Who Is God?

John 3:1-17; 14:6-17, 25-27
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       I have an interesting question for you today: Who is God? That would seem an odd question to come before a Christian congregation and ask. Yet, the answers (emphasis on the plural) would surprise you. You would be surprised at the effect who we say God is has on our lives together as Christians. “Who is God?” is one of the two most pressing questions churches must struggle with at their very core to remain vibrant. The second question is “What has God done for his creation in, through, and as Jesus Chris?”. How we answer that question also has profound implications for our life together as Christians.
       So, who is God? In the 4th Century during those huge Church councils that left us the Nicene Creed one of the authors of the Creed Gregory of Nazianzus answered that question quite emphatically. He boldly proclaimed: “When I say God I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” He was saying God is Trinity. God is the loving communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 1 John 4:8 says that “God is love”. If God is love, then God in God’s self must be a relationship for love requires relationship. Therefore, the Trinity is three relational beings (persons) who love and give themselves to and for one another so utterly that they form each other’s person-hood and are one in being. That is Christianity’s confession of who God is.
       It sounds weird, but let’s think about ourselves. I am a unique person who exists in relationships. I cannot be who I am apart from the core relationships I have had in my life. I am who I am as the result of all the relationships I have and have had in my life. In similar manner, God the Father cannot be God the Father without God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. God the Son cannot be God the Son without God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. And, God the Holy Spirit cannot be God the Holy Spirit without God the Father and God the Son. God is not God without the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit giving themselves to one another so utterly in mutual love that they are the same and are one. This is hard for us to grasp as we live in a world that bends inordinately towards individualism and self-realization. Yet, life is pretty bankrupt when lived apart from significant relationships.
       Back to Gregory, why was he so emphatic in stating this? Well, in the days of Nicaea, Christianity was in a bitter dispute. There was a man by the name of Arius, an elder and teacher in the church around Alexandria, Egypt who had a very significant following. They came to be known as the Arians. Arius taught that God is just God, an unknowable Creator with a moral will who must be obeyed by his creation or else. He emphatically declared that Jesus was in no way God and that he was just a man who showed us how to live according to the will of the Creator God who would never in anyway ever dirty his hands with human “being”. To Arius, Jesus was not in any way God.
       Well, the Arians were in the majority back then, evidence to the historical fact that at any given time over the centuries the majority of Christians are being swept away by errant understandings of who God is with the result that the Church has not been and acted Christ-like, but quite the opposite. In fact, it is Arian theology about God almighty that provides the theological undergirding for the white supremacy we call Arianism practiced by the Nazi’s in WWII and it persists among Christians today. When the Church does not understand God the way God has revealed Godself, we, the Church, do some horrible things.
       Back to the 4th Century, Gregory of Nazianzus was Bishop of Constantinople in Turkey and he had a friend named Athanasius who was Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt. Incidentally, both of these men, who are now saints of the church, spent quite a lot of time in exile during this controversy because, as I mentioned, the majority of Christians labelled them heretics. In response to the Arians and their denial of Jesus' being God Athanasius is famous for declaring “the unassumed is the unhealed.” He meant that if Jesus was not God become human by taking on himself fallen human flesh, then humanity is not healed of sin and death. If Jesus was not God the Son become fully human, then the Trinity has not taken humanity unto and into Themself to heal it of sin and death with the Trinity's own indestructible life.
       For Gregory and Athanasius what the Trinity had done for us in, through, and as Jesus Christ was to reconcile us to himself (2 Cor. 5:20), heal us of Sin and Death (1 Cor. 15), and make us to be partakers of God’s very own nature. The Apostle Peter says as much at 2 Peter 1:3-4 which reads: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (ESV).
       Gregory and Athanasius believed as did the Apostle Paul (not to mention all the Apostles and Jesus himself) that the Trinity has adopted us as God’s own children and this adoption wasn’t merely a legal adoption (a paperwork legal transaction). Rather, God has made us to be blood family with himself and each other by Jesus God the Son becoming human and the Holy Spirit freely given to indwell us making our adoption effectual.
       Paul says this at Romans 8:12-17 “So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh – for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (ESV).
       Paul again says as much at Galatians 4:4-7: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!' So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (ESV).
       To Gregory and Athanasius, the followers of Arius and his unitarian idea of God were simply still living according to the flesh. The Arians were simply dutifully trying to live according to the moral will of an unknowable Creator whom they called God. They were not living by the Spirit. They were dreadfully unhealed in their hearts, stuck in dogmatism and legalism, all the while thinking themselves to be the ones who had it right. They were concerned about obeying the will of God by their own effort rather than being changed in their very being by the presence and power of the Trinity.
       The Arian Controversy, as it is called, revolved around whether or not God who is holy, pure, and unchanging would get his hands dirty by really getting involved with us. The Arians said no and that the Christian faith was all about knowing the Creator God's moral will and being obedient to it. Gregory and Athanasius on the other hand emphatically said yes and more so that the Trinity had indeed taken human being into his own being and healed it. For the Arians Jesus was only a man, a very special God-empowered man, who only showed us what the moral will of God was that we might live accordingly so as to not suffer the Creator God's wrath. But for Gregory and Athanasius, God the Son truly and fully became Jesus the man and took human being into the Trinity's Being to heal it. The Triune God had indeed gotten his hands dirty with humans and it changed actual human being. Humans are now indwelt by God in a permanent way unknown before Jesus. In this act of new creation humanity is becoming healed of sin and death in the same way that Adam's disobedience caused humanity to sin and suffer death.
       Paul writes of this in Romans 5:10-19 “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned - for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. If, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous” (ESV).
       To sum up, the answer to question two “What has God done for the Creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth?” is that by God the Son becoming human as Jesus of Nazareth and living, dying, rising, ascending, and yet to return, humanity has been and will be healed of sin and death to live as God’s children and the Holy Spirit is working now in and through you and me to make this obviously and experientially effectual. We are blessed now to partake of the life of the Trinity, as members of their family so to speak, that we might be a blessing to the community in which we live and beyond.
       To make this somewhat practical, we must say that what the Trinity has done by Jesus and the Holy Spirit is restore God’s image in humanity. The Trinity is a communion of persons working in us to create community in God’s own image. Therefore, Jesus’ one and only commandment, that we love one another as he has loved us, is of the utmost importance for who we are as congregations and why we are here. As the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom the Father has given us, we bear their family resemblance. By the way we love one another we proclaim not only that Jesus is Lord and Saviour, but also that the one true God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This means that our primary task is to build community among ourselves and with the community around us according to Jesus’ command to love.
       This means that the sincere giving of oneself in Christian community is not optional. Being able to give loving community to the community beyond ourselves expecting nothing in return – no money in the plate, no bums in the pews – is our way of being in the world. The Trinity has called us to be community in his image in the world. We have to be that community and we will, if the Trinity is our God and we are careful to not let other understandings of God hamper the Trinity’s healing and transformative work in us.
       So, I leave you with the question we started with: who is God? Amen.

Let's Talk about the Holy Spirit

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-16

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We live in a time now when spiritual fulfillment is more of an acceptable topic around the water cooler and in coffee shops than we would think.  One Saturday morning about five years ago, I was in the cycling room at the Y and a man was letting everyone in the room enjoy his ZZ Top playlist while talking to two women he didn’t know about his understanding of God and they were right there with him in the conversation.  I thought it better I just listen.  I was winded and when I get winded and try to talk, I sound grumpy.  The last thing anybody wants to hear is a grumpy minister.  Talking about spirituality, about what helps one to get in touch with that transcendent something or other out there is more welcome than you think.  That’s the world today.  People want to taste the divine.  They want to touch something beyond themselves that can give life meaning and orientation.  It is not all that uncommon to get invited to a drum circle.  It is not or to walk into someone’s home and smell the incense they lit to clear the room of unwanted spirits so that the good spirits can surround them.  Spiritual things are a hot topic. 

So, it shouldn’t surprise us that the type of Christianity that is growing by quantum leaps globally these days the charismatic and Pentecostal varieties where, I won’t deny, there are real manifestations of God’s power happening.  People getting healed.  Demons cast out.  Just like in the Gospels and the Book of Acts, those things still happen today.  Within these movements would seem to be the Christian alternative to this pervasive hunger for a taste of the divine.  They can talk about the Holy Spirit and back it up it seems.  But…there has also been a quieter movement within the more traditional arms of the church attempting to teach spiritual disciplines like how to pray and read the Bible devotionally in a way that is more meditative, in which it seems God is more “personally” present and felt and communicative.  That’s where I feel comfortable.  

People want to be spiritual today and so it seems that if we were going to get “relevant” in our communication of the gospel we’d bag all that talk about believing Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins so that we can go to heaven when we die and how we need to “go and sin no more” and rather start talking about the Holy Spirit and our experience of God.  Some have done this and unfortunately have ceased to be the Church, the body of Christ, and turned their own spiritual experience into a god in and of itself disregarding the actual seriousness of the “S-word”, Sin, and why Jesus had to die.  If this Sin-thing wasn’t deadly seriously Jesus could have just been another guru who taught us to self-release endorphins into our brains until we feel enlightened.  The brain is a wonderful thing.

In these days of spiritual awareness, how do we know it’s the Holy Spirit we’re dealing with and not just brain chemicals or some other spirit?  Well, the Holy Spirit never points to himself or to our spiritual experience as the chief end of our existence.  The Holy Spirit always points to what Jesus is doing.  It is the Holy Spirit who includes us here on earth in Christ Jesus’ heavenly life of worship and prayer before the Father and who empowers us here to carry out the work of witness to Jesus and his reign to which we are called.  The Holy Spirit brings us into the very life of God so that we are an adopted part of the loving fellowship of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.  He does this by bonding, unioning us to Christ Jesus to be his earthly body as his resurrected body is in the dimension of reality called heaven.  A good Ascension Sunday sermon would cover that.  Bond to Jesus by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and in him, Jesus brings us before the Father as his brothers and sisters and the Father looks upon us as his own children by adoption and blesses us.  Jesus includes us in his relationship to the Father, his adoration of the Father and he prays for us on our behalf.  The blessing he receives from the Father he passes on to us.  That blessing is the Holy Spirit dwelling in us transforming us to be like him.  A modern scientific analogy would be that God has given us their DNA and it’s changing us. 

That’s the picture the Bible paints when we study the work of the Holy Spirit.  It may sound like a bunch of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo because we are so accustomed to hearing and practicing a form of Christianity that winds up simply being Law-based and duty-bound in practice.  I’ve heard some crazy stuff in my life particularly when it comes to matters of spirituality and, to be honest, to a reasonable person the popular Christian gospel we’ve gotten accustomed to of deciding to believing that Jesus died for my sins so that we can go to heaven when we die takes a prize for being “out there” too.  That coercive line of thinking was also condemned at the Council of Orange 529AD as something known as Semi-Pelagianism.  That’s your historical trivia for the day.

So let me do something probably more off the wall.  I would like to share with you what the Church in the 4^th century agreed to be the Gospel; Gospel meaning the proclamation of what God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are doing to save their good Creation from sin, evil, and death because humanity has turned from our created purpose of being God’s image in God’s good Creation. It goes: because God loves us and always intended to fill us with his life, God the Father sent God the Son, through whom all things were created, to become human as Jesus of Nazareth and through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension in a human body he makes us to be participants in the very life of God by sending us the Holy Spirit who draws us into the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share, and who transforms us into the image of Christ, and makes us whole which is what the word salvation means.  This, in turn, results in our being healed of Sin and will ultimately put an end to Death and Evil when Jesus returns.  That’s the good news.  That’s the Gospel.  God has drawn near to us in such a way as to draw us into himself and make us participants in the divine life.

This would sound crazy, but the personal presence and work of the Holy Spirit in our midst testifies to us that this is the Truth.  The personal presence of the Holy Spirit includes us into the very life of God.  He brings us into the loving fellowship or communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  All the love and joy that the Father has for the Son the Son receives it and gives it to Spirit who makes it known personally to each of us while joining us together in Christ so that we can respond to God with love and joy, worship and prayer, and receive the blessing of his Holy Spirit in us who works in us transforming us, filling us with the utmost of joy, thankfulness, compassion, and a desire to share the news that what God has done in Jesus Christ for all of humanity is the truth.   

It is the work of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the truth of the Gospel and he does so in such a way as to make us part of it.  I would like to play with the word “remember” for a moment.  The Holy Spirit causes us to remember Jesus.  On the night of his arrest Jesus took bread and a cup of wine and told his disciples to eat and drink them in remembrance of him.  Most communion tables have “In Remembrance of Me” written on them.  This seems to indicate that the celebration of Communion should take on a solemn note, like on Remembrance Day as we observe silence and remember those who gave their lives protecting our freedom.  And so, at Communion instead of celebrating we go solemn and remember Jesus died for us.  But...that solemness distracts us from the work of the Holy Spirit as we gather around the Lord’s table to remember him. 

The Greek word for remembrance is amnemnesis.  It means way more than just do something to remember someone and what they did for you.  Sharing in the Lord’s Supper, as we will today, is not simply about remembering what Jesus did for us.  Amnemnesis means to remember someone in such a way that you take on their characteristics and truly become a part of them.  You may remember the story of Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones.  The voice of the Lord told him to speak to the bones and tell them to live.  The wind of the Holy Spirit moved over them and we get “the footbone connect to the…legbone” and then flesh comes upon them but they don’t have breath.  God tells him to prophecy the them Breath, the Holy Spirit, to come into them and so he does God breathes the breath of the Holy Spirit into them and they live. That story is a foreshadowing of what God is doing in us by the Holy Spirit.  They Holy Spirit puts the flesh of Christ on us and becomes the Breath by which this New Humanity lives.  

In this meal, which we partake of in remembrance of Christ, is a means of grace through which the Holy Spirit works to make us the body of Christ, to re-member us into the body of Christ.  It is Christ’s body broken and shared.  His blood shed for our forgiveness.  When we join together to partake of this meal we partake of him and are nourished, strengthened by the Spirit and become his body more fully.  It is here at this table, where we are nourished on Christ, that all those people in the world who hunger for God can find what they are craving – the very life of the Triune God of grace.  God has brought us into the fellowship of his very self.  God is in us and we are in God and it is a feast.  Amen.

 

  

The Corona of Jesus

 John 17

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Today is Ascension Sunday.  I like to think of it as Coronation Sunday for King Jesus.  Today we celebrate Jesus being carried back into the realm of heaven and there he assumes his place at the right hand of God the Father and is crowned Lord of all creation.  Now I’m not trying to be punny or funny, but the Latin word for crown, which is rooted in the Greek word koronē which means garland, is corona.  Hence, the act of enthroning someone is a coronation, an act of crowning.  So, today we make special effort to say “Hail, King Jesus” and “Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne.”

To celebrate that Jesus has ascended has challenges inherent to it.  First, there’s trying to describe the mechanics of Jesus physically ascending into heaven – you know, the where did he go and how’s that possible topics.  Trying to talk about that in a world of sceptics is like talking about quantum physics in a church.  I’ve done that on a few Ascension Sundays before, but one never seems to be able to get beyond conjecture.  I’m not one of those who say to check your brain and just leave it to faith and so I keep searching for a way to explain Jesus going back into heaven that demonstrates that in the realm of quantum physics it is possible for a resurrected human to ascend into another dimension…but perhaps I’ve watched too much Star Trek. 

Another problem is the language of monarchy.  To speak of Jesus as a king taking his throne over heaven and earth comes across as rather archaic these days, especially if you live in one of these Modern Western democracies that endured a war of revolution to free itself of the rule of a corrupted monarchy.  As an American living in Canada, I will readily admit that I don’t get the relationship this nation still has with the British monarchy.  But hey, to each, its own.  Whatever.  I won’t start a Scots-Irish rant about it.  

Anyway, as we don’t live under the direct authority of a monarch, it is safe to assume that we have lost a core, fundamental understanding of what biblical faith is.  To understand what faith is in the Bible we have to think in terms of the relationship between monarchs and their subjects.  In this sense, Biblical faith is better understood as allegiance, as utter reliance upon and fidelity to a king or queen.  We children of Modernity don’t get that.  Instead, we have a very democratised and individualistic understanding of faith which we read back into the Bible in an unhelpful way.  We like to think of faith as a matter of individual personal choice with respect to what I want to believe and put my trust in.  We think of faith as a personal choice to accept things that can’t otherwise be proven by science or reason.  We think of faith as the opposite of doubt.  In essence, the way we Modern’s have come to define faith places God in the same category as unicorns, leprechauns, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster – two of which I personally believe in but I won’t say which.  There’s no wonder atheists abound.

But biblically speaking, it is more correct for us to discard our Modern ideas of what faith is and talk more of faithfulness, of allegiance to a monarch.  You see, faith, like love, is something we do.  The Greek word we translate as faith was used back then to describe a particular way one participates in certain relationships particularly relationships requiring a vow.  Marriage, for example, faith isn’t just that I believe in the existence of my wife.  It’s that we are faithful to each other.  Faith is conducting oneself according to pledges of loyalty.  In Roman days, they even used faith to describe the relationship between crime lords and their thugs.  Rarely is faith used to describe intellectual ascent to something that science or reason can’t prove.  

In the biblical big picture, faith is best defined as our loyal participation in the sphere of reality where the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, is making his promise to save his Creation from sin, death, and evil come about.  So, on Ascension Sunday we say that Jesus has taken his throne as the supreme monarch of God’s good Creation and we pledge our allegiance as willing-to-die-to-ourselves-for-him participants in what God is doing in, through, and as him to save his good Creation. 

To pledge allegiance and act accordingly…growing up in the States, as child every day of school began with a pledge of allegiance to the flag on the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.  Here in Canada students just have to listen as the national anthem is played.  The Pledge of Allegiance was adopted in States in 1892 as a way of developing nationalistic spirit and fidelity among the myriads of immigrants who had come to the States to live.  We understood that making that pledge meant faithfully carrying out the duties of being a citizen of the United States.  We may have had our varying beliefs about what America stands for. (Even today it stills seems the limits of the word “all” to whom liberty and justice should apply is still up for debate for in practice it obviously does not mean everybody.)  Regardless, I/we understood that making that pledge meant that I would lay down my life for the greater good of the people of my nation.  

Biblical faith is more like that, a pledge of allegiance to Jesus Christ and his kingdom – a promise to participate faithfully at the cost of one’s own life in what God is really doing in history to save his good Creation from sin, death, and evil.  I hope you can understand that faith in Jesus Christ isn’t just what you confess to get yourself into heaven when you die.  Faith in Jesus Christ has profound political implications. It supersedes any pledge of allegiance made to any other person, nation, or organization.  In 1954, when the American Congress inserted “under God” after “one nation”, they committed a serious faux pas making it seem that being American is the same as being Christian.  It is not.

In the first century for the first Christians to call Jesus Son of God, Lord, and Saviour was an act of treason in the Roman Empire.  The Roman emperors claimed those titles for themselves.  There were grave consequences for pledging allegiance to Jesus the crucified and risen King who reigns from heaven.  No matter how upstanding you were or how much good you and your Christian friends did in your community, proclaiming that Jesus is Lord could quite easily offend the good citizens of the Roman Empire with the result that you could find yourself banned from your profession, stoned outside the city, skinned alive, burned at a stake, or the source of sick public entertainment in the arena fighting wild animals or getting butchered by gladiators, or crucified as Jesus was.

That was then.  What about today?  How does one live faithfully to Jesus the King?  Well, let me kick back to the word for the day, corona.  When there is a solar eclipse there comes a moment when the moon comes directly between the sun and the earth so that the sun and moon appear to be a black circle encircled by a crown, which we call the corona.  One way of understanding what it means for Jesus to be glorified is to think of how his crown, his corona, the emblem of his rule shines forth into this world.  I would hope that the answer is obvious – us, those who live in allegiance to him, and the life we share together in him.  

If we do a quick scan of the word glorify in our reading today, we find that Jesus glorified the Father here on earth by doing what the Father sent him to do.  That means that Jesus revealed the nature of the Father.  Jesus then prays that the Father glorify him in his presence by restoring to him the glory he had in the Father’s presence before the world was created.  That’s verses 4 and five.  Hop down to verse 10 we find that Jesus is glorified in us.  He is in us, we are in him, and he is glorified in us.  From verse 11 where Jesus prays the Father protect us so that we may be one as they are one, we can surmise that the glory of Jesus is in the unity we share in him that he shares with the Father.  

Christian unity is the corona of Christ.  In the same way that the sun cannot be seen behind the moon in a solar eclipse so also Jesus cannot be seen because he has gone to the Father.  So also, just as the presence of the sun continues to be evident as the corona around the moon, the corona of the One who is the Light of the world is still visible.  To speak in high lofty terms, God is love.  God is the loving communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons who empty themselves in love for each other so completely that they are on.  They include us in their union in love by coming to live in us.  By the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us we are unioned to Jesus who is unioned by the same Holy Spirit to the Father and thus we are united to Father as Jesus is, as his beloved children.  Chew on that whilst I move on.

This unity, this union, this bond, this living relationship of love that we have with Jesus and the Father in the Holy Spirit becomes visible when we lay down our lives, our soul, our me for one another.  I would encourage to go back and have another listen or read of last week’s sermon.  The joyful bond of true friendship is found among the followers of Jesus when we strip ourselves of any claims to glory we think we might be entitled to and wash each other’s nasty, stinky feet as Jesus did during the last meal he shared with his disciples…not literally, but the example of humility persists.  

So, what is it to be the corona of Christ in a world that’s suffering under a pandemic involving a corona virus?  Another way of asking that is to say how can we say Jesus rules this world in love when the world is suffering so much?  Well, Christian unity, the corona of King Jesus, looks like the love required to be patient with family members as we’re cooped up together in lockdowns.  It looks like suffering the dread inconvenience of wearing a mask and keeping distant.  It looks like phone calls to those who feel forgotten. It looks like ordering take out from one of the local restaurants or curbside from local businesses that could go under because of all this.  It looks like generous donations to organizations like PWS&D to help those in poorer nations get medical supplies and bury their dead.  It looks like petitioning governments to get big pharma to stop profiting off the vaccine and find a way to make it globally available.  Jesus’ corona shines through the love that arises when people suffer together and in the midst of that suffering serve one another selflessly and unconditionally.  The day will come when he will put the powers that be in their place.  Until then, we find him present and ministering among the suffering…which is exactly where we should be.  Amen.

 

 

A Chosen Friendship

 John 15:1-17

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This passage from John is special to me.  It was many years ago, when I was roughly 20 and really struggling with where my life was heading that a verse from this passage spoke to me.  Things weren’t going according to “the plan” for me.  I was a very smart kid of good stock and should have been doing well in university and dreaming of where that career as a lawyer or scientist was going to take me.  But my first attempt at university didn’t go so well.  I dropped out.  You see, I had to work and commute to school and my part-time job at the restaurant was where my relational bonds were, not at school.  That’s probably the largest component as to why things didn’t go so well.  The university I commuted to was huge and there was no hope of this shy kid forming meaningful relationships there without living there.  I was alone and on my own having flown the coop into adulthood…and it wasn’t going well.

It was also in the midst of all that that I turned to Jesus feeling I had nowhere else to turn.  I started going to church every Sunday first at a small staid, tried and true Presbyterian church frequented by my best friend’s mom.  You may have heard me mention Mom Landis a time or two.  Then, I switched to a more charismatic type Nazarene church at the invitation of a girl I was interested in.  I had just come to the conclusion that if my life was going to go anywhere then it was going to have to be where God would take because I was blowing it.

So, I was reading my Bible one afternoon, and those words of Jesus, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” leapt off the page to me as if Jesus was saying them directly to me.  That was the first time that I had experienced anything that seemed like communication from the God-side of things while reading the Bible.  Prior to that moment, the Bible was just the book of the stuff that God wants us to do that we have to do if we want things to go well.  That day the Scriptures became “living” to me, if that makes any sense.  

To a young adult who was floundering and carrying some hurt hearing Jesus say to me “I chose you” became the rack on which I hang my hat.  I know what it’s like to be a kid and to not get picked for the team.  That happens to just about everybody growing up in one way or another.  But this was a bigger scale.  This was life.  It felt like life wasn’t picking me for the team.  It’s like I had big dreams of playing ball for “that team”.  I had the natural talent.  I had trained hard.  Try outs came, they didn’t go well, and I didn’t get chosen for “that team”.  I felt worthless; that I wasn’t meeting the expectations everybody had of me, myself included.  And then Jesus said, “I chose you”.  Game changer.

Arising from Jesus’ choice of me there suddenly was a purpose for me to which I have devoted myself.  By this I don’t mean simply the calling to be a minister; as if people who go into the ministry get something special from God that any other disciple of Jesus doesn’t get.  Ordained ministers are no different than anybody else in the Church excepting we are set aside to be within the Body of Christ what the Body of Christ is set aside to be in the world.  Just as the church fails miserably, so do ministers yet even so, Jesus still calls us all his friends.  The purpose that I mean is a life-changing friendship with Jesus discovered among the fellowship of his friends as we together try to be his disciples in this world distinguished by the way we love each other.  We love as he has loved us.  As I minister, I simply work to get you to live in love in the same way you, the Body of Christ, tries to get the world to live in love.

Anyway, chosen-ness, that’s a good topic for Presbyterians to get into.  We Presbyterians have an interesting history with the topic.  We carry the nickname, “the Frozen Chosen”.  Our theological roots in Calvinism places a lot of weight on the sovereignty of God over his creation and we pushed that to the logical extent of saying that God has foreordained everything that happens in his creation.  We pushed that to an even further logical conclusion to say that God has foreordained or predestined who would be saved and who would not.  The logical end of that was saying God created some people to know the eternal joys of heaven and some to know eternal damnation in hell all regardless of how they lived their life here on earth in the meantime.  Sometimes being theo -“logical” has more to do with logic than with God.

  We were wrong to come to those logical conclusions.  By our logical conclusions we were saying more than Scripture itself said.  So, in 1904 most churches of Presbyterian and Anglican rootage disavowed that way of thinking.  But the damage was done.  It did have negative effects in the church.  We became quite dour and joyless in our expression of faith and in turn, stuck in our ways.  Worship had to be done in a certain way as not to offend God.  Dress codes, conduct codes – legalism.  Cold we were!  Frozen in place!  Totally contrary to my experience of being chosen which involved joy.  Anyway, that was a rabbit hole.  Back to the pea patch.

To define what it is to be chosen we should take a route that is relational rather than logical.  When Jesus said “I chose you” to the Disciples, he said it in the context of a conversation with his friends.  He had just told them that he considered them friends rather than servants (slaves actually).  Slaves do not know what their masters are up to, but friends do.  Jesus had shared with the Disciples everything he could about who he was and what the Father was up to in the world through him and they in the power of the Holy Spirit would be doing the same things he did once he was gone.  He summed it all up by saying abide in “my” love – a love which he and the Father share, a love which is the same love that he has for his disciples, a love which is the same love they will have as the Holy Spirit dwells in them if they love one another in the way Jesus said to.  

The particular love that Jesus wants his friends to share is the type of love in which we lay down our lives for one another.  So now, what did Jesus mean by laying down our lives for one another?  Well, the word for life there isn’t the word for literal life.  It is “psyche” in Greek which usually gets translated as “soul”.  In the Bible, the soul isn’t this immortal blip of energy that departs the body when we die.   That’s Greek Paganism.  The soul is basically what we would call “me”.  It’s who I am.  It’s everything thing I am; body included.  It’s identity, who I bring to the table in relationships regardless of whether I am able to say who I am or not.  It’s the me I know and the me I don’t know.  It’s the face I put on and the me I fearfully keep hidden behind that face.  The soul includes everything I want to be and do, all the baggage I carry, my habits, and all I have become due to my relationships with others.  My soul is the “me” I bring to you.  It’s the me God knows better than I know myself.

Jesus says the love that he wants his disciples to share is that we lay down our souls for our friends, that we set my “me” to the side for my friends for their growth as followers of Jesus.  I’m going say something about what a friend is here in a moment but first something about laying down our souls, our “me”.  For Jesus to say we must lay down our “me” is something we don’t readily take to, particularly in our culture in which we believe that figuring out who I am and putting myself and my own happiness first is something I most do before I can think about the needs of others.  We are fairly well indoctrinated in the philosophiy of “Be who you want to be”, “Pursue your dreams”, “To thine own self be true”.  But if you haven’t noticed, that way of thinking just isn’t working.

Yet, there is a healthy side to that approach to life we should consider.  When I was in seminary, one of the things they tried to help us do was to come to an awareness of our weaknesses and hurts for if we do not, we would inadvertently get hurt by and/or hurt the people we serve by making our ministry all about ourselves.  We were all taught the fine art of how to listen to another person so that they feel heard. Oddly and powerfully, it was in the process of learning how to listen that we soon discovered like a Pandora’s Box the personal junk we brought to the table because it was that junk that got in the way of our being able to listen to people in a way that’s helpful.  It is a rare minister, and I am not one of them, that can actually listen effectively to people who come to them in need.  The number one reason we (and not just ministers) can’t listen to each other is that we are unable to set aside our need to be liked by people.  In situations where all we are being asked to do is listen to a person and reflect back “What I hear you saying is…”, we will instinctively say and do things to try to get that person to like “me” rather than feel heard.  We will rather say things like, “Yeah, I felt that way once.”  Loving requires listening and we have to lay our souls, our “me” aside if we’re going to do that.  Ain’t easy.  Ain’t easy.

In the context of abiding in Jesus’ love, of enjoying the fellowship in which Jesus dwells, we have to lay down our “me” aside for the purpose of the healing and the wholeness of each other.  Laying down doesn’t mean “O Me the Martyr”, where everybody but me gets their needs looked after and I wind up wallowing in self-pity.  The point is that if everyone is laying their me down for the healing and betterment of their friends, then we all get better together.  We all are broken and we all have needs and it is the responsibility of us all not to let our own needs take priority over the needs of others.  We must also be sure that we not let one of our own burn-out and die for looking after us.  Jesus already did that.  

One thing you learn in how to care for the family courses is that there is almost always somebody in the family that’s silently bearing the deadly load of everybody else’s whims of self-actualization.  The greatest gift a family can be given is help in coming to the realization of who that person is in their family and in compassion lay their “me” aside to help that one person heal.  That’s love.  We have all heard that if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.  On Mother’s Day we must acknowledge, that too often it is our mothers who have been silently bearing that deadly load of making sure everybody else’s needs were met to the neglect of their own and we have been to involved in our own me-ness to notice.  Let’s do better by our mothers.

Well, about friends.  What Jesus means by a friend here is a loved one.  Someone, whether they be blood relation or not, whom we treat like family.  A friend is someone whom we chose to let into our lives because of a felt bond that we so often just can’t explain.  They are people for whom we will drop everything and inconvenience ourselves to help.  They are the people we call together when we’ve got something celebrate.  When Jesus talks about his joy being in his disciples and our joy being made complete in him, he means the joy we feel just being with our friends in him.  It makes us happy to be with our friends and especially when eat and fellowship and kick a few back together.  There’s a lot of vulnerability in friendship, because we have to trust our friends to care for the “me-junk” that we don’t want everybody to know.  Friendship is where we lay our burdens at each other’s feet and we bear them up together.  Marriage doesn’t work without friendship.  Family doesn’t work without friendship.

It is said that you can’t choose your family, but you can chose your friends.  Jesus has chosen us each to be his friends, but to be his friends we must be friends to one another.  The fellowship of sharing friendship in Christ is what the Church is about.  We can easily mistake that the Church exists for worship, or religious education, or moral development, or feeding the hungry, or lifting up the downtrodden, or worse – spreading Democracy and Western civilization throughout the world.  We can also easily mistake that the Church is just the place that fits with my private spiritual beliefs.  Something I fear with online worship being so readily available is that it is too easy to mistake that Church is something I can do by myself in my living room, in my pajamas, disheveled, with coffee in hand.  There is a place and time for that, but Church is so much more.  Church is about a group of friends whom Jesus has chosen to be his friends and whom he has entrusted to each another to love each other in his physical absence.  The church is first and foremost about building the bond of friendship that Jesus has entrusted to us as a congregation.

Let me say that again.  The Church is first and foremost about building the bond of friendship that Jesus has entrusted to us as a congregation.  Being Jesus’ friends by being a friend like him to one another is what we are about.  We are to lay down our “me” for one another as Jesus has directed us.  There’s joy in it for us.  There’s a purpose in it.  Jesus has chosen us to be one of his friednship places in this world where he manifests salvation – meaning healing, wholeness, and peace.  The salvation that is to come in its fullness when he comes.

You may be saying, “Randy, I don’t feel chosen.  I don’t feel like Jesus is a friend and your little self-sharing at the beginning of this little feel-good rant only made me feel inadequate.”  Well, I’m sorry.  That was not my intention.  That said, I will totally act like I haven’t listened by saying “O but you are.”  If you understand that Church is primarily about the love we share as Jesus’ friends rather than steeples, organs, choirs, pews, Sunday School rooms, and who makes the best pot-luck dish, and being hypocritically good; then you are Jesus’s friend and he has chosen you to know that.  In fact, the very fact that I’ve just so super-fantastically, clearly explained this to you, is how he has chosen you to be his friend. So now, enough said.  Let’s be the friends Jesus has chosen us to be.  There’s joy to be shared.  Amen.

 

An Abiding Home

 John 15:1-17

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You folks know I play the fiddle and you know the type of fiddling I do ain’t from around here.  It’s that Hillbilly stuff called Old Time Mountain Music.  The Traditional music particularly of Eastern and Central West Virginia is my first love.  I got into it when I lived down there.  I wanted to learn the people and in a place like that – a land that time forgot – learning the rhythm of the music is a broad avenue into the heart of the people.  When you start playing down there, people will start talking, sharing stories.  They’ll dance.  They’ll laugh.  Get a little weepy and not even know why.  That type of music is a big part of what “home” is in West Virginia; of what it is to “abide” in West Virginia.  

When I moved to Canada, I didn’t realize how musically lonely it was going to be for me.  There was next to no one who played what I play.  At my first Canadian church down in Caledon, we hosted a fiddle jam once a month.  And there were some good fiddlers who played the music that’s “home” to people in southern Ontario.  I tried to get into it, but it didn’t become my home like West Virginia music is.  Fiddle jams can be quite lonely for me.  When I play, it’s a novelty and it is rare to find accompanists that get that the rhythm is different than it is in Canadian fiddling and East Coast Fiddling.  I eventually found a couple of people I could play with and we did some playing around.  It was nice.  Even in the Great White North I could still have a sense of still abiding in West Virginia.  Yet, I have to say, not having the side of a mountain as my horizon was, is, and will always be difficult.  

When I moved up here to Owen Sound, even that little bit of home got left behind, but I knew how to carry on.  I knew how to abide.  West Virginia Mountain Music continued to be all I listened to.  I played at least once a day.  I would routinely go on a binge of learning new songs.  I kept inspired.  I got myself on a regular schedule with some of the nursing homes to play for the residents monthly.  I tried some of the fiddle jams and made a few friends.  I did my best to continue to abide in West Virginia and to share my musical home with the locals up here.  I found it got people to start talking, sharing stories.  Some would dance and laugh and remember how there used to be fiddle music and dancing every weekend up here.  

But now, COVID has hit.  With these lockdowns people can’t get together.  I haven’t played in the nursing homes in over a year.  Weeks will go by that I haven’t even touched the fiddle or even cared to.  I can’t really share it with anybody so I feel like “What’s the use?”  I rarely listen to the music anymore.  I’m realizing that my time in West Virginia was now 18 years ago.  Most of the people I know down there have forgotten me or disowned me.  I’m not sure which.  There’s a person in my heart, a part of me, that hurts and wants to scream out, “I swam in the Greenbrier River, damn it!  Why can’t I just go home?”  It’s hard to abide in a place and not be able to be there.  That’s grief.  A part of me will always “abide” there.  The depression these lockdowns bring on makes the grieving all the more acute.  Well, I’m going to get off this horse before anyone gets any more uncomfortable.

So, I broached that subject to try to talk about what it is to abide in Jesus.  What is it to abide in a person?  Well, obviously that’s a relational kind of thing.  Dana and I abide together.  With the kids, we abide together as a family.  The abiding at times can be quite deep and other times its distant, but its home.  Good friendships are also places in which we abide.  Abiding requires relationship.

Applying that to Jesus, the question arises how do we abide with a person who’s not physically present the way our friends and family are?  Well, Jesus said, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.”  To be gathered in Jesus’ name means to be gathered for his purposes, gathered to be those here who participate in what he does at and from where he’s seated at God the Father’s right hand.  Jesus stands before his Father and ours never ceasing to worship and pray.  So, to be gathered in his name is to be gathered to worship and pray with him.  Then, as the Father sent him so he sends us into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit to embody his presence.  To do that we must abide in him otherwise we are powerless to do anything.  That brings me back to saying that abiding in Jesus requires relationship, a relationship that is found among the community of his disciples.  

To be a gathering of people in his name is also to say that for all of us each he has left an abiding mark in us, the Holy Spirit, a sense of his presence active in our lives by which he in the name of God the Father has proved himself faithful.  What I mean is that Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit, has touched us and proved himself faithful throughout our lives and especially when we walked through our darkest places.  

I once asked my grandfather if had he ever experienced the Holy Spirit.  His answer, “Back in the war, I just had to of.”  He was a machine gunner in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge.  His life expectancy in battle was three minutes, but he lived.  That was a pretty dark place filled with the shadow of death. Yet, he lived and he knew who got him through both the horror of war and having to live after having been through it.  Jesus was with him.

Moving on, Jesus is a friend, a faithful friend and we find him among his friends.  His presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, can be felt there.  Some of the Biblical ways of describing this presence is as light that can’t be seen, a weightiness but there’s nothing there.  It’s good to be in it.  It moves us.  It lifts our burdens.  It enlightens.  It heals.  It helps us to hear the truth about ourselves and gives us the strength to accept.  It speaks to us.  The personal devotional life is a profoundly appropriate response to Jesus abiding in and with us.  We enrich our fellowship together when we each practice the daily reading of and meditating upon Scripture, when we take the time to sit and listen for him, when we take time to pray.  

This abiding mark of his presence in us becomes outwardly visible as we love and are faithful to each other and to others outside our fellowship in the way that he has been to us.  Jesus gave one commandment to us, his friends, that we love one another as he has loved us.  That means we love unconditionally and sacrificially.  

Love for one another is what I appreciate most about small churches.  The abiding in Christ is really evident.  The love, the loyalty to one another is so profoundly deep and rich.  Larger churches have to work real hard to foster what happens naturally in smaller congregations as we simply go about being in Christ.  Our love and commitment to him is mirrored in our love and commitment to one another.

Just to give an example.  The Anglican Church in Chatsworth finally closed this time last year.  They were six women strong and all pushing the age of 90.  Many churches would have made a practical decision years ago to close up but they couldn’t.  These women had been through thick and thin together.  Loved and served together.  Grew old together. Grieved together.  Sat in those same familiar pews in that same familiar sanctuary together.  If you were to ask them about the presence of God in their lives, I think it would be inconceivable for them to separate it from their shared experience in that congregation.  So, it was hard to end it.  They abided in Christ together.  That relational bond is like no other.

Well, I think this profoundly deep fellowship that we have by abiding in Jesus is what he means when he says “I am the true vine.”  In the Greek it’s worded, “I am the vine, the real (true) vine.”  By this he means if we want real life, true life, then abiding in him is what we must do both as individuals and as congregations.  Reflecting back on my fiddle life and the “abiding” home the music of West Virginia is for me. Until here recently, I managed to abide in my musical abode for 17 years separated from where the music is alive in the “heavenly sphere” of those mountains.  But COVID is wreaking havoc on my relationship with my first love in fiddle music, but I’ll get back to it.  This pandemic is a trauma event for all of us.  It will take years for us to get over it and find a new normal.  

So also with our congregations, when we are able to be back together without COVID restrictions, it’s going to be different.  Things will not be the same.  If you have ever had to live through a traumatic event, you know it takes a while to get going again.  We’re going to have to figure out what it means to be the Church in our communities post-Pandemic.  That won’t be easy.  The most important thing we will need to do is abide in Christ – truly devote what energy we have just to getting together and fellowshipping in his name.  

The Greek word we translate as abide means “to stay and wait”.  After Jesus’ was raised the disciples didn’t do anything but gather together behind closed and usually locked doors.  They stayed and waited.  They prayed and ate together and occasionally Jesus showed up.  After that wilderness experience of forty days Jesus ascended and within days God poured the Holy Spirit upon them and they became the dynamic body of Christ in the world.  So also, when we are finally able to come together perhaps the way forward is to truly focus on how we are gathered in his name, on staying and waiting, and how he is in our midst and not let ourselves fall into the pattern of simply being church only on Sunday churches.  Let’s take advantage of what we have missed most about our churches…each other…and spend more time together…in Jesus’ name and let him come to us and restore our vim and vigor.  Amen.