Standing in Capernaum

Matthew 4:12-25
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I went to the Holy Lands on a study tour in 1995 when things were relatively peaceful.  It was a profoundly wonderful experience.  We traveled through Syria, Jordon, the Sinai Peninsula, Galilee, Jerusalem, and some places in Greece.  We saw a lot of ruins, mostly Roman.  We visited a lot of Biblically significant places.  We learned that Arab Muslim peoples are really hospitable people and not a bunch Jihadists. 

The most significant part of the trip for me was when we travelled around in Galilee and particularly the ruins of the little town of Capernaum on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee.  This was the town where Jesus lived.  That morning I stood in the ruins of an ancient church that was built on top of the synagogue where Jesus worshipped and taught.  As I stood there something came over me, a sense of awe at just how real, historically real he was.  Capernaum and the little towns and countryside around was the place where Jesus lived, walked, taught, preached, and healed.  Just to the south on a hillside along the shore of the Sea is where he delivered the Sermon on the Mount.  And, just a little further south on the shore is the wilderness place now called Tabgha where Jesus fed the 5,000. Christian faith isn’t just a bunch of doctrines and ethical teachings.  It is a real faith that is the outgrowth of God’s real historical involvement among real people in real places.

Well, back to Capernaum is located in the ancient tribal land of Naphtali. Jesus made his home there.  Prior, he had lived in Nazareth, which is in Zebulon.  Both are in the land of Galilee which Matthew, or Isaiah rather, calls the land of the Gentiles.  As I said, a light shone on me there, the light of just how rooted in God’s real acting in history the Christian faith is.  Matthew also speaks in reference to Jesus’ presence there and the Gospel of the Kingdom of heaven as being a great light that has shone on a people living in darkness, a people living in the land of the shadow of death.  What do we know of these people?

Well, within Naphtali and Zebulon lay a major north-south corridor, the best agricultural land in Israel, and the Galilean fishing industry.  One would think that the people there would be wealthy.  But, that was not the case.  When the northern kingdom of Israel fought with the southern kingdom of Judah and with other surrounding kingdoms, which they often did, the majority of their battles were in Zebulon and Naphtali over control of this valuable land.  Whenever Assyria and Egypt wanted to attack each other the fastest route between them was through Naphtali and Zebulon.

Simply put, gaining control of the area of Zebulon and Naphtali guaranteed a king or an emperor a good food source and a well-used trade route. So, for most of their history the people of Zebulon and Naphtali stayed beat down and poor and most of what they produced was taken from them to feed invaders.  One more thing to note, in 722 BC Assyria sacked Israel and sent most of the people away into exile and resettled the land with foreigners.  Thus, it was called the Land of the Gentiles.  This added some racial prejudice to the mix.

By Jesus’ day a Jewish population from the south had moved up into Zebulon and Naphtali.  The Romans occupied the whole nation.  Due to Roman taxation and the Roman army’s need for food and fish the people of Naphtali and Zebulon suffered the most of all the peoples in Israel.  They were poor, powerless, and hopeless.

It was among these people that Jesus began his ministry; his real, historical ministry.  From among these poor farmers and fishermen he called a handful of disheartened and probably embittered men to be his first disciples.  Together they walked all over Galilee while Jesus taught and proclaimed the Gospel: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”…and it was more than just talk.  Jesus healed every kind of sickness—the lame, the lepers.  He even cast out demons.  He told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven and proved it by making him able to walk again.  He raised a dead man.  He calmed a storm and ultimately cast out a legion of demons from a man across the lake.  Among these people, Jesus did and said things that only God could do and say.

The Greek word we translate as Gospel was the word the Romans used for an imperial announcement of good news about the Emperor.  When the Romans came to Galilee, to Zebulon and Naphtali, they too would have proclaimed a gospel.  It wasn’t “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”.  It was, “Submit, for the kingdom of Caesar is at hand” and they backed it up with legions of Roman soldiers.  But, Jesus came proclaiming that God was delivering them and proved it by doing things that only God himself could do and that God said he, himself would come and do through the mouths of the ancient prophets.

When Jesus proclaimed his Gospel he called people to repent. This call wasn’t a warning to these poor people to get yourself right with God so that God will do right by you.  It was a call to have faith, to have hope, because their God was among them.  In through, and as Jesus of Nazareth, their God was really among them delivering them.  The Greek word for repent actually means to become with-minded.  To become with-minded with God is to have faith and hope.

That Jesus began his real, historical ministry among the poor and overburdened people of Zebulon and Naphtali is a profound statement of how God gets involved in our lives. It is in those places in our lives, in our very selves where it seems that we are living in darkness, walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death that God comes to deliver us, to heal us, to set us free.   If we want to see where God is at work in our lives, then we will find him in the places where we ourselves are being beat down and made to be impoverished both internally and in the externals that we must first look.  It is into our weakness that Jesus comes in the power of the Spirit so that he may bring healing.  Look for Jesus in the Zebulon and Naphtali places of your life and you will find that God is there really and historically working to heal you and set you free.  Amen.

A Poultice to Heal the World

John 1:29-42

I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely it was your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe.  She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked.  Anybody have that happen? I was lucky.  My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me and that has been our go to for the kids.  They even ask for it. 

Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating with an herbal poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area that is supposed to absorb the infection into itself.  After a few hours you remove it and reapply.  I’ve made one here with turmeric, ginger, onion, and garlic.  It’s supposed to be good for drawing the infection in a boil to the surface and for relieving pain in an arthritic joint and, all the while, warding off vampires.  There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t.  Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the inflammation associated with it.

Keep that in mind because I am going to try to convince you that the proper way to understand what God was doing in, through, as Jesus Christ is similar to the healing work of a poultice.  God the Son himself became human to draw out humanity’s disease of sin and its consequence of death into himself so that he might once and for all die with it and heal us.  His healing work is applied to us and continues today carried out by the Holy Spirit in the midst of Christian communities.  As we love one another as Jesus loved us, lay down our lives for one another, serve one another, listen to one another, speak the truth to one another Jesus draws out the infection of sin from us and heals our wounds.

Looking at John’s Gospel, here we first encounter John the Baptist about a day after he baptized Jesus.  Apparently Jesus stayed for a period of time among the crowd of people that surrounded John as they were waiting for the Kingdom of God to come.  As Jesus walked through the crowd John blurted out, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And then John continued saying that he saw the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus and that Jesus would be the one who baptized others not with water as he baptized, but with the Holy Spirit for Jesus is in fact the Son of God.

When John said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” he was making reference to two specific sacrifices that the Israelites offered every year: Passover and Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement.  Before saying more about those sacrifices I need to first clear up a misunderstanding we have of the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ death due to an overemphasis of what theologians call the penal substitution theory of atonement.  This is the courtroom way of understanding Jesus’ death. 

It goes: all humans are legally guilty of sinning.  We’ve broken the divine laws of God.  Therefore, God’s verdict on us is the death penalty and eternal torment in Hell as some would add.  And so in love for us, God the Son became human as Jesus of Nazareth, lived a faithful and sinless life, and died an innocent man.  God the Father accepts his death as being on behalf of all those who will believe that Jesus death was in place of their own death and who henceforth try to live faithfully and those who do will upon death go to heaven and eternal life. 

We don’t have time for me to break that theory down, but I will say that penal substitution is only one of at least twelve ways the Bible gives us to understand the death of Jesus and is likely the least used model by the biblical writers.  There is truth to it.  We are guilty of sin and Jesus did die the death we deserve on our behalf, but that understanding is secondary to the predominate way the writers of the New Testament explain Jesus’ death which was called Christus Victor model of atonement.  It goes: by his death Jesus defeated sin, death, and the devil and he reigns as Lord and Saviour over all Creation and he will return to make his reign complete by making all things new.

So, put the legal ideas of Jesus death on the back burner for a minute and let’s get back to what John the Baptist meant by saying, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  First, the term “Lamb of God” refers to the lamb that every family was supposed to sacrifice at Passover.  Passover as you may remember was/is the annual celebration of the night God delivered his people from slavery in Egypt.  On that night God told Moses to tell the people to kill a lamb and smear its blood around their door posts to mark their doors for life so that when the angel of death came to kill the firstborn of Egypt he would know to pass over the homes of the Israelites and they would live.

This term “Lamb of God” applies to Jesus in that he is, so to speak, the Passover sacrifice for the world.  He would die on the cross and his blood is applied to his people to mark them for life.  That’s going to take some explaining. 

Leviticus 17:11 and 14 tell us that the life of the animal is in the blood.  They had offerings called sin and guilt offerings that they did when they knew they had sinned and wanted forgiveness.  For the sin offering they would take an animal to a priest.  They would lay their hand on it.  The priest would slaughter it and then take some of the blood and sprinkle it on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be.  What was happening was in the laying on of the hand they symbolically transferred their sinful selves to the animal, who then was put to death, and then the priest symbolically presented their life that had passed through death to God and he granted forgiveness and fellowship with God was restored.  They did the same thing with the guilt offering but in that one the priest also put some blood on the person’s earlobe.  Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to heal the ear so that the person could hear the Law of God better and keep it.

This life passing through death thing applied to Passover as well.  On the night of the Passover in Egypt they smeared the blood of the lamb, the lamb’s life that had passed through death, over the doorposts to mark their households for life.  It was life that had passed through death that saved them.  So also, Jesus raised from the dead is life that has passed through death and he marks us for life by giving us his life in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us. 

Moving on, the “takes away the sin of the world” part of what John the Baptist refers to is part of the Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement sacrifice.  On Yom Kippur the High Priest sacrificed three animals: a bull and two rams.  The High Priest slaughtered the bull as a sin offering as I explained above on behalf of himself and the priests.  But in this case he actually took the blood further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the Ark where God was seated in a cloud of smoke that was created by a big incense burn.  Thus, God and the priests were united in this life that had passed through death.  The High Priest then took one of the rams and slaughtered it as a sin offering on behalf of the people.  He also sprinkled some of that blood on the Ark thus uniting the people with God in this life that had passed through death.  He then also sprinkled this blood all over the temple and its furniture to cleanse it of the stain of sin incurred by contact with humans.  So also the Holy Spirit unites us to God and cleanses us of guilt and shame. 

Next, the High Priest took the second goat and whispered the sins of the people into its ear.  This goat was thus laden with the sins of the people.  A priest then led this goat out into the wilderness where it and the sins it bore would be destroyed by the beasties out in the wilderness.  This goat took away, carried away the sins of the people and they perished forever along with the goat.  So also, Jesus, God the Son become human, took the Sin of humanity upon himself by becoming one of us and he removed Sin from us by his death on the cross.  When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that passed through death and unites us to God himself. 

Finally, Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity.  In Christian fellowship, in the love that God has placed in our midst God continues the poultice-like work of removing sin’s infection from us and healing the inflammation by healing our broken selves and our broken relationships.  Like the folks in the Old Testament who brought a sin offering laid their hand upon the animal to transfer their broken selves to the animal, we need only lay hold of Jesus, give our broken selves to him, and he will bear it, bear us, to Father who will not withhold his very self from us and who heals us with new life in Christ Jesus by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit coming to live in us.

What's Your Calling?

Matthew 3:13-17

Please permit me to play pollster for a moment or two this morning and ask you some deeply provocative questions. When I ask them please feel free to respond by raising your hand or piping in where appropriate. The first question is: How many of you here believe that all Christians are called to full-time Christian service? If not, who is? Okay. How many of you think of or thought of your work, your employment, as a vocation to which God called you? If you are a full-time dad or mom or Grandma or Grandpa consider that to be your work. Are their other activities that you associate with a calling from God?

Now why am I asking all these questions? Well, I know that most of us deal with the question of “Where is God in my daily life?” Is it simply that God just shows up for a minute or two while we’re having devotions (if even then) or when we go to church and then disappears for the rest of the day or week while we go about doing what we do and trying to be a good person while we’re doing it. Or, could it be really be that God is with us always and has put us where we are so that somehow he can be working through everything we do? I guess the question is whether or not God really has anything to do with the stuff that we spend our days doing.

Before I left for seminary I wondered about those same questions. I considered myself called to fulltime Christian service which I believed meant going into the ministry. I was inclined to believe that full-time had to do with employment. I wonder if God wanted me in full-time ministry, then why am I working at the hardware store that I was working in. I figured that there had to be some reason why I was there rather than doing ministry since that was what I wasted my time in university preparing for. I came to see that somehow through that job at the hardware store God was preparing me for the ministry, giving me certain public relations skills and so forth. I never really considered my work at Golden corral or at the Hardware store as a calling from God until I met Mrs. Jackson one day.

Mrs. Jackson was a short, grumpy, and very abrupt little old lady who walked stiff-legged wearing very padded slippers. When she came into the store she always stood at the cash registers barking out her demands. She would stand there whining loudly, “Somebody help me. Somebody help me.” Usually, one of the cashiers up front would help her and that would entail having to run throughout the store to get what she wanted while she stood there waiting and then listen to her complain because it took them so long.

Well, this particular time I heard up front asking for help and then over thover the loud speaker “Randy, please come to the front.” I was like no. Please don’t do this to me. Well, I went up front and sized up the situation and realized that this was not going to be easy. I immediately saw that she was actually in a great deal of pain and did not want to be on her feet for too long, but that day she needed a telephone and not being too up on the latest in telephones she realized that she would need to have them explained. So there I was. I looked at her again and immediately it came over me that Mrs. Jackson, as rude as she seemed to be, just needed to be treated with respect and given the time of day and that I was the person to do it because I was a Christian. I escorted her to the phones and listened to her explain what she wanted and I gave her a couple of options to choose from and took the time to explain the differences and how they worked. She choose one and I escorted her up to the checkout. After she checked out the cashiers came to me and said “I don’t now what you did, but that’s the easiest she’s ever been to check out.” From that day on I was the one called for the difficult people.

That experience and many more like them made me realize that it didn’t matter whether I was going into the ministry or not, my first calling was to be Jesus’ disciple wherever I was and whatever I was doing. And now I firmly believe that God puts his people into different forms of employment in order to carry out Jesus’ ministry that begin at his Baptism.

So now I ask you two more questions: What is God doing in your circle of the world and why has God placed you there in the middle of it all? These questions are important because we believe that God is at work in this world. He leads. We follow. God is not simply the scapegoat we use to explain everything that goes on in the world as if he were the world’s after thought. God is at work in this world and usually way ahead of us. He leads. We follow. When we start asking the questions “What is God doing in my circle of the world” and “Why has God placed me in the middle of it all?” we are talking about our calling. What God has called us to be and do.

Now I know that when I use the word calling most will think that this word applies only to those people God has called into the ministry - pastors, missionaries, elders, deacons. It is not a word that is typically applied to the everyday life of the everyday Christian. And because of this we often do have trouble trying to make the connection of how God works in our lives outside of what we do for the church. God has called and still calls us each daily to his work. Called does not solely mean called to some form of service in the church. Called first and foremost means that God is calling out to us, inviting us to become Christ's faithful disciples wherever we are. To be Jesus’ disciples is our vocation, our purpose in life, our mission in life, our job, our work wherever we are and whatever we are doing.

When we were baptized as children our parents made a vow to God on behalf of us and when we came of age and joined the church we made the same vow to God for ourselves. That vow was that we would be Christ's faithful disciples, obeying his Word, and showing his love wherever we are. To be Christ's disciple means to listen to him and to love others as he loves us.

Jesus’ life work, his vocation began when he was being baptized. The moment he left the Jordan that day he began to live out what God had put him here to do. And so it is with us. When we became baptized members of Christ's church being Christ's faithful disciples in everything we do became our calling, the life’s work to which God has called us.

As Jesus’ faithful disciples we share a common identity with him. As he was God’s Son, the Beloved One, the one that God loves so we also are God’s children and God also loves us as he loved Christ. God is our Father and he takes that task seriously. He is active in our lives and wants to see to it that we become all that he has created us to be. He doesn’t abandon us to raise ourselves. He gives us the Holy Spirit to help and enable us. It was the Holy Spirit who moved me with compassion that day that I helped Mrs. Jackson. The Holy Spirit opens the Scriptures to us so that they become transforming, life-giving words to us. He feeds us when we hunger and thirst for his presence.

Finally, since we are children of God and Jesus’ faithful disciples and the Holy Spirit rests on us as it did on him, we participate in Jesus’ ongoing ministry in the world. When we go to work we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we go to school, when we go curling, when we go to Tim’s we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we raise our children and grandchildren, we raise them to be Christ's faithful disciples. That too is part of his on-going ministry in the world. We are Christ's faithful disciples and we are all called to full-time ministry of his on-going ministry in the world. Amen.

Soul Satisfaction

Jeremiah 31:7-14

I gave this sermon the title “Soul Satisfaction” which means there needs to be some definitions given.  First, satisfaction, then what the soul is, and last what soul satisfaction might be.  Well, to be ingenuous I thought it might be appropriate to look at the world of music to grasp what satisfaction might be because satisfaction is somewhat of a recurring theme; believe it, or not.

When I look to the world of music concerning the topic of satisfaction I immediately go the Rolling Stones and their meaningless song, “Satisfaction”.  You all are familiar with the chorus, “I can’t get no satisfaction.  I can’t get no satisfaction.  Cause I try and I try and I try and I try, but I can’t get no, I can’t get no.”  Apparently, satisfaction is something very difficult to get.  Unfortunately, if you read the rest of the lyrics, you will find yourself being very unsatisfied with Mick Jagger’s search for satisfaction. He talks about driving in his car and the man on the radio is telling him just a bunch of useless information.  Then he’s watching his TV and the man on the TV has no good advice because he doesn’t smoke the same brand of cigarettes.  Then, he’s driving around the world signing all kinds of great big contracts, but the girl he’s trying to pick up keeps telling him to come back next week.  So, he’s a bit unsatisfied.  Boo hoo!

Well, the world of Rock ’n Roll is a bit shallow on the topic of satisfaction.  Perhaps we should turn to the world of the Blues.  Let’s enter the world of Mr. Eddie James House, Jr. otherwise known as Son House.  He sang a powerful song on the experience of grief called “Death Letter Blues”.  It’s about a man who was working somewhere far off who gets a letter that his wife is dead.  So he rushes back to say goodbye to her in the morgue and then goes through the funeral.  The last two verses are poignant: “I woke up this morning about the break of day, a-hugging the pillow where my good gal used to lay. Oh, I woke up this morning oh about the break of day, hugging the pillow where my good gal used to lay.  It’s hard to love somebody who don’t love you, ain’t no satisfaction no matter what you do. Oh, it’s hard to love somebody who don’t love you, ain’t no satisfaction no matter what you do.”  That is a dissatisfaction that anyone who has loved another for a lifetime will know.  The death of your spouse leaves one brutally dissatisfied.

Satisfaction in the world of the Blues is always relational and always involves unfulfilled love between a man and a woman.  Let me stress that again.  Satisfaction is a relational matter.  One cannot be satisfied without good relationships.  This is one thing that the world of the Blues has in common with the world of the Bible.  When we talk about being satisfied in the Biblical sense, we have to talk about relationship as well, but we have to add God into the mix.  Satisfaction isn’t a simple matter about something that “I” feel.  It is something we the people of God feel together as the result of what God has done for us.  Satisfaction is contentment with what the Lord has provided.

Looking at this text in Jeremiah, the LORD is announcing that he is going to bring his people back from exile.  Years before, the LORD sent his people packing into exile in Babylon because of their covenantal infidelity; their idolatry.  The LORD was not satisfied and so he wasn’t going to give them anymore of his love, so to speak.  King Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and took away the king, the officers, the soldiers, the artisans and craftsman.  He took all the gold from the temple as well as all of the gold Solomon had amassed.  Those who had everything, lost everything.   The LORD sent a very wealthy and powerful people numbering about 10,000 into exile.  But now over seventy years later, he was going to bring back only a remnant of them.  Most had had actually faired well in Babylon.  This remnant would be those who actually longed for the Land that God had promised and who were not satisfied simply with the comforts of Babylon.  It would include the weak and the vulnerable – the blind, the lame, pregnant women and women giving birth.  Moreover, God was going to bring them back in what appears to be the rainy season when there was lots of flooding, which meant danger.  God’s gift of satisfaction would not be easy.

 In the Hebrew text of this passage the word for “together” appears twice – the first, to describe this rag-tag caravan of the weak and vulnerable and the second, to describe them once they had returned and the LORD had turned their mourning into joy and they would dance having had their souls satisfied, satiated on the Goodness of the LORD.  The Lord was promising this weak, vulnerable remnant soul.  Soul satisfaction has something to do with being a people in unity, people who have suffered together, wept together, and prayed together and who have found joy together in the Goodness of the LORD, his steadfast love and faithfulness.

Now, to talk about soul satisfaction we have to have to think about what we mean we mean by the soul?.  In Hebrew the word is “Nephesh” and it does not mean an immortal, eternal energy blip that leaves the body after death to go on to eternity.  That’s the Greek idea of the soul and it is utterly unbiblical.  The Nephesh is the totality of oneself, body included as we stand before God our Creator and are in relationship with him and with others.  To be out of relationship with God is, in essence, to be soulless.  Jeremiah says that it is the LORD’s blessing upon this rag-tag people, the LORD’s provision, his Goodness that will make their souls, their nephesh’s, like a well-watered garden.  The soul of the priest will be satisfied with abundance.   Imagine that a well-paid minister. Therefore, soul satisfaction is what arises when the people of God, that’s us, together realize and experience the steadfast love and faithfulness of God, the Goodness of the LORD, after having suffered together, wept together, prayed together and been brought to joy together.

Last Wednesday was New Years day.  I suspect that many people spent a little bit of time reflecting that yet another year has passed.  Some made decisions about things they want to change that are making them unhappy, unsatisfied.  Others realized that they have already lived more than half of the years they can expect to live and pondered what they want to do with the rest of their lives.  Others realized yet again that they only have a handful of years left and are pondering the life-matters, the relational matters, the family matters that need to be put in order, the things that need to be said, forgiveness sought and forgiveness granted. 

Yet, those are all the questions of soul exile.  A greater question to ask is “Is my soul satisfied?”  Do I look back on life knowing I’ve been led by the LORD in his steadfast love and faithfulness and can look forward to the same for the rest of my life?  How has the LORD turned my weeping into joy?  Who are those with whom I have wept and prayed?  Who are those with whom I have suffered and been brought to joy with?  Those are the questions we need to answer for ourselves for those answers are the evidence that we are part of that remnant – the people of God whom God promises soul satisfaction.  Amen.