God and humanity are in communion as God intended.  For now, Jesus has taken resurrected and healed humanity back into God and has sent the Holy Spirit to be with and in us so that we are united to God and are partakers of Jesus resurrected and healed humanity.  It is not enough to say that we simply have restored fellowship with God.  Rather, it is more accurate to say we have communion with God in Jesus the Christ because we are grafted to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  Indeed, God has reconciled us to himself in Christ Jesus. 

Jesus’s uniting our sin-laden humanity with himself and dying with it has forever changed things for the whole of the creation.  Paul says, “…we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.”  In Christ all of humanity has died and has available to it in Christ the new life of his resurrection.   All who are in Christ indeed are a new creation.  By sending the Holy Spirit into us Christ unites us to himself and the Holy Spirit begins the work of healing in us that began when in, through and as Jesus of Nazareth God the Son became human.  God will complete this healing when he raises us from the dead just as he raised Jesus.  For now, just as Jesus lived his earthly life with the struggle of two wills within him-the human and the divine, so also we live it.  And as he enjoyed friendship with his Father so do we enjoy the friendship of God forever.  It’s all the result of God’s doings, not our own. 

Reality for the whole creation has changed because God has put us into friendship with himself through Jesus Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit with and in us.  Things are different now since Christ Jesus lived, died, was raised, and sits at the right hand of the Father.  We no longer have to look at our own little realities in the same way.  We can have hope, the hope of knowing that God is our friend and is working his loving will in us and in the details of our lives.  God isn’t out to get us.  Rather, He’s out to make us his friends.  He wants to listen, to comfort, to have fun, simply to enjoy every moment of our lives with us.  He’s out to heal us of the hurts that we live with.  We just have to accept his friendship, draw near to him, and start living in the New Reality, the New Creation, the New Humanity that he has created in, through, and as Jesus the Christ and let God heal us.  Amen.

The End

John 13:1-17, 33-35
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Back when I was in university I had the distinct privilege of going to a Church of the Brethren love feast.  When the Brethren celebrate Communion they do things different than we do.  It’s a big occasion so it doesn’t happen on Sunday morning, but in the evening when they can take the time to share it during a meal.  It’s a feast.  It’s as much a remembrance of Jesus last meal with disciples as it is the coming “Marriage Supper of the Lamb” that we look forward to when Jesus returns.  They have a big meal, like roast beef or chicken, a meal common to the area.  It culminates with communion.  Its very early church-like.  But, the interesting thing about the Church of the Brethren Love Feast is that you don’t eat until you’ve washed feet. 

Though it was thirty years ago, I remember this meal, my one and only experience of foot washing.  The men and women were separated.  We paired up and got a basin of water and a towel.  I was in my early 20’s.  My partner was in his 70’s.  I was styling in cotton socks and docksiders.  He wore those cushiony black shoes and black polyester socks.  His ankles and feet were a bit swollen and sweaty.  With me being a newbie, he washed my feet first to show me how it was done.  I set my feet in the basin.  He splashed water on them and then dried them off.  He sat in a chair in front of me, grunting as he had to bend to pick-up my feet.  Then he set his feet in the basin and I splashed them a bit and dried then off and that was that.

For me in my 20’s that was probably my first experience of human contact of that manner.  It is a bonding experience.  It is intimate and personal and, in a mild way, it is humiliating.  It requires humility and a sense of maturity.  You don’t go about it displaying non-verbal’s of repulsion.  You don’t joke about the experience and or fain gratitude there was no fungi involved.  It is a sacred act.

In real life foot washing can be a very profound and indeed life-saving act.  Just ask a nurse.  I’ve heard nurses share stories having to help bathe homeless, mentally ill people who’ve had the same socks and shoes on for months.  The socks have to be cut and peeled off because hair and nails have grown through them and they have fused with the skin due to fungus growth.  It’s painful. 

In Catholicism, on Maundy Thursday the Pope has to wash the feet of twelve homeless people.  I don’t agree with that practice.  I think it humiliates already humiliated people for a matter of religious “ceremony”. 

Looking at John’s Gospel, the origin of this practice of foot washing, John tells that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples before they shared what was to be their last meal together.  This meal was thus Jesus’ last opportunity to teach his disciples and closest friends.  So, we must clue in that what Jesus said and did at this last supper was of utmost importance; like a summary of everything he had taught them.

John is adamant to note that Jesus did this foot washing fully knowing that what was soon to happen.  In just a few hours he would be arrested, tried and convicted wrongfully, tortured, and executed.  Judas would betray him leading to his arrest.  While on trial, Peter, his most adamantly loyal disciple, would deny him three times before daybreak.  Then, the other ten, fearing for their lives would desert him.  Despite knowing their soon to happen lack of fidelity, Jesus still washed their feet.  Most people would not have done that. 

An obvious question to ask here is why.  Most interpreters will mention that the other Gospels tell us that during this meal a dispute broke out among the disciples as to who was the greatest of them.  So then, stating the obvious, they say that Jesus humbled, humiliated himself in this way to put a final end to their delusion of grandeur that they would rule with him when he established his kingdom, which they expected to happen in the next day or two as they were expecting.  That interpretive move may be historically accurate, but if we stay true to John’s Gospel, the obvious answer to why Jesus does this humiliating act is to demonstrate his own nature and the nature of his rule in his kingdom and to prepare them live accordingly. 

Verse 1 reads, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”  Then, John fills out the meaning of that verse.  He notes that Jesus knew what will happen later that evening and regardless, he stripped down to his undergarments, tied a towel around his waist, poured water in a basin, washed his disciples feet, and dried them with a towel.  That’s what love looks like.  Humbly serving one another is the “end” of love. 

John saying in verse 1 that Jesus “loved them to the end” unbeknownst to us English speakers is very rich in meaning in the Greek language.  We read it rather literally as Jesus never stopped loving his disciples despite the betrayal, the denial, and their total desertion.  The Greek word there is “telos” and it is much richer in meaning than that.  Let me try to fill this out.

In Pagan worship services the “telos” is the culmination of the worship service, which is the sacrifice.  In this sense, Jesus washing his disciples is a profound act of worship.  It should also shine light on Jesus’ death as being a profound act of worship in resembling the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement.  Like on the Day of Atonement it is here that Jesus cleanses his disciples of “iniquity” and takes their sin upon himself to bear it away in death.

In the world of ethics, “telos” or end means the culmination of a process of actions.  We like to say, “the end justifies the means” or its opposite that “the end does not justify the means”.  In this case, Jesus’ act of love in washing his disciples’ feet is the culmination, the end of the educational process of discipleship he had led them through for three years.  So also, in Jesus’ Kingdom the way of rule is most markedly demonstrated by love shown in humble service.  Thus, the end and the means are one and the same throughout.  The nature of power in his kingdom is best demonstrated by washing one another’s feet – and I might add especially the feet of those who have and will hurt us, the feet of friends who prove themselves disloyal, friends who betray us as do enemies.

Another meaning for “telos” has to do with purpose –the end for which something is made is its purpose.  The love that Jesus demonstrated to his disciples by washing his disciples’ feet is the end, the purpose for which he came into the world.  His purpose is fulfilled when that love is cherished, embodied, and enacted in the midst of human community.  That is what eternal life looks and will look like.  That is what salvation looks and will look like.  It is the healing of humanity. 

One last thing, Jesus’ washing his disciples feet was the final thing that he needed to do to equip his disciples for the ministry of heralding in and enacting his kingdom until he returns.  Isaiah 52:7 reads: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the herald, who proclaims peace, who brings news of good things, who proclaims salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!”  Jesus made their feet beautiful so that they could be the heralds of his kingdom. He further equipped them for this on the evening Easter Sunday when risen from the dead he appeared to his disciples and said, “Peace to You!  As the Father has sent me, I also send you.” Then he breathed the Holy Spirit onto them. 

Having beautiful feet looks like loving one another as Jesus has loved us.  Jesus' one commandment is so important.  People will know we are his disciples by how we love one another.  So also, people will know that our God reigns by the way we love one another.  But wait a minute; let’s not be on a power trip with delusions of an almighty God who smites all those wicked people who have committed the grave sin of simply being different us.  Our God reigns in the power of self-emptying love.  My friends, our God washes feet – even the feet of those who hurt him most – that’s me and you and us together as we daily betray him, deny him, and walk out on him in fear.  Our God does not make us wash our feet to come into his presence.  In fact, the commandment is that we take our shoes off before coming into his presence. 

When Jesus finished washing his disciples’ feet he asked them, “Do you know what I have done to you?”  Do you fully perceive and understand the significance of what I have done to you.  That’s a huge one.  Do we understand that our Lord is a foot washer and that we should be and do like wise?  Do we get that?  Seriously, there is only one thing we need to understand about God and humanity’s and each of ours relationship with God – He washes our feet.  He washes everybody’s feet – everybody’s!  Amen.  

Wasteful Love

John 12:1-8; Philippians 3:4-14
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How does one define waste?  One way is to say waste is something that has served its purpose and is ready to throw away.  A used tissue is easily defined as waste.  But the conversion of trees to paper products to be used for human hygiene is a huge waste of a tree when you consider that trees are the largest producers of the oxygen we breathe.  And since we are on the topic of waste, if you have ever attempted to wipe a baby’s bottom with toilet paper, then you may have concluded that this particular Modern convenience doesn’t really do down there what we believe it does down there making the killing of trees for that purpose all the more an utter waste. 

So, you may have noticed our definition of waste just expanded from something that can no longer serve its intended purpose to using something for useless, futile purposes.  In that line of thinking we can waste natural resources.  We can waste money.  We can waste time.  Above all, we can waste the lives that God has so wonderfully entrusted to us.  There’s the Prodigal Son kind of wasting our lives where we spend ourselves and everything we have on “wild living.”  But, we can also waste our lives in the pursuit of what many would call a successful life.  We can work day and night for a nice house, nice cars, fine dining, all the stuff that wealth affords.  Yet, is being “wealthy”, being “successful”, really what God gave us “life” for?  The fact that there are more poor people in the world than there are Middle Class and wealthy should tell us something is askew with our definition of success or at least with how we go about getting it.

Looking at Paul here in our reading from Philippians we see that it is possible even to waste our lives on godly pursuits.  Paul claims that he actually wasted his life pursuing what he thought God wanted him to do.  Prior to his Damascus Road experience he was very zealous for an Israel that was Law-abiding.  He was a model Pharisee and riding the escalator up in power and status.  But, soon he found himself willingly imprisoning the followers of Jesus and desiring they be put to death for blasphemy.  After his encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus, he discovered that his zealous efforts were contrary to the life God actually desires and were actually a waste of his life.  He considered his pre-disciple rise to success life to be dung and that’s putting it mildly.

In contrast to Paul here in John’s Gospel is a young woman, named Mary, who wastes a bottle of very expensive perfume on Jesus because, unlike everybody else in Jesus’ day, she kind of gets who he is and especially that he is going to die.  All the Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus for his burial in the days following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s version Jesus speaks highly of this woman saying that she had done a beautiful thing and that everywhere the Gospel was proclaimed what this woman had done for him in anointing his body for burial would be told also.

As Jesus said, this woman had done a beautiful thing.  In the Jewish faith one could say she performed an act of Chesed, an act of loving kindness that truly reveals the heart of God; pure, unconditional, wasteful, and one could even say broken-hearted love.  The perfume she wasted on Jesus in an extravagant act of wasteful love was worth upwards of one years salary for any of us here.  Yet, to Jesus she had done a beautiful thing that revealed the very heart of God. 

“How does wasting perfume on Jesus’ feet reveal the heart of God”, you may ask.  In light of Judas’ question, we may also want to ask how does wasting expensive perfume reveal the heart of God any more than would selling that perfume and giving it all away to the poor.  Well, her anointing of Jesus with this perfume corresponds to Jesus’ wasting his life by dying for a humanity that didn’t deserve it.  There’s a Good Friday Sermon here that we don’t have time for this morning, but it must be said that Jesus wasted his life over to death to destroy death and its cause, which is the disease of Sin.  Then, by raising Jesus from the dead God created a new humanity that would bear his Spirit and in essence be his Temple, the Body of Christ.  The end result is that Jesus’ wasteful death restored value to human life which we have wasted in Sin.  We are now also reconciled to God in an organic union kind of way; united to the Son of God, the Living Christ, by the Holy Spirit to become his sisters and brothers and beloved children of the Father just as he is.  With the wasteful gift of his Spirit, which God poured upon us similar to the way Mary wasted expensive perfume on Jesus feet, God has truly united us to the love which God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  By anointing us with the perfume of the Holy Spirit, God has made us partakers of the relationship which Jesus the Son shares with God the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Well, enough of this theology stuff.  God has wasted the perfume of his very self on us.  He has wasted the life giving blood (life) of Jesus the Son on us in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  I have said wasted.  This is not a very nice thing to say of us, especially as we know that God loves us dearly, indeed loves all people dearly even the most evil of us who have ever lived.  Yet, when we look at the whole condition of human existence – the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the way we abuse one another, our pride, our self-involvement, our self-indulgence, our self-righteousness, the way we judge one another – it would make more sense for us like Judas the thief and betrayer to turn to God and say, “Why have you wasted the gift of yourself on us.  Destroy us all and start again!”

Well, here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was a beautiful thing.  Of all the disciples only she seemed to understood that he was going to die.  In fact, she was the only human outside of Jesus who got it.  Even though his disciples knew who he was, they wouldn’t believe him when he said he had to die.  Instead, they were blinded with their own hope and belief that he would ride into Jerusalem, cleanse the temple, kick out the Romans, and establish the Kingdom and…they would rule with him.  Hmmm, we’re back to that power thing.  But Mary, knowing no other way to express her overwhelming grief at knowing Jesus would die, she rather spontaneously took a bottle of very fine, very expensive, very pure perfume and wasted it on Jesus’ feet.  An act that simply says, “My heart is broken, but I understand that you must die.”  All she could do with her grief was this futile, wasteful act of preparing his feet for burial.

Mary’s beautiful act mirrors God’s understanding and deep grief over our wastedness and the inescapable fact that we, his beloved children, must die.  God is a grieving God not an angry God who demands righteousness from us in an “obey me or else” kind of way.  God’s children are dying by our own demise.  Of course, he’s upset about that.  What else can he do for us other than to anoint us for our death and burial with his very self that being made alive in the new life he created by Christ Jesus we can live through death and be healed of Sin in our own resurrection?  God our Father, Brother, and Constant Companion is not this sourpuss, judgmental, angry, petty, old man of a God who demands an inordinate standard of morality from us that we cannot possibly live up to.  God is not angry at us and wanting to destroy us if we don’t repent.  God is not going to destroy us and start over!  Indeed, not!  Rather, he loves us each as his own dear children.  Instead of destroying us God the Father in an act of wasteful love sent God the Son who wasted his life as one of us and died so that God the Father and God the Son might wastefully give us their very life in the gift of God the Holy Spirit that we might live through death.  Praise be to God!  Praise be to God!  He understands.  He understands that the end result of the dung of our lives is that we must die so that the disease of Sin will end, but out of his love for us he will raise us just as he did his only begotten and beloved Son, Jesus, because he has poured upon us the same Spirit that lived in him so that he may live in us and we may live through death.  Amen.