Freedom in the Spirit

Galatians 5:1,13-25

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There was an elderly gentleman that I once knew.  He was a Centenarian and lived a very full life; a life which he very much lived “his way” in the Sinatra sense.  He was a veteran of WWII and a successful entrepreneur.  He liked to talk as long as you agreed with him and even at his age his mind was a sharp as ever on the opinions that he held.  Whenever he and I had a chat he usually picked the topic and as I was a minister he liked to talk about religious matters.  Unfortunately, his knowledge of the topic did not venture past his childhood.  He had more than a couple of stories to tell about growing up in a strict Baptist home; stories that were mostly about things you weren’t supposed to do on Sunday which he would sneak off and do.  When he became an adult he went to war, went to work, and went to the clubhouse, but never to church.  He could never get past the legalism and moralism of the Christian religion that he had forced upon him growing up. 

The first few times I had the opportunity to chat with him on the matter I tried to nudge him past his opinions which he formed in response to his strict religious upbringing.  On one of those occasions he asked me what I believed happened to us when we die.  I told him that all of that high-handed Heaven and Hell stuff he was threatened with when he was young just isn’t really in the Bible in that bully-pulpit kind of way.  The Bible really doesn’t say much about either.  I went on to tell him that I really couldn’t say much about what to expect other than when we die we will come face to face with the greatest sense of being Loved that we have ever known and my basis for that is the way I have glimpsed an experience or two of God in my life in the here and now.  Needless to say, the subject got changed.

Speaking for myself, I have to say that this man’s story breaks my heart.  The Christian “religion” that he was bullied with as a child is not what following Jesus is about.  Following Jesus is not about a bunch of rules of conduct that you have to obey for fear of a wrathful God sentencing you to Hell if you should walk in the way of the wicked or if you failed to believe that Jesus’ death was your Get-Out-of-Hell-Free card.  The Christian faith is about being set free from all that religious legalistic and moralistic hub-bub in order to live a new life led by the Spirit of God who lives in us and transforms us.  It breaks my heart that this man had his faith destroyed by being spiritually bullied with a yoke of law when he could have known love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  He could have been raised to want to know God and the love of God more fully, but all he got was spiritually bullied.

Paul writes, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”  The freedom he refers to is freedom from an old existence that is ruled by sin and is undergirded by fear and leads to death – that twisted old existence where good becomes evil and evil seems so good.  Free from that old existence we are now free to live in a new existence that Paul normally refers to as “ in Christ”.

At the end of chapter 2 of Galatians Paul writes: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  For us, this entails that we too have been crucified with Christ Jesus and it is no longer we ourselves who live but Christ Jesus living in and through us.  We have a new existence in Jesus Christ that leads to new life, a new life that is ruled by him and made real in us by the Holy Spirit living in us and leading us to faithfulness.  This new life doesn’t look like religious moralism.  Rather, it shows itself as faithfulness working through love – love for one another and love for our neighbours.  The Holy Spirit points us to Christ Jesus and compels us to love as he has loved us.  The freedom for which Christ has set us free becomes reality in loving service to others.

As we give heed to the voice of the Holy Spirit, who from deep within us compels us to love, to reconcile, to pray, to read the Scriptures regularly and to meditate on them we find our new existence in Christ.  We find ourselves being transformed, being made new in that we become more and more compassionate, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and more in control of ourselves – and that, my friends, is true freedom.  It is like God is overwriting our old hard drive with the new programming of the new human existence that is in Christ Jesus.  True freedom is found in heeding the voice of the Holy Spirit who compels us to love.  Amen.

Spirit Old, Spirit New, Spirit Borrowed, Spirit Blue

Romans 5:1-5

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“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”  All you wedding planners have heard that a time or two.  It’s an old superstition involving four good luck charms that a bride should have in her attire on her wedding day to bring “good luck” and to ward off the “Evil Eye” which might cause infertility.  The bride isn’t supposed to plan them into her own attire.  They are supposed to be last minute gifts from women close to her.

Each of the charms has particular meaning.  The “something old” is usually given by a mother or a grandmother and is supposed to represent continuity with the past and fertility in the future.  It’s usually a piece of family heirloom jewellery.  The “something new” represents hope for a good marriage and fertility.  The “something borrowed” is supposed to be something borrowed, like earrings, from a person who has a good and fertile marriage.  It used to be customary to borrow undergarments from women who had had plenty of healthy children.  The “something blue”; it was believed long ago that the colour blue warded off the Evil Eye or wicked spirits that would destroy a marriage or cause infertility.  It was usually covertly worn as a garter belt.  More currently, the superstitious types say that blue stands for “love, purity, and fidelity.”  But, I think that’s kind of boring and, as far as myself, I prefer the Hoodoo version.  But anyway, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue; no bride should ever be without them at her wedding.

Well, in hopes of producing a short but fertile sermon here I’ll just get to the point.  One of the biblical images for the church is that we are the Bride of Christ.  As such, God the Father has made certain that Bride of Christ will be properly attired on her wedding day in “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.  He has given to us the Holy Spirit through whom he has poured into us his very own love to bless and prosper our marriage to Christ the Son. Thus, “Spirit old, Spirit new, Spirit borrowed, Spirit blue.”

The Holy Spirit dwelling in us is “something old”.  The Holy Spirit is not only our continuity with the past, but like Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs she is the Architect and Orchestrator of Creation itself.  She was there when God created and through her work as a master builder it came to be.  The Holy Spirit brought forth God’s good Creation and continuing on is at work in us and all of Creation now bringing forth the New Creation that is in Christ.

Thus, the Holy Spirit is “something new”.  The Holy Spirit is the sign and seal of our future hope in Christ, that we will be bodily raised from the dead to live in Creation made new and no longer subject to sin, evil, and death.  We know this hope is real because we can feel the Presence of God in our midst when we gather in worship.

The Holy Spirit is also like “something borrowed”.  (This is where my wonderful analogy gets a little sketchy.) Through the Holy Spirit we borrow New Creation life from God, life from our future as a foretaste of the good full-filled, filled-full marriage that we will have with Christ Jesus in the Age to Come.  We will have an unhindered relationship with God.

The Holy Spirit is our “something blue”.  The Holy Spirit is God’s own love, purity, and fidelity dwelling in us making us able to love as Christ Jesus has loved us each by laying down his life for us.  The Holy Spirit is God’s own purity poured into us.  The Church on earth in this Age will never have the moral purity that some think we ought to have and judge accordingly.  Rather, the Holy Spirit, the Love of God, the Presence of God in us now is Refining Fire burning off our impurities and healing us giving us faith and making us able to be faithful.  The Holy Spirit even shields us from evil spirits.  It seems weird to say in this day and age, but no evil spirits can indwell us nor can Satan overcome us because the Spirit of God his very self lives in us.

Spirit old, Spirit new, Spirit borrowed, Spirit blue.

Today we gather around the Lord’s Table to share a meal that like the rehearsal dinner the night before a wedding when two families gather usually for the first time to rehearse being one family, this meal is a rehearsal for the wedding feast that we will have when Christ Jesus returns and all things will be made new.  Adorned properly by the presence of the Holy Spirit in us let us gather around the table of our Lord and joyfully partake of a small foretaste of the Day to come.  Amen.

Making a Name for Ourselves

Genesis 11:1-9

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Why congregations build buildings is an interesting study?  Back in the 80’s I regularly heard church people remark, “If you want people to come to your church, build a new building.”  The idea was that if a congregation could afford to build, then it was a vibrant and growing fellowship; not some stuck in mud, always done it this way, old stogey club.  Consequentially, a lot of new church buildings went up in the 80’s symbolizing congregations trying to make a name for themselves in the grand competition for new members that went on between churches.  Unfortunately, the result was mostly “sheep stealing” rather than new disciples of Jesus.  Congregations lost members to each other over what amounts to religious consumerism.  Congregations were making a name for themselves through building up-to-date facilities to house their snazzy church programming and charismatic ministers, and people came (from other churches), but they did little to further the name of Jesus.

That was the ‘80’s.  Here’s a more currently vexing problem – spending money on restoring church buildings.  The rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral stands as a blatant example of this problem.  Should Christians contribute to rebuilding it?  I would argue that Notre Dame Cathedral is more representative of French culture than it is of Roman Catholicism and certainly more than the simple carpenter it is supposed to represent.  Estimates for rebuilding it are as much as $8 billion.  $8 billion would rectify a lot humanitarian need.  Relief for the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami totalled $6.25 billion, the largest amount ever raised for humanitarian needs.  They can rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral, but let’s acknowledge the effort has nothing to do with Jesus who said, “When you did it unto the least of these my family, you did it unto me.”  This is the question we must ask when we look at sinking a lot of money into maintaining old buildings.

Back to building new churches; building a new church these days is a rare occurrence. Today in North American we are dissolving more congregations and selling the buildings than we are planting congregations and building facilities to house them.  Most church buildings are simply ghostly reminders of the day when Western culture and Christian religion walked hand-in-hand, a relationship that has all but withered.  The idea that a culture, a civilization needs a god to make it great has all but died. 

Looking at Genesis, the relationship between a culture and its god is at the heart of what the story of The Tower of Babel is about.  We have a tendency to mistakenly think that the story of the Tower of Babel is about a group of humans who got prideful and wanted to build a tower so high that they could stand equal to God and so God punished them by confusing their languages.  But the story of Babel is better read as the parable of how humans try to use God to make their civilizations safe, secure, and culturally great. 

If we step back roughly 5,000 thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia, we would find that they built tall step-pyramids with temples beside them.  The tower in this story is one of those step pyramids or ziggurats as they are called.  The idea behind them was not climbing the pyramids in order to go into the heavens to be with the gods.  That’s what mountaintops were for.  These ziggurats worked the other way.  They were rather staircases for the gods to come down to earth from the heavens to come be with the people by taking their place in temples. 

The people at Babel were building the highest of step-pyramids to try to get the highest of all gods to come down and be their god in order to make their civilization great.  Mind you, as the story goes, God had commanded humans to spread out over the earth.  But, the Babel folks stopped short of that mandate and decided to settle down and build an empire. 

Babel represents our human attempts to build civil religions.  Civil religion is when we use God to undergird our ways of doing civic community rather than trying to get our communities to reflect God’s way of doing community as modeled by the way of Jesus Christ.  Civil religion is asking God to bless our empire building, our ideas of prosperity and power, rather than committing ourselves to God’s kingdom and the way of Jesus Christ.  It’s our using God to make own name great.

When I see a new church building a question comes to mind: Is this just one more Tower of Babel?  Is this just one more congregation trying to get God to make its name, its programming, its charismatic minister…great.  I am suspicious of this fundamental need we seem to have as congregations to have a sacred space represented by a building.  If we read the Bible from cover to cover we find the trajectory that God is on is not housing his presence in buildings.  God doesn’t want a building where he can be with his people.  God actually wants a body.  God wants to be embodied in human community.  That’s why God the Son became the human person, Jesus.  That’s why God filled the followers of Jesus with the Holy Spirit. 

The last thing Jesus said to his disciples before ascending was to mandate them to go into the world and make disciples.  We did that for a few centuries and met in homes, caves, and even tombs.  Yet, soon enough we let ourselves get coopted by Empire and we have been embroiled in civil religion ever since…at least until recently here in North America.  Now its time to yield to the Holy Spirit and leave the building mentality behind, and as the body of Christ, get back to making disciples of Jesus everywhere we are – in our homes, in our neighbourhoods, in our work places, in coffee shops, in schools, and even in church basements.  The mandate and the drive of the Spirit is to go forth, not to settle down.  Amen.

Jesus Reigns through Us

Acts:1:1-11

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Well, today is Ascension Sunday.  Wooo!  Yeah!  Let’s bake a cake!  Today is the most uncelebrated high holy day of the church year.  Today we are supposed crank it up because it’s Jesus Inauguration Day and it’s the biggest crowd ever.  Every year the number of Christians on earth grows.  Jesus has ascended to take his place at the right hand of God the Father to reign as Lord of all creation.  He is the Lord, the one who has saved his creation.  He has defeated evil, sin, and death by becoming human, living faithfully, dying, and being resurrected – all for us. 

But, and to be frank, saying that Jesus is LORD over all creation is a bit of a hard sell these days.  It's been just shy of 2,000 years.  The world is still full of evil.  The pandemic of sin is still raging.  Death is still the leading cause of death.  What's changed?  Seriously, what has changed since Jesus was enthroned as LORD of all creation?  One could easily argue that Science and Technology have done way more good than him.  You could even add that religion, all religion, that great “opiate of the masses” has caused more death and suffering than any disease ever has and continues to do so.  How can we talk about Jesus reigning as LORD over all creation when reality is so “obviously” contradictory to the fact? 

Well, one thing we do not do is play that old “faith” card.  Where we say, “Faith and reality are two different things.  You just have to believe.”  Faith is not simply divorcing ourselves from reality by believing in God.  If we are going to say Jesus is LORD and that he reigns, then we are somehow going to have to work in there that yes, its been 2,000 years; yes, evil, sin, and death are still around; and yes, those who claim to believe in him have done some pretty heinous things.  If we are going to say Jesus reigns in any way that has integrity, then we are going to have to go right smack-dab into the heart of all the brokenness and human insidiousness and there demonstrate that, “Here, right here in the midst of this horrible mess Jesus’ reign is breaking through.”

Here’s how Jesus reigns.  Just before Jesus ascended his disciples asked him was he at that time going to establish his kingdom and set all things to right.  But instead of making his victory and reign overtly manifest by waving a hand and magically putting the world to rights, he told his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the gift the Father had promised them, the Holy Spirit who would empower them to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.  His disciples were to be empowered by the Holy Spirit to manifest Jesus’ reign, but not in a triumphalistic way.  Rather, it would be the cross-bearing way, the foot washing way, the way of self-sacrificing compassion.

In classic Jesus' fashion, his reign, his Lordship, indeed he himself for now will only be manifest through weakness – our weakness – not strength.  His powerful reign becomes visible through things that would appear to be futile by the world’s standards; things like the prayers and acts of humble service done by those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus’ reign is made evident among individuals who have been changed at heart by God's presence in them and who then live accordingly.  Let me give you and example.  This is an account of a day in the life of an Emerge nurse, Dawn Husnick, that I think speaks loudly to how Jesus is LORD:

“In my years in the ER, I saw Jesus daily doing his kingdom work in and through a group of his followers.  It was a true expression of church.  One day stands out beyond all others and left me radically changed forever.  It was the day I saw Jesus face to face...

'Give us hearts as servants' was the song they were singing as I left the church service, heading for my second twelve hour shift in a row.  Weekends in the ER can be absolutely brutal!  I was physically and emotionally spent as I walked up to the employee entrance.  The sound of ambulances and an approaching medical helicopter were tell-tale signs that I would literally be hitting the ground running.

'Dawn...can you lock down room 15?' yelled out my charge nurse as I crawled up to the nurse's station.  (When someone asked for a lockdown it was usually a psychiatric or combative case.)  Two security guards stood outside the room, biceps flexing like bouncers anticipating a drunken brawl.  My eyes rolled as I walked past them into the room to set up.

The masked medics arrived with N strapped and restrained to their cart.  The hallway cleared with heads turned away in disgust at the smell surrounding them.  They entered the room and I could see N with his feet hung over the edge of the cart covered with plastic bags tightly taped around the ankles.  The ER doctor quickly examined N while we settled him in.  The medics rattled off their findings in the background with N mumbling in harmony right along with them.  The smell was overpowering as they uncovered his swollen, mold-encrusted feet.  After tucking him in and taking his vital signs, I left the room to tend to my other ten patients-in-waiting.

Returning to the nurse's station, I overheard the other nurses and techs arguing over who would take N as their patient.  In addition to the usual lab work and tests, the doctor had ordered a shower complete with betadine foot scrub, antibiotic ointment, and non-adherent wraps.  The charge nurse looked in my direction.  'Dawn, will you please take N?  Please?  You don't have to do the foot scrub—just give him a shower.'  I agreed and made my way to gather the supplies and waited for the security guard to open up the hazmat shower.

As I waited with N, the numbness of my busyness was interrupted by an overwhelming sadness.  I watched N, restless and mumbling incoherently to himself through his scruff of a beard and 'stache.  His eyes were hidden behind his ratted, curly, shoulder-length mane.  This poor shell of a man had no one to love him.  I wondered about his past and what happened to bring him to this hopeless empty place?  No one in the ER that day really looked at him and no one wanted to touch him.  They wanted to ignore him and his broken life.  But as much as I tried...I could not.  I was drawn to him.

The smirking security guards helped me walk him to the shower.  As we entered the shower room I set out the shampoo, soaps, and towels like it was a five-star hotel.  I felt in my heart that for at least for those ten minutes, this forgotten man would be treated as a king.  I thought for those ten minutes he would see the love of Jesus.  I set down the foot sponge and decided that I would do the betadine foot scrub by myself as soon as his shower was finished.  I called the stock room for two large basins and a chair.

When N was finished in the shower I pulled back the curtain and walked him to the 'throne' of warmed blankets and the two basins set on the floor.  As I knelt at his feet, my heart broke and stomach turned as I gently picked up his swollen rotted feet.  Most of his nails were black and curled over the top of his toes.  The skin was rough, broken, and oozing pus.  Tears streamed down my face while my gloved hands tenderly sponged the brown soap over his wounded feet.

The room was quiet as the once-mocking security guards started to help by handing me towels.  As I patted the foot dry, I looked up and for the first time N's eyes looked into mine.  For that moment he was alert, aware, and weeping as he quietly said, 'Thank you.'  In that moment, I was the one seeing Jesus.  He was there all along, right where he said he would be.

'...Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of theses who are members of my family, you did it to me.'”[1] 

Friends, Jesus reigns as LORD, for now until he comes, in the prayers and little acts of love done by insignificant people such as ourselves; people of transformed heart who humbly do for other insignificant people necessary and difficult acts of compassion.  Friends, our Jesus reigns and we are part of it.  Never underestimate what is going on when you feel moved to show kindness to someone.  Amen.

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[1]   Excerted from McKnight, Scot; A Community Called Atonement; Abington Press, Nashville, 2007; p. 3.