Raised to New Life

John 11:1-45

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I know a man whose marriage came to end.  Marriages do that.  The problem was could they start it up again.  This one they couldn’t.  Life as he knew it came to an end the day his wife moved out.  Depression began to set in.  It was Fall.  Winter was coming.  He had come to the conclusion that if he was going to make it through this he needed to draw close to God and so he began to read his Bible everyday. One morning as he was reading, he happened to read Psalm 42 which just happens to be about a person who is longing for God, who feels cast out by people and forgotten by God feelings common to men when going through a divorce (Men in their fifties in general).  A verse stuck out to him: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?  Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”  He memorized the verse and decided that later that morning when he took his run he would contemplate it meaning he would just repeat it over and over to himself for he felt this verse was good, hopeful advice.  About a mile into the run, he could show you the place, while doing his contemplating it hit.  It hit him – “Why are you so down, man?  You will again praise God.”  The depression lifted and he knew God would work everything out so good that that in the end he could only praise and thank God for his goodness to him.  Hope in God!

I know man who after yet another day spent drinking, was put on notice by his wife that he needed to get help or that would be it for them.  He lay in bed that night and in his head and heart he was shouting out to and at God, begging, pleading, accusing, “Is this what you want, God.  Is this what you want?  Do you want me to be a miserable drunk?  I have tried to quit.  You know I’ve tried and tried.  If this is going to end, God, you are going to have to end it.”  Then, in a desperate fit of wanting to hear God speak yet not really believing God would, the man grabbed his Bible and just opened it and it opened to John 19 and the first words his eyes caught were “It is finished.”  That’s the last thing Jesus said before he died.  In that moment the man’s compulsion to drink was taken away and the next evening he started going to AA and has not drank since.  The whole of verse 30 reads: “When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”  Jesus took that man’s alcoholism to himself and died with it.  God indeed spoke to the man though he didn’t feel he deserved it, and said, “It is finished.”

Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  When he said that he wasn’t necessarily talking about what happens to us when we die.  Yes, we will be raised from the dead and yes, we will be given life: new and true life free from sin and death.  But, what Jesus means here in calling himself the resurrection and the life has more to do with the experience of the man I just told you about than it does with God’s future healing of Creation.  Jesus is speaking of how our lives can just come crashing to an end and our only hope is for God to raise us from death in the midst of life and give us a new life in himself in the midst of this life right now.  It is experiences such as these that assure us of the Resurrection and New Life on that Day to come.  

When Jesus told Martha, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” he said it in the face of the horrible reality of the death of his beloved friend Lazarus, Martha’s baby brother.  Martha doesn’t seem to understand what he was saying.  It seems she’s on autopilot and assuming Jesus means the Day when Jesus returns and Creation is made new and God resurrects us.  She thinks Jesus is doing the funeral sermon thing here that in the end really isn’t all that comforting.  You know, “he’s with God in Heaven and we’ll all be together again someday.”  Those words really aren’t all that comforting.  When people told me that after my dad died it really made me mad.  I needed a hug not saccharin religion.  

For Martha, life as she and her sister Mary new it had come to end.  Their brother, whom they loved, had died.  With a very accusatory tone both she and Mary nail Jesus with that brutal accusation, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  That’s the “God, where are you in the midst of all my suffering?” question.  I’ve seen very faithful people suffer while certain jerks have died in their sleep – not that anybody deserves to suffer.  Yet again, I have been with quite a few people in their last days and hours and the sense of the presence of the Lord was rich around them.  Anyway, I’m getting off topic.

The reality in this Lazarus story is that God, Jesus, did show up and he gave Lazarus a new life.  Even in the face of the impossibility of Lazarus being four days dead, Jesus gave Lazarus a new life.  That’s stinking dead.  He was dead.  He didn’t give Lazarus his old life back.  For Lazarus and his sisters things would be drastically different.  He would forever be the man Jesus raised from the dead.  People who win the lottery suddenly find life is drastically different.  How different would life be for Lazarus having to live as living proof to the fact that Jesus was the Messiah in the face of the religious authorities who had Jesus put to death because he raised Lazarus from the dead?

Anyway, looking at ourselves when Jesus comes in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit into the painful depths of our broken disrupted lives and raises us to new life in him, we don’t get our old lives back. Ask any alcoholic in recovery.  They certainly don’t want their old lives back.  What we find in Christ is a new life of hope, of joy, of peace but also the challenge of having to be honest and love and let yourself be loved.  That’s hard to do.

Anyway, with this COVID-19 pandemic upon us, we are finding and will find that as this plays out we are going to have to change.  With the isolation and the anxieties and the financial concerns and health care matters these things have and will change the way we do life forever.  We are certainly asking where is God in all this.  And, it likely seems to so many of us that he is somewhere far, far away and if he would just show up he could put it all to rights and we could get back to life the way we do it.  Well, the problem is that this whole pandemic thing is the result of life the way we been doing it.  It should tell us something that when this thing first broke out in January, the biggest concern seemed to be what it was doing to the Stock Market.  It is my hope and prayer that when this all calms done that a more compassionate and community-oriented lifestyle will be the result rather than our returning to me being obsessed with getting the stuff I want.

Our God loves his creation.  He really loves his humans, too, even though we are not what he created us to be.  God deals in resurrection and life.  Work for the Lord, my friends, for what we do in him is not in vain.  Draw close to God.  Love your neighbour.  There’s a new life coming and we, the people of God, are the seed.  Amen.

What's in Your Wake

Psalm 23

When I think about what we are having to do now to slow this COVID-19 thing down, a certain movie comes to mind and it’s not a Zombie apocalypse or a pandemic movie.  It’s ‘The Martian’ with Matt Damon in it.”  It’s about a Mars expedition that had to abort when a massive storm blew up on the surface of Mars.  The crew had started to build a base, but things got bad and they had to evacuate.  On the way back to the lander Matt Damon’s character, botanist Mark Watney, had an encounter with a radio tower that came tumbling by due to the wind.  It punctured his suit and carried him off a ways.  The crew couldn’t find him in all the blowing dust and figured he was dead because the computer system said his suit got punctured and he was not answering his com.  So they boarded the lander and left for Earth.  But, don’t you know it.  Watney winds up not dead, not even mostly dead. He’s alive.  His blood had plugged the hole in his suit.  He has no way to communicate with the ship because the radios are destroyed.  So he has to figure out how to stay alive on Mars for a couple of years until the next planned manned mission can arrive. 

He got the shelter working, inventoried his food, and assessed the tech gear he had to work with.  He found some raw potatoes in the food packs and being a botanist he knew what to do with those but how do you make water and dirt suitable for growing potatoes on Mars.  The scene that sticks out to me is of Watney sitting at a desk making his video log hold those potatoes and he says, “Well, I’m just going to have to science the hell out this thing.”

To me that moment in the movie describes where we are at with COVID-19.  We are having to stay fairly isolated, holed up in our homes with our families, and it’s worrisome because we don’t know how long this is going to take.  We don’t know what’s going to happen to the economy and to our jobs.  There’s a lot of misinformation floating around stoking our anxieties and some of it is intentionally engineered to cause panic and worse.  There are those who are playing down the severity of this virus and not sticking to the social distancing protocols.  There is so much we don’t know.  Meanwhile, some of the brightest minds in epidemiology are busy “sciencing the hell” out of this thing and there are already vaccine trials going on. 

I saw a thing on Facebook about two weeks ago after the NHL shut down.  It was praising Canadian ingenuity and making fun of the Canadian love for hockey.  It said, “They cancel hockey in Canada and immediately three Canadians manage to identify the virus responsible for COVID-19.”  Our scientists have a lot more available to them to work with than they did in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  We need to give them the time to do their work while we ourselves exercise patience, kindness, and compassion and keep our distance to hopefully keep our health system from backing up.  My grandfather’s generation was asked to go to war.  We are being asked to find a way to turn this time of social distancing into a time of personal and family growth and even community growth.

I hope we all understand why we have to cancel public gatherings including church services.  First, as our congregations consist largely of the people for whom the virus is especially dangerous, we simply have to take every precaution.  Second, we are hoping that social distancing will keep our medical system from being overloaded as it has become in Europe.  And let me take a moment to say thanks to all those people in medical and human service professions who are the front line of all this.

Looking at all this, I believe we people of faith have a distinct advantage.  We know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.  We know that God does indeed work all things to the good for those who love him and are called according to his purposes.  Our God deals in hope and in compassion.  Our God is the living God who gives new life in Christ.  God deals in resurrection.  When we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, He makes us know that he is personally with us.  He protects us, provides for us, ensures us that we have what we need. Therefore, we need not fear.  In troubled times we do not need to be ruled by fear and anxiety and fall into a panic.  Instead, being free from fear means we can use our energy and efforts in other ways.  Being free from fear, we are free to be faithful, free to be the people of God.  

You know, there is something very symbolic, almost prophetically symbolic that in the midst of this crisis we are not meeting behind closed doors for worship.  The church experts have been telling us for decades that for us to overcome the demise of the institutional church in these days of the collapse of cultural Christianity, we have to be the church out there, the church out among the people of our communities; the church out in our neighbourhoods among our neighbours.  Jesus commanded us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves and by neighbour he means our actual next-door neighbours.  These are days when we need to be checking in with our neighbours, by phone or even knocking on the door being sure to keep that 1m+ social distance.  Keeping in contact with our elderly neighbours just goes without saying.

To wind it down here, the last verse of Psalm 23 reads, “Surely, goodness and mercy, shall follow me all the days of my life.”  We read that and our inclination is to say that it means, “I’m just going to be so blessed.”  Well, maybe, but, the Hebrew word for follow here is the word that everywhere else in the Old Testament it means being followed in the sense of your enemies pursuing you, hunting you down to beat you up or to kill you.  It seems like a pretty strong metaphor to say that Goodness and Loving Kindness are pursuing me as if they were my enemies out to get me.  And so I say maybe David is saying something else here.  Maybe its when you look over you shoulder to see what’s following you, it is Goodness and Loving Kindness that you leave behind you in your wake.  

I’ve been in a canoe many times on lakes where people with big, loud, motorized boats go zinging by.  The faster they go, the bigger the waves they leave in their wake.  I find those big waves quite scary from my seat in my little canoe that is suddenly being violently rocked about by that rude boater who didn’t have enough Canadian politeness to slow it down around the paddlers.   

Maybe what David is saying is that when we look over our shoulders to see what we leave in our wake, that because the Lord is our Shepherd and is with us, Goodness and Loving Kindness are the waves in our wake that follow behind us.  These are days we slow our boats down and gently rock people by blessing them with the Goodness and the Loving Kindness of God.  Amen.

The Camel Complex

John 4:5-42
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In my early 30’s I got on a kick of running marathons. I trained for 5 and finished 3.  Someone once wrote that “runners are the fittest group of sick and injured people in the world.”  I agree.  Why someone would put themself through the sort of agony that distance running is…well, that is a good question.  But all the pain aside, running has its benefits. One thing that most runners realize is that running is a lot like life.  The way you approach running is almost always the way you live life.  Physical giftedness aside, some runners run in order to run away from life.  Others run simply for the joy of being out there.  Running always brings pain with it.  How a runner deals with that pain is usually how they deal with pain in life.  Some runner’s such as myself will run with their injuries and run with their injuries and run with their injuries until they are forced to find another form of exercise and outlet for life’s angsts.  Other’s deal healthily with the pain, and rest and heal and run for life. 

Another interesting component of running is what runners think about, or rather how they occupy their minds while out on these long runs that can become painful ordeals.  I always distracted myself with the time and math involved with pace.  If I run at this pace, how long will it take me to finish?  I would convert pace from kilometers to miles per hour.  Often and almost always during Lent I would try to meditate on a scripture while I ran.  I memorized the Sermon on the Mount years ago doing this.  Regardless, my spiritual discipline would always soon give way to time and math.  Sometimes, one reaches that blessed state of not thinking about much of anything and just listening to the sound of your own footsteps. 

Moving on, runners suffer from some peculiar mental and emotional quirks and I would like to share with you one I fell into one summer while training for the ’97 Marine Corps Marathon.  I call it the “Camel Complex.”  It’s water related.  It’s where you believe that you can run for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles on just that big gulp of water you took before the run.  The camel complex has an unfortunate consequence in that your runs often come to a premature loopy feeling end as your body begins to shut down for lack of water.   Runners need to drink every 20 minutes or they will begin to dehydrate.  On runs under an hour this really doesn’t matter, but on long runs lasting a couple of hours it can kill you, literally.

In training for a marathon you have to take one long run a week and make those runs progressively longer until you hit marathon distance.  Well, where I lived in West Virginia there were no conveniently placed man-made water fountains and I didn’t like to carry water.  I trained on the Greenbrier River Trail, which is a rails-to-trails project that follows along the Greenbrier River for 80 some absolutely beautiful miles.  Well, with there being no water spots and only some “questionable” river water along the way.  I began to think that I was a camel.  I would gulp down a lot of water before the long run hoping it would last.  Well, it came time for the twenty-mile long run.  The problem of attaining water did cross my mind.  I’m not reckless.  I knew I would need it.  But, I thought that I would be all right to the fifteen-mile point in Buckeye.  I had been fifteen miles without water before, no problem.  Well that day was a little warmer than most and I added some hills to the course.  I gulped up a lot of water and took off on the trail.  I got to the nine-mile point feeling great…great…, but then I got into the hills and the heat and…the camel lost his hump.  I started to get a little scattered in my thinking.  Lost energy bad.  Began to feel like I couldn’t go on, even walking.  8 miles from home, well into dehydration…that’s serious trouble.  Eventually, the road took a turn back towards the river and down to that living water of the Greenbrier River praying it wasn’t too lively and I drank and drank and drank, but it was too late for it to do me any good on that run.  I puttered on for two more miles into Buckeye, thieving from every apple tree in sight, until I arrived at the post office and borrowed a car. It was a good thing I lived out in the country in West Virginia where people are still human and knew me.  I’d have been in some real trouble a little closer into civilization.  The really sad part of this whole “Camel Complex” thing was that for the first nine miles of the run that river, flowing with living water, was right there beside.  I just didn’t want to drink river water. 

One thing that kind of amazes me about the human body in physical exertion whether its working outside or exercising is that when we feel thirsty it is too late for the water that we gulp, gulp, gulp, to do us any good.  It takes a while for water to be absorbed.  For water to do us good we must drink it frequently in small quantities so that it can be absorbed into our system and continually do us some good. 

The amazing thing to me is that our bodies won’t tell us we need water until it is too late.  We are often not aware of our need for water until it is too late.  I bet you that almost all of us here right now do not have nearly the water in our systems that the body needs to maintain health.  I bet you nearly every one of us sitting here right now is near being dehydrated and unaware of it.  In fact, we’ve grown accustomed to the feel of a water-depleted body and that’s what we call normal.

I think there is something here that will help us understand our walk in Christ.  The Christian life for it is a marathon event not a sprint and like athletes we need water.  We have a thirst for God that is always in us, a thirst which too often we are not aware of until we find ourselves in the midst of a dire personal crisis and we realize that we lack the depth of personal resources to endure it.  We are thirsty people.  We thirst for God.  If we know this we do well to go and drink of the living water of praying often and meditating and pondering on the Scripture’s, or of just sitting back and enjoying with gratitude God’s presence with us and all the good gifts that God has placed in our lives; our families, our church, our friends, our jobs, our lack of want.  Drinking this water as often as we can will change us, make us into people who reflect the image of Jesus Christ - kind, compassionate, forgiving, and generous people.  It will make us people through whom the gracious ministry of Jesus Christ in us by the presence of the Holy Spirit radiates out to others.  It really will.  We’ll find that daily drinking of the living water of Christ's presence in prayer will give us the assurance of faith and hope that no matter what, we’ll be all right. 

            Well, I could go on here but I think I have made the case that we are God-thirsty people and it’s the type of thirst that can only be quenched by living daily with and for Christ Jesus.  The really ironic thing about that long run that really pokes me in the side to wake me up is: the river was right there beside me the entire first nine miles of that run, right there beside me, and I would not drink of it for fear, for pride, for laziness and I wouldn’t walk down the bank to take a drink until it was too late.  The river with its life giving water was there.  God is here. He’s always right beside us, every step of the way, offering the living water of his presence to each of us all we have to do is put aside our fears, our worries, our busyness, and drink.  Amen.

Dogs and Tricks - You Know the Saying

John 3:1-17
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When Dana and I got married she came with a really special little red dog named Cedar.  Cedar was probably the smartest dog I’ve ever met.  Dana had trained her not only in basic obedience but also to do a lot of neat tricks. Cedar was the life of every party, especially if there were kids.  Cedar listened to Dana without fault unless it was a hot day and there was a pond nearby.  There was no calling her back from that.  She was proof that dogs above all else just want to please the human they feel most bonded with.  You have heard the old adage that “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.  That’s not so.  If you are your dog’s favourite human, it will be willing to learn new tricks because that’s all part of their love for their person and it gives them great joy to please their person. 

Cedar lived to be fourteen.  She went deaf at age twelve.  We obviously couldn’t teach her something new after that.  But, she knew hand signals and still loved playing with Dana.  She still loved to play fetch right up to a few days before she died even if it was just to throw something that she would trot out to and lay down beside it.  Saying that you can’t teach an old dog a new trick, well, that’s something you should just stoop and scoop.

But anyway, that adage seems to be the angle that Nicodemus is taking here with Jesus.  They are discussing here whether or not you can take someone who is old and set in their ways and teach them something new.  Nicodemus came to Jesus as someone genuinely seeking what Jesus was offering – new life in the Kingdom of God.  He was a member of the Sanhedrin, which was the ruling party of the Jewish people back then.  Though other members of the Sanhedrin wanted Jesus dead, Nicodemus rather found himself drawn to Jesus.  He wasn’t caught up in the corrupted mess that comes about when religion and political power start walking hand in hand.  Rather, it seems he sincerely wants to please his God; you know, like Cedar wanted to please Dana.  

Well, the Holy Spirit like the wind was blowing him in the direction of Jesus.  So, in fear of the Sanhedrin he went seeking Jesus at night to figure things out.  He started the conversation acknowledging they all could see that God was working through Jesus.  Jesus told him, “It’s truth, I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”  And then, Nicodemus plays the old dog, new trick card and answers, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the womb and be born?”  

I’m going to step back and again emphasize that what Nicodemus said there about someone old being born again should be interpreted in the sense of “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.   This isn’t simply an interesting little word play on birth that in the end makes Nicodemus look thick as a brick for being too literal – How can someone pop back in their mama.  I think Nicodemus knows full well what Jesus is talking about with respect to being born from above.  He just sees himself as too set in his ways to be able to try the new trick of following Jesus.

Part of the problem we have when we read this passage is that we want to read into it our Modern ideas of the birthing process that emphasize the role of the woman.  Back then, when things were more patriarchal, the role of the father in siring a child was emphasised a lot more.  They had two different words that we would translate as giving birth.  One was obviously for the mother giving birth.  That’s not the word being used here.  The one that is used here typically refers to the father’s role of begetting/generating the child.  This means that all the emphasis on being born in this passage should be considered from the standpoint of conception and the role the father played.  To be blunt, I don’t think they knew about eggs and sperm back then.  To them the father planted the seed that grew inside the mother.  It was as much agriculture as biology.  I apologize if this is a little too randy of a sermon here at the moment.

  This conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus should rather be translated like this.  Jesus said, “It’s truth, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being begotten/sired from above.”  The angle here is that God would regenerate or recreate or beget the person anew.  And Nicodemus’s answer, “How can anyone be begotten after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the womb and be begotten?”  I know by now you are confused, but this is the time to start thinking about the old adage of “You can’t teach and old dog new tricks.”

This same word for beget back in Jesus’ day was also a word they used to talk about the discipling relationship between a Rabbi and his students.  Rabbis were often called “Father” by their students due to their planting the teachings of the Law and the Traditions in their students.  This leads me to think that Nicodemus is really asking, “Can an old Elder of the people, so set in the ways of the faith as we know it…can…I be discipled anew into the Kingdom of God.”  Can this old dog of the faith learn the new tricks of the Kingdom of God?  To Nicodemus, that probably seemed as impossible as entering the womb a second time to be begotten anew.  

They are not just talking about how babies are born.  They are talking about having to learn a new way of being a person of faith.  Nicodemus was used to keeping the Laws of Moses and the Traditions of the Rabbis as the way of being faithful, but now Jesus was asking Nicodemus to follow the prompting of the Spirit of God that was drawing him into a living and life-giving relationship with Jesus.

It may be that many of us here can relate to Nicodemus.  Most of us have “done church” all our lives – faithful attendance, helped out, given faithfully, did unto others as we would have them do unto us, raised our kids in church.  We believe in God due to a sense of his love and faithfulness.  We have all been through tough times and come out knowing that it was the Lord who brought us through.  And, yes, we are all guilty of letting the way we “do church” take the place of a living relationship with Jesus who ever-calls us to an ever-deepening relationship with himself by the drawing of the Holy Spirit.  We are old dogs at doing church who the Holy Spirit is ever-inviting into the new trick of a renewing…a recreating…a re-begotten living and life-giving relationship with Jesus. 

But now, we’re tired old dogs with hardly the energy to do even the old tricks even though we enjoy them so much when we do.  (There’s nothing like a good fellowship dinner.)  Like Cedar, it’s throw me the toy and I’ll trot after it, but I’m going to have to lay in the yard beside it for a bit before I bring it back.  It is not so much that we’re just old and set in our ways like Nicodemus.  We are old and the reality of the limitations that aging brings to the human person are a painful reality. 

Previous generations of the church have had a deep bench of a younger generation to turn things over to, but not this generation.  Our culture no longer “Does church” in the way it used to.  Our culture is no longer Christian.  The mission field is now just outside our front door...but, we're feeling like a bunch of old hounds who can't make it much further than a good nap on the front porch.  But you know, even if we are just a bunch of old hounds and just laying on that same old familiar porch is about all we got in us, that doesn’t mean the Spirit of God can’t come blowing through us with new life in Christ.  The new tricks we need to learn are the same old tricks we have tried and tried to learn over the years and they involve the devotional life.  Here are three tricks for us to learn. 

Practice the presence of God. A couple of weeks back I spoke of setting up an empty chair and letting that be were the presence of the Lord sits and then you say what you need to say.  Now take that one step further and let that awareness of the presence of the Lord be with you everywhere you go.

Take up the practice of the daily reading of scripture.  Read two chapters of the Old Testament, two chapters of the New, and a couple of the Psalms.  Just read.  Sometimes, you will get a sense that God is speaking to you.  I would highly recommend a printed Bible as opposed to one on a device.

Last, pray.  Make a prayer list of people you know and love and take the time to pray for them.  Then try to disciple yourself to try and pray the Lord’s prayer as you go through the day.  The majority of us have a conversation going on in our heads that’s usually just a bunch of ranting and worrying.  Why not rein that voice in by disciplining it to pray.  Amen.