Pregnant with New Creation

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Romans 8:9-28

I remember the ultrasound visits when my children were in-tummy.  The very first one with William is probably the most memorable simply because it was the first time we would have such an experience.  The technician lubed the ultrasound device and began to roll it around on a beginning to have a baby-bump belly. Then she focused in on William and there was the sound of a little heart beating.  We could see him move and he had little fingers.  He wasn’t even a big as the palm of my hand, but on the screen he was the biggest thing in our universe. Although, his disproportionately huge head and eyes had me a little suspicious that he was an alien baby.  

Pre-natal ultrasounds are surreal experiences, but one thing they do is help the reality set in that there’s a baby on the way, a new human life, a child, your child.  That realization brings with it a few questions?  What will this child be like?  What will it grow up to be?  What will it be like to be a parent?  What do we have to do now to get ready for it?  Some things are obvious – paint a room, get a crib, buy clothes and toys.  Go to the pre-natal classes.  For certain, the new baby means life is going to be very different; but, how different?  In all these questions one thing was certain – this baby is indeed coming.

Looking here at Romans this eager expectation of a baby about to be born, is what Paul says the Creation is presently experiencing.  The Creation eagerly waits with patient endurance and groaning like a woman in labour pain.  The baby is in there coming to term and in the violent miracle called birth it will arrive.  Creation is pregnant with a New Creation and will give girth to it.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia from Hebrew for your enjoyment.  The Hebrew word for the created Earth is “Adamah”.  This is the feminine version of the Hebrew word for humanity – “Adam”.  The first child born of Adamah was Adam and according to Genesis 1-3, he ruined/ruins things.  He was made in the image of God but tries to be God and that’s just twisted.  The result is that Adamah, like the parent of a disappointing child, is subject to the futility of the disease of sin and death.  But looking at Romans these new children that are about to appear, Paul says they are the children of God and they are not only made in God’s image but are actually indwelt by the Spirit of God.  When they are born the Creation will be free from its bondage to futility and decay.  It will be healed.

Who are these children of God?  They are us, the followers of Jesus who have been born from above by God’s pouring himself, the Holy Spirit, into us life-gluing us to Jesus.  By this bond, we partake of the new humanity that God the Father created when by the power of the Holy Spirit he raised Jesus from the dead, the firstborn of the New Creation. If an ultrasound of the belly of the Creation (Adamah) were taken, we, us, Christian community who in the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, are the image of Jesus.  We would be the alien-looking foetus obliviously growing away in the Creation’s belly until the time is right for us to be born by resurrection into Creation made new.

Now, I bet you folks haven’t heard anything like this before.  The image of pregnancy and the Creation giving birth to a new humanity by means of the resurrection probably wasn’t one of the stories we all heard in Sunday School when we were young.  Just as Genesis 1-3 is the foundational story that gives meaning to the present Creation, Romans chapter 8 is the foundational story that gives understanding of the New Creation that is coming.  Paul says that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.  This entails that the Holy Spirit with us is the proof this is really happening.  The day will come when God makes all creation new and all creation will be healed of the futility of sin and death and we will be raised from the dead as part of that healing.

The certainty of the arrival of this New Creation is the root of Christian hope.  A pregnant woman doesn’t look at her unbelievably expanded belly and say, “Oh, I hope I have a baby.”  No.  She says, “Oh my God.  I’m going to have a baby.”  Then she cycles through every emotion you can think of on a spectrum from panic to awe and begins to prepare for it.  Hope leads to action.  With the same certainty that a baby is going to be born from a very pregnant woman so the Creation is pregnant with a new humanity that is for now, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, embodied in the fellowship of the followers of Jesus.  God is preparing the Creation in ways that we can’t see even through telescopes or microscopes, in ways that we can’t begin to imagine.  The prophet Isaiah said the culmination of it all will be that “The Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).

Anyway, Paul also says that we the children of God also groan and wait eagerly for the Day of New Creation.  This waiting involves living by the Spirit, not by the flesh.  We don’t live pleasing or looking out for ourselves, rather we love our neighbours.  The Holy Spirit living in us teaches us who Jesus is and makes us want to instinctually live according to Jesus’ ways. The Spirit causes a profound discontent in us, a discontent with the world and the way it is.  Dissatisfied with the world, we can find ourselves in conflict with the world and ourselves.  If we act too much like Jesus, the world shames us.  If we act too much like the world, we feel ashamed of ourselves. 

We begin to suffer with Christ as we start to struggle with making our lives, our home life, our friendships, our relationships with neighbours more in the image of the New Creation coming, the healed Creation coming, the New and healed Humanity that’s about to be born.

         Waiting in eager expectation for the Day of New Creation also involves praying. Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that begins, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Praying this from the heart continuously and in turn living accordingly will bear its fruit and be the proof that a new day is surely coming. Amen.

Behind the Scenes

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Ephesians 1:15-23

Many of you may have memories of years past when on Ascension Sunday children would come from their Sunday School class, of which there were myriads, with a white Styrofoam cup turned upside down with cotton balls glued all over it.  There would be a paper cut-out of Jesus dangling from a string out the bottom of it.  When you pulled up on the string, Jesus would disappear into the cup as if to ascend into heaven amidst clouds of glory.  So cool.  The whole scenario just begs that be a spaceship involved.

Ascension Sunday.  Ascension is such a big word.  I wonder what it would be like to be a child and ponder this thing of Jesus ascending into heaven.  I think they would have a lot less trouble dealing with it than adults do.  We adults, we want scientific proof and stuff like that and tend to dismiss as preposterous a bodily resurrected from the dead human being ascending bodily to somewhere else.  But hey, try this on for size.  We like to imagine ourselves as living in a four-dimensional reality.  We can measure length, height, depth, and time, but that’s not it.  Since the discovery of the subatomic world, it’s pretty much an established fact that there are at least 11 dimensions to our universe or our four dimensions don’t add up.  There are seven more dimensions of reality that we can’t conceive of, but they are there.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.  Here's another one about things we can't see.  The electrons in the atoms we each are made of are at this very moment jumping in and out of existence.  “Where do they come from and do they go, nobody knows but Cotton-eyed Joe”.  If our electrons are popping in and out of our reality and presumably into another, how are we able even to physically exist.

When I consider reality at the sub-atomic level, well, Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead and bodily ascended to someplace called heaven does not seem all that impossible.  Rather, it is as possible and probable as the mathematical singularity we call the Black Hole which we now have pictures of to prove their existence.  Over a hundred years ago, black holes were only theoretical possibilities swirling around in Albert Einstein's nearly god-like brain and now we have pictures of them...and...it's theoretically possible that there are wee-teenie black holes just about everywhere blipping in and out of existence...like the one that just happened in my brain!

But anyway, I think children have simpler thoughts and questions about Jesus' Ascension that we would feel more comfortable pondering.  I can think of at least three obvious questions that deserve some time: Where did he go?  Does he still have a body?  And, what’s he doing there wherever it was he went?  I put on our child-like minds for a bit and ponder these.

To answer the first question Ephesians tells us that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).”  He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being God the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes.   To a child’s mind, that’s an informative enough answer and they would be ready to move on to question number two.  But some older children may want to ask where is and what is heaven or the heavenly places as Paul calls them.  

Well, briefly, I don't like to think of heaven as being up and far away.  Rather, I think of it as overlapping our reality and as being at the center of everything and hidden behind everything.  If you could somehow open a hole in reality right in front of you and stick your head in and look around, you would be looking into heaven.  And like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation, you would see God’s throne and on the throne would be a super fantabulous display of lights of every colour because we can’t see what God the Father looks like.  “Tis only the splendour of light hideth Thee”.  Seated to the right of God would be the best friend and brother you will ever have, Jesus.  You would see angels and choirs of angels and lots and lots of people from all times and all places and some of them you would know and they would all be singing, worshipping and praying, and you would have a feeling of being so loved and so special wash over you  - that’s the Holy Spirit - and you would want to just step right on through except it’s not your time.  When its your time, then you’ll go.

Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly place, then what’s his body like?  Is he a ghost? is another way of putting it.  The answer is that he still has a fully human body, resurrected all be it, and he has some scars.  Now try this on for size; Jesus’s ascension back into heaven is every bit as important as Christmas.  

At Christmas, we celebrate that God the Son became a human being just like us in every way.   We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God.  God the Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became a human person with a real body just like ours.  He thinks and feels just like we do.  With the Ascension, the reverse happens.  Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary took humanity, human flesh, back through into heaven.  As a result, God the Father from sends the Holy Spirit to come and live in us to glue us to Jesus.  It’s like life-glue.  There’s Elmer’s glue and Gorilla glue.  So also, there’s life-glue, the Holy Spirit, who glues us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' new, resurrected life, and slowly we become more like him until when our time comes, because of that life-glue we go straight on to be with Jesus and we get resurrected.  But also and until then, while we are on this side of things we are God’s beloved children just like Jesus is because we are life-glued to Jesus with the Holy Spirit.  And as I said, this life-glue makes us to become more living, more loving like Jesus and helps us to do here on earth what Jesus is doing there in heaven.

And that takes us to our third question: if we participate in Jesus’s life because we are life-glued to him and doing what he is doing, then what is he doing?  For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the Book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who while in continual worship of the Father prays like all get out for each of us.  He says, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18) protect them, provide for them, let them know you love them just as much as you love me.”  He constantly prays for us and our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to listen (Heb. 4:14-5:10).  This also is why it’s important for us to think of heaven as being behind everything rather than way far away, up there somewhere.  If God is right here behind everything, he is with us and hears our prayers real good.

In and with Jesus we pray all the time for the needs of the world as Jesus does.  As Jesus is always praying for us so also we should to strive to pray without ceasing.  I like to try to pray The Lord's Prayer as often as I can think to.  We pray in and with Jesus because we are life-glued to him, but sometimes we don't know what to pray and sometimes we are hurting so bad we can't pray.  Guess what?  When we don’t know what to pray, Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit is still praying in us always for what we need.  It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of God even God is praying for us.  Sit on that one for a while.

The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit.  We’ve talked about this already.  This life-glue is the power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side and that the same power is at work in us by the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit not only life-glues us to Jesus so that we share in the love that Jesus and the God the Father have for each other but the Holy Spirit also life-glues us to each other so that we can love each other and other people and even those we might call enemies like God loves us, like family.

As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit.  Jesus is always praying for us so we should be always praying.  Another thing Jesus is doing is worshipping.  In Jesus, life-glued to him and to each other we find our true worship, which is rooted in God the Son’s love of God the Father coupled with thankfulness and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into God’s very being through the Holy Spirit.  We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians.  We attend worship to worship the Father through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.  In and with Jesus, we worship, we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and pours his love on us.  

So, we worship and we pray.  One other thing, as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son sends us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission.  He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to fellowship with God in such a way as to make us to participate in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the life-glue of the Holy Spirit living in us.  This means we are to let ourselves be moulded by that love into a fellowship that proclaims and invites all people.  Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit into us we are life-glued to God in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace.  That’s what Jesus is doing and so that’s what we do and so there you have it. Amen.

 

Believing in Jesus

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John 20:19-29

What do we mean when we say “I believe in Jesus”?  First, what does it sound like to other people?  I know for a large segment of the population, when they hear somebody say “I believe in Jesus” they will think you are out of touch with Modernity and science and that you also believe the earth is flat.  They also don’t appreciate when Christians go around saying you can’t go to heaven when you die unless you believe in Jesus.  The coercive nature of doing that is counterproductive.  They will also expect that you’re going to play moral policeman and go judgemental on them.  People think those things because a large portion of the people in the last couple of centuries who have said, “I believe in Jesus”, have been just like that – anti-scientific, anti-questioning, coercive, and power hungry – rather than behaving as if they actually know and abide in Jesus.

Moreover, belief or faith in this age of science and psychology is a rough row to hoe.  Belief in something or someone you can’t see is thought to be ridiculous, delusional even.  If it can’t be seen, touched, measured, or proven by math, then it’s not real and your belief therefore is really just your fantasy or delusion.  But then there’s always that politically correct tag on, “if that’s what helps you keep your world together, then who am I to judge.”  Your truth is your truth and mine is mine. 

Oddly, looking here at John’s Gospel, this relationship between belief and having evidence to prove it seems to be what’s behind Jesus’ conversation with Thomas.  Thomas believed in Jesus.  He followed Jesus around and participated in Jesus’ ministry.  His belief in Jesus as the Messiah and what Jesus was about in initiating the Kingdom of God or in John’s Gospel “Eternal life” was likely shattered by Jesus’ death.  But then the others tell him that Jesus has been raised from the dead.  Being the type who needs evidence, Thomas is not going to believe it, until he sees it, until he can touch the wounds that killed Jesus in a Jesus who now lives.  

Thomas’ response is reflective of what Greeks and Romans thought to be true about this world.  They believed that bodily resurrection is impossible.  People don’t rise from the dead.  Indeed, why would you want to?  Why would you want a second go at this sick, twisted world?  They believed that physical matter, especially bodies, is bad, evil, and gross.  Things change, rot, and stink and hurt.  Spirit and spiritual, as are the gods, is the true good.  Becoming an immortal spirit should have been Jesus’ destiny to the Greeks.  If Jesus was God or the Son of God, he certainly would have gone to the spiritual realm after death, not come back to the physical. 

Informed by that Greek sort of mindset, Thomas exclaims, “I won’t believe God raised Jesus from the dead unless I see the evidence, i.e. touch the wounds on the physical body of the crucified yet now living Jesus.”  Jesus gave him the proof in what is probably the most humorous moment in John’s Gospel.  “Put your hand here in my side, Tom.  You’ll know I’m for real when you touch my guts.”  

In response to Thomas’ Greekness, Jesus’ response to him is quite Hebrew.  The Jews believed God created the world and that it was very good.  It’s just diseased by sin, a disease which culminates in death.  If Jesus is bodily raised from the dead, the disease is cured, sin forgiven, and death defeated.  Moreover, if it was God who raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus is the Truth because God has validated him.  What God was doing in, through, and as Jesus is as sure and as real as the rocks that are the very foundation of the very good earth, as sure and as real as life itself and more powerful than death even.  

So, to believe in Jesus the Resurrected One, is to say I believe he is the heart and root of Creation and of life.  Participating in his ministry is what everything is all about, what life is all about.  To not participate in Jesus’ ministry, to not be his disciple, is to perish.  Jesus and his ministry are the root of purpose in God’s very good creation.  John started his Gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”  That’s the way he started it and pretty much how he ended it.  Jesus is the root of reality, the source of life around whom we must orient our lives if we want to have true life.  Believing in Jesus is orienting your life around him and his life.

Well, now that you’re all thoroughly philosophized and looking like a deer in the headlights, let me tell you something more about what it is to believe.  In New Testament Greek, the word we translate as believe, “pisteuw” and the noun form, “pistis”, belief, is also the same word we translate as faith and being faithful.  It is a complicated word family because we really don’t have a good word in English to translate the concept the word family carried in the first century.  Being loyal is probably the most accurate way to translate it.  Believing in Jesus is being loyal to Jesus.

A few years ago, I spent a chunk of money on a thick book that I actually read that is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the “pist-” word family.  Something I find really cool, but realize you might not and that’s okay, is that pretty much every book, letter, engraving, sales receipt, and scribbling of a note that is in the Greek language from the several centuries before and after Jesus are now typed into a computer database word by word.  You can do a word search that’s pretty incredible with it.  You can type in the word “cup” and give it a couple days and it will provide you with a report of pretty much every known use of the word “cup” in the Greek world way back then.  The author of this book did that with the faith word in Greek and found some interesting stuff.  

One thing I found really interesting is that this word that we associate most readily with faith in God, with a religious religious context, was actually quite secular in its use.  Our dear word for faith, for belief, is the word they used to describe the relationship between crime lords and their thugs.  The very loyal thug in essence believed in their crime lord much the same way as Christians believed in Jesus.  It was a relationship rooted in owed loyalty and reward.  The crime lord gained the thug’s loyalty usually by saving their lives, and in an odd sort of way he included them in his family, he continued to provide for them and their families, and did them favours in response to their acts of loyalty.  Betrayal of this benevolence was punishable by death or something worse.  I bet you have never thought of God the Father as being God the Godfather?  Heh. Heh.

Back then a Christian saying “I believe in Jesus” meant more or less the same thing as a thug saying “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus”, his crime boss.  Believing, having faith, meant way more than simply believing in the existence of something you can’t see or touch.  Believing means being loyal with the totality of your life.  The thug wouldn’t have said “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus even though I can’t see or touch him”.  He would have said, “I am loyal to Corrupticus Maximus even unto death.”

But in all seriousness, God acts in our lives much like a crime lord would have to gain our loyalty but truly for our good.  God answers prayers.  God heals.  God is there with a still, small voice when we need to know what to do.  God acts to deliver us in the real muck of our broken lives.  Yet there’s more.  In, through, and as Jesus and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit God has done something infinitely more.  We know and abide in Jesus.  We have a real and living connection with him.  We know ourselves to be the beloved children of the Father just as Jesus knows himself to be.  A crime Lord didn’t love his thugs.  Yet, God loves us as his own beloved children and we know it and feel it because of God’s faithfulness to us and because of the love we find in the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and in the way we love each other.  In Christ, God is way more loyal to us than we can ever be to him.  God doesn’t hold it over our heads that we owe him our lives and threaten us with death if we don’t do what he wants.  Rather, God works graciously in our lives until we have the love for him that Jesus has so that we live to please God simply because we love him and those he calls us to love and serve.  

To believe in Jesus is to be loyal to him with our lives because we know and love him because he knows and loves us so much more than we could ever love him.  Even when we prove ourselves disloyal to him, he doesn’t “get us” like a crime lord would.  Instead, he continues to be loyal to us and works to heal us of what caused the disloyalty.  Quite often that can be a painful thing to grow through but it’s always for our healing and for drawing us closer to himself so that we know and love him more.  

In closing, we truly are blessed because we don’t see him.  We love him and are loyal to him because of his saving and gracious work and presence in our lives and in our very selves.  He lives in us!  By gift of the Holy Spirit, he is in us working to reveal who he is to us.  We get to know him through and through and that is more than just touching some scars for proof of his existence.  Amen.