Thy Kingdom Come

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Matthew 6:10; Matthew 11:1-5

So, there sat John the Baptist in prison.  The Empire struck back, one could say.  King Herod’s wife, Herodias, who was also the wife of Herod’s brother, did not like this hermit prophet of Gawd meddling in her morality.  So, she got Herod to arrest him.  He was not under a death sentence, but the likelihood of his getting out was nil unless the Messiah got things rolling, which meant, Cousin Jesus, if he is the Messiah, needed to get on with it…and what would the “it” be?  The Kingdom of God – “Thy Kingdom come.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven”.  But Jesus seemed to be up to something else.

I think that to John, Jesus was probably a bit of an enigma.  He didn’t live up to the Messianic expectations of the day.  Faithful Jews were expecting an overthrow of their Roman occupiers and a cleanup of their corrupted royals and the Jerusalem temple authorities and their big business religion.  But Jesus of Nazareth, he wasn’t exactly the likes of his Hebrew namesake Joshua who led the people across the Jordan River to a conquest of Canaan’s Land.  Jesus wasn’t arming up to take over.  Instead, crowds were flocking to Jesus, but he was more of a circus sideshow than a “Messiah” – a Deliverer.  He healed people, cast out demons, raised the dead, even calmed a stormy Sea of Galilee.  He had some great “debates” with the religious authorities and to their chagrin pronounced forgiveness of sins...and he kept company with all the wrong people (whores, revenuers, and fishermen).  To those powers that be (the royals) he was more of a sought after source of entertainment than the harbinger of the Kingdom of God that would unseat them.  The Romans hardly paid him any attention.  Although, a centurion did once solicit Jesus’ to heal his dying son.  He didn’t feel that Jesus needed to come to his house to do it, only just speak the word and it would be done akin to how this centurion gave orders.  Jesus did just that and said that he’d never seen such great faith in Israel. The enemy having greater faith than the people you’re supposed to deliver?  And Jesus even taught to pray for your enemies and if forced to carry a Roman soldier’s stuff, carry it the extra mile.  He was no threat to the Romans, but the size of the crowds could be concerning.  Everywhere Jesus went through the things he said and did great things happened, but was it the Kingdom of God? 

So, in his impatience John sent some of his disciples to put the question to Jesus, “Are you the One, the Messiah who is coming, or should we wait for another?”  Jesus told them to go back and tell John exactly what they were hearing and seeing.  Then, and just to make sure they got it right, Jesus gave them a list of things that he was doing that the prophets of old and particularly the Prophet Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would do.  Yet, they were not only the Messiah’s doings, but things God himself said he would do when he himself came to deliver his people; acts that were a reversal of the universal maladies caused by sin, a healing of more than just Israelite national and religious problems.  These were the healings of the very signs that something had gone deadly wrong in God’s good creation.

What did these disciples of John hear?  I imagine they were hearing the sound of people praising God with great joy, a sound so loud that it seemed to be the voice of all creation resounding in victory at the arrival of its Saviour; rejoicing that the glory of God had returned to the Land of Israel.  It was like the wanton wasteland of the dry wilderness of humanity becoming lush, breaking forth and blossoming like the dry riverbeds in the Palestinian wilderness coming into blossom in spring just after the end-of-winter flooding.  (I’ve seen that and it’s beautiful.)  If you have ever heard Middle Eastern people when worship comes on them, you know what I mean.  It is emotional, loud, and powerfully joyful.  There’s drums and dancing and people loudly shrieking “halalalalala”.

So, if that’s what John’s disciples heard, what did they see?  What could have caused all that loud praising?  Well, Jesus doing what God said he himself would do when he himself came to deliver not only his people but also and more so the whole creation from oppression by sin and death.  Weak hands were strengthening.  Shaking knees were steadying.  Jesus was opening the eyes of the blind and unstopping the ears of the deaf.  He was making the lame to leap like deer and loosing the tongues of the mute so they could praise.  He was cleansing the lepers and even raising the dead.  And what’s more, Jesus was also sending out his own disciples ahead of him and they did these things too as if to make a highway in the desert so that God’s people could come to him.  Joy and gladness were overtaking God’s people.  Sorrow and sighing were fleeing.  John’s disciples were seeing and hearing Isaiah 35 manifesting all around Jesus everywhere he went.  What better news could there be for the poor in the land than these signs of “Immanuel” – God is with us!?  “Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  That’s what they were hearing and seeing.

Jesus told John’s disciples to go report what they hear and see and also sent them back with a little kick in the pants for John.  Tell John, “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  If I had to paraphrase that, it would be, “John, I am who I am and I will do as I am.  I am God and you are not.  I may not be doing what you think ‘God’ ought to do.  But I am ‘God with you’.  Keep being faithful, John.  Don’t stop believing.”  

When I try to imagine what it was like back then I find myself quite challenged.  The “Church” today is transitioning into something different than what it has been.  We used to be a, if not the, foundational institution in our culture.  But now we are not necessary to the public good anymore, at least not in the eyes of the public.  To quote somebody, I don’t know who – “We’re not the Mainline church anymore.  We are the Sideline church.”  In this time of transition, I, like John the Baptist, would like to know what Jesus is up to.  I feel like I’m blind to seeing what Jesus is doing.  I feel deaf to his voice and powerless to leap.  Churches are dying; I want to see them raised to new life. Where is Jesus in all this?  Where’s the Holy Spirit?  What’s God up to?  God is with us.  This is all part of his plan.  But what is he up to?  Where are we going?  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

The position the church finds itself in now in our culture is very much like what it was in the first century?  So we must ask, why did the early church spread so far and wide and not get snuffed out?  Well, they were Resurrection people.  They unquestionably knew that the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ had in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead.  They knew this because God the Father had poured that same Holy Spirit upon (into) them and life-glued them to Jesus and changed them, indeed raised them to new life.  They thought of themselves as an actual new humanity which they called “in Christ” as opposed to the old humanity they called “in Adam”.  Empowered by the Holy Spirit, they faithfully lived as New Creation in the midst of the Old.  Their way of life was marked by the way of the cross – unconditional, selfless, sacrificial love.  Their fellowship was (and this is attested to by non-Christian 1st and 2nd Century historians) distinguished as being filled with compassion, peaceful, and just.

The Apostle Paul summed it up when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by (in) the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).  What the people in the crowds experienced as physically restored sight, hearing, and abilities, the early Christians experienced as new life “in Christ”.  These early Christians worshipped together and served their communities together as living witnesses and testimony to the fact that the Kingdom of God was breaking in on earth.  They did this in a culture that was contrary to them and often persecuted them.

Paul also said in Philippians, “My goal is to know him (Jesus) and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death” (Phil. 3:10).  He didn’t say, “I just want to be a good person, and have my private beliefs, and hope for heaven when I die if anything.”  He desired personal transformation that was in accordance with a cross-formed way of faithfulness.  

This hunger for personal transformation in Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit is where we, the church, need to be right now in this transforming transition.  This hunger is at the heart of what it means to pray, “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  The Kingdom of God is not that Middle Ages crusading against other religions that we did.  It is not a Kingdom or nation ruled by the Church as we try to do.  It is not a liberal social/political agenda to eliminate poverty, educate everybody, and provide healthcare to everyone (though I’m partial to that).  It’s not a voting block that seeks by any means necessary to instill moral and economic conservatism in a nation by ruling that nation.  It is seeking to know Jesus who is with us in the presence of the Holy Spirit with the power to heal, to free, to make us leap and praise, and move us to love as he loves.  Where he is, there is the kingdom.  Pray for it.  Amen.

 

About That Father and Son Language

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Job 1:1-5; Galatians 3:26-4:7

At the end of last week’s sermon, I touched on the subject of how problematic it can be today to refer to God in the Biblical and traditional Trinitarian terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and particularly confession of God as Father.  Indeed, with women’s rights issues and the reality of abusive or neglectful fathers one should rightfully question why the Christian church doesn’t entirely abandon our creedal confession that we believe in God the Father.  In fact, many within the faith have understandably done just that but since have been groping to find a name for God that reflects the fullness of the relationship we have with God in Christ Jesus through the presence of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us each and among us together. 

 Moreover and unfortunately, those who still cling to the creedal confession, such as myself, are dismissed as conservative Evangelicals, or fundamentalists, or just plain narrow-minded, uninformed, power-mongering traditionalists.  And even more unfortunately, in many cases that dismissal is not uncalled-for.  There are many out there who assert the name Father because they are one of the above and have never thought through these painful issues much less acknowledged them and then with narrow-minded authoritarianism they insist upon calling God Father and coercively use the fear of punishment to keep people in line with male dominance in their churches.  

On the other hand, there are people like British theologian Tom Smail who in his book The Forgotten Father: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Gospel writes powerfully about our discovering who we are as persons.  He says: “We find out who we are not by introspection or psychological technique but by an existential discovery of our relationship to God.  Far more ultimately significant than the content of our subconscious or the influence of our inheritance or environment is the fact that in Christ God has made himself our Father and us his children.  For that to come home to us in the power of the Spirit is one of the most healing things that can ever happen to us…this discovery is a charismatic gift.”  He is basically saying that we truly do not know who we are until we discover ourselves in relationship to God and the most healing aspect of that discovery is coming upon the revelation that God has made himself our Father and us his children through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  

That’s a pretty bold statement and I will readily admit that I agree with him.  Myself, when I graduated seminary, I had a very minimal understanding of God as Trinity.  I thought, “doesn’t everybody know that God’s just God, our Friend?  Why do we need the Trinity and that antiquated if not abusive Father/Son language other than it makes for a good way to organize our talk about what God has done for us?”  I was all for confessing God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer or just God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.  My reason truly was that using the Father/Son language was not fair to women and especially to people who have been abused by their fathers.  

Needless to say, nearly 25 years ago I had a revelation, so to speak, on the matter.  What Tom Smail said hit home.  I had lost my own father to cancer, gone through a divorce, and in the midst of all that got into a doctor of ministry program that was centered on rediscovering the Trinity…all were oddly coincidental.  Probably the greatest pain that I suffered going through the divorce was that my father, who was probably the most significant relational bond in my life, was not there to talk to.  What ensued was not my discovering that since Dad was gone I could talk to my heavenly Father.  That’s nothing more than coping out of developing new relationships.  In fact, what happened was I found that the need for a father in my life began to be filled by other people and in many cases by my stepfather.  What happened was bigger than I had a father-shaped hole.  Through the events that ensued I began to realize how utterly and ultimately my life was in the hands of God the Father who was making it clear to me that he wanted what was best for me and was going to make that happen not only through the events of my life but also in helping me heal from many of the wounds I had accumulated in life and he continues to do so.  I learned that the only possession I have in life is to utterly trust in my heavenly Father for my well-being and to do what he was showing me to do to the best of my ability.  That’s called faith/faithfulness  

In the midst of it I learned the nature of what it was to be God’s child and that is to put my own perceived wants and needs and what I thought was best for me on the shelf and just let God be God.  His promise was to heal me and to give me the desires of my heart.  To be God’s child is to learn the nature of his Son, Christ Jesus, to learn not to assert yourself in the pursuit of your own wants and needs but rather to put the needs of others first as God shows them to you.  Miraculously, along the way we start to heal and in time the Father gives what he’s promised.

Now, where I’m going with all of this is to say that we do God and our relationship with God a serious injustice when we project our Father images and “Daddy” issues upon him.  What is meant by Father in the Bible and by the early church theologians has little to do with our own ideas and culturally contrived understandings of fatherhood and the male gender particularly as they exist now in the 21^st Century.  Why we call God Father also has nothing to do with all that.  Christianity’s most basic reason for confessing God as Father is that Jesus did and invited us to do so as well.  

Now, before someone says “that’s simplistic” we do have to ask what did Jesus mean in calling God Father.  What’s this whole Father/Son thing about?  In the stories of the virgin birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke we learn that Jesus had no earthly father other than to be adopted by Joseph, the husband of Mary.  Joseph was Jesus’ earthly father for all intents and purposes.  With the Father/Son talk Jesus was pointing us to something other than a father-shaped hole in our lives.  The answer to what Jesus means with the Father/Son relationship he has with God and our inclusion in it I think can be fairly clearly addressed by looking here at Job.

If you survey the Bible for a definition of the role of a father you will find that a father brings a people into existence, provides them with an inheritance, disciplines or rears them rightly as his children, has faith, and provides for his children to have a right relationship to God.  Job, by this definition was an excellent father and as such reflected the nature of God the Father quite clearly.  In fact, I think that’s why Job suffered so badly.  Satan particularly wanted a piece of him because to get Job, the father par excellence, to curse God and die would be a painful affront to God the Father.  Job had a family of ten, a great inheritance to pass on, and most importantly it was his custom to offer sacrifices on behalf of his children should they in some ways have offended God.

These things in particular are what God the Father has done for us.  He has brought us into existence by giving us life and by bringing us together as his children through the new life given to us through Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.  He gives us an inheritance, which is nothing short of his very self, the wealth of his great love and provision through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  His faith is his own faithfulness which he cannot betray.  God has provided for us to be rightly related to him through the sacrificial and life-giving death of his own Son and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  When we pray to our Father, we notice we have a lot to be thankful for.

So, about the Son language.  It is no secret that in the Biblical world sons had rights and privileges that daughters did not.  Sons had a relationship with their fathers that daughters did not.  Daughters couldn’t hold property and instead they were more or less themselves property that was sold or traded between families in a manner similar to breeding stock.  Inheritances almost always passed to sons, particularly the family land.  Sons carried on the family name.  The oldest son of the family in particular had a special relationship with the father and received the bulk of the inheritance and the land.  But this didn’t mean that fathers didn’t love their daughters as much as their sons.  It was a different time with different laws and different customs.  

The rights of daughters and women have changed greatly but slowly over the last twenty centuries and, believe it or not, the church has played a great role in the trend to equality.  In our Galatians passage, translators make a problematic mistake by using the word children instead of the word sons to translate how Paul describes our relationship to God.  The word in Greek is the word for son not the word for children.  I think Paul is quite intentionally calling everyone in the church, both men and women, a son of God and not just a child of God.  The effect of that act was to give women, to give daughters, the same rights in the church, in Christ, as men, as sons.  

Paul says we are all sons of God through faith.  There is neither slave nor free.  Slaves are now elevated to have the rights of sons.  There is neither Greek nor Jew.  Gentiles are now elevated to the status of sons.  There is neither male nor female.  Women, daughters, are now elevated to the status of sons.  The reason being men and women have faith in God just the same.  Yes, we are all God’s children, but more so, we all have the rights of sons, the highest status a child could have in a family in that day…except for first-born son.  That status belongs to Jesus and he is generous in what he shares with us.  He gives to us what the Father gives to him, the Holy Spirit.  The Father listens to us just as he listens to Jesus.  This may be hard for you to wrap your head around, but our Father loves us each, us adopted children, as much as he does Jesus, the first-born.  Such is our Father in heaven to whom we pray.  So, if you want to know the most important thing about who you are, you are a beloved child of God the Father, Almighty Maker of Heaven and earth and your big brother loves you so much as to give his life for you and to you.  Trust that love.  Amen.

 

Our Father

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Matthew 6:9; Luke 15:11-27; Galatians 3:26-4:7

Jesus taught us to call on God in the Lord’s Prayer as “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be your name.”  It should not then surprise us that the two oldest statements of what Christians believe, the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed both begin basically the same; "We believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker of heaven and earth."  Both creeds and the prayer make the simple statement that we place our trust and give our loyalty to God, a God who has revealed himself by means of Jesus Christ, as Father. 

It should tweak our ears just a bit that the first thing we Christians have to say about God is that he is our Father.  Simply put, Jesus called him that and instructed us to do so as well.  But keep in mind Jesus is also God, God the Son and there’s also God the Holy Spirit.  The Three are the One God, but there is a sort of primacy given to God the Father.  So, let’s look at that today. 

That our statements of fidelity begin with our giving our allegiance to God the Father is important.  It means that everything we say after that is informed by who we say God is.  That God is Father shapes everything else we have to say about God and creation, salvation, the Kingdom of God, the Church, the resurrection from the dead, and the world to come.  Our relationship to God is different if God is “Our Father” as opposed to simply being “the Almighty”.  The Christian Faith becomes something altogether un-Christian if we set the Father aside and simply pledge allegiance to “the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth.”  When Christianity has done that over the centuries, it tends to become a state religion that resembles Nazi Germany.  

That God is “our Father” puts a family bond, a family tie, at the heart of the faith.  If that bond is ignored or forgotten then we lose what is at the heart of the Christian faith.  We lose the reason Jesus, God the Son, became human which was to reveal the love of the Father and make us able to share in the relationship that he has with his Father in the Holy Spirit.  The biggest of the big pictures that I can give you of what the Christian faith is is that Jesus came to reveal to us the love of the Father and make us able to share in the relationship that he has with his Father.  Simply put, we are adopted into their relationship.  Through allegiance to Jesus made possible by our being life-glued to him by the presence of the Holy Spirit coming into us and among us, we are now adopted into the loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit.  We are adopted children of the Father, siblings of the Son by the bond of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

Being siblings who are life-glued to Jesus by the Holy Spirit means that what Jesus is by nature, we are and are becoming by grace – the children of God the Father who willingly trust and live for him because we know the Father’s love.  As God's children, the presence of his Spirit in us is changing us to be like Jesus. This change happens now in a change of heart and mind in us to want to be and to do what our Father wants of us and it will become complete after we have been raised from the dead into a new heaven and a new earth. Just as Jesus is in communion with God the Father and prays to his Father, so also, we can stand in the presence of our Father with him and pray with him.  With the same love that Jesus has for his Father, so we also can with him love and praise our Father.  

This change from being estranged and pridefully at enmity with a God we can’t know to being adopted as our Father’s beloved children is what we mean by salvation. We have been saved by God's own initiative and action from the deathly implication of hearts and minds that are bent on self-destruction through doing and being what we want to be do and be. God created humanity to live in communion with God and one another in self-giving, humble, unconditional love but instead, like cancers, we instinctively and by choice seek to do simply what pleases ourselves and this has broken the communion. 

God the Father has saved us from this brokenness by sending his Son to become one of us. The very fact that God has become human and how that played out in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth has healed humanity and he shares this healing with us now by including us in himself by giving us the Holy Spirit. As God's children we can now call out to God in devotion saying Abba, which means "dear Father", and sit in his presence and make requests of him and in grateful praise and adoration, we can worship God our Father.  God the Father in his great love for us has given us access to his love through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit and that changes us, heals us, restores us to true communion with God and one another. That's the Christian faith in a nutshell. 

Now, saying that the Christian faith is really about the love of the Father may sound new to you. I think that many of us have been churched into a Christian faith that is defined by the so-called conversion experience of the Prodigal Son as it is in this parable.  You know, here's this rebellious little snot wanting to break off from the family and go and make it on his own.  So, he gets his father to give him his inheritance; an act that in essence was wishing his father dead.  Then he heads off to the far country and winds up grossly wasting it all away.  After hitting rock bottom, he comes to his senses and decides he'll just go make things right with his father.  He would be better off being a servant in his father’s house than a starving servant on a pig farm.  He plans his little prayer of repentance so that he will be all ready to beg for forgiveness when he sees his father.  Hopefully, he can convince his father that he just might be sincere.  But if you're really paying attention here, he's not. He's just looking for a guaranteed meal.  He heads home to makes things right.  That sounds like the Gospel we’re accustomed to hearing: we’re sinners who need to repent and get it right with God so that things will go well with us.

Well, what happens next in the story is unexpected.  The father has been watching and waiting and waiting and watching for his son.  When the father sees him at a distance, instead of remaining aloof for a few days and then demanding his son come and beg for a forgiveness the father may or may not grant, the old man takes off running across the fields to embrace his son who had wished him dead and then wasted everything.  Surprisingly, the father has no interest in the son’s little, contrived prayer of repentance nor with what the son has done with his inheritance. He's just so happy his lost son has come home and very graciously restores him to the family with a robe, a ring, and a feast.

I have heard too many sermons from this parable based on how we are supposed to be like this prodigal son and come to our senses and come home when the parable really is about the love of the father.  The love of the Father is so great that he sees past the wasted life of the prodigal and even the hypocrisy of the brother who stayed around. They are still one family whom he loves very much.  Too many sermons I have heard telling us to get right with God and come home so that we can enjoy his love when the fact of the matter is that our Father never stops loving us and there is nothing we can do to earn that love.  We can blow it, totally blow it, but even that doesn’t change God's love for us.  

The immeasurable love of the Father and our inclusion in it by his grace is what the Christian faith is about.  No decision or repenting on our part could ever make us right with God. We are already right with God through Christ Jesus. We just have to show up for the inheritance.  Too much of Christianity says you are not a Christian unless you've had a conversion experience meaning you've come to your senses about the cruddy life you've been living and are now going to live so God can use you.  That's not a conversion experience.  Deciding to get it right with Jesus by cleaning up your act so you can go to heaven is not conversion.  Please note that the Prodigal Son does not go home because he's realized his father's love for him.  He goes home because he knows it's a guaranteed decent meal. He's not converted.  He’s just using his father to get by.  Conversion happens when we’re slapped in the face with the faithfulness and love of our Father.

I'll get off that, and close with a thought about calling God Father. I am aware that in our day many have great difficulty associating God with the concept of a father. There have been too many fathers who have failed and failed miserably and even maliciously at being a father. They have been so hurtful that many people are not able to associate the word father with any concept of love. On top of that, it's not a very inclusive term. There are many who think calling God Father only reinforces patriarchal systems that have plagued humanity from the beginning of time with the abuse of women. 

We do not confess God as Father to reinforce misogyny nor in ignorance of the pain that so many have suffered at the hands of their father or because of the absence of a father.  We confess God as Father because Jesus did and Jesus did so to describe a particular kind of relationship he had with his God whom he called Father, a relationship which he brings us into and by which we are healed. I am not a Fundamentalist for calling God Father. Personally, I have come a long way around on this myself.  Years ago, I would have whole-heartedly suggested we find another name for God.  But I have discovered that if we change the names, it changes the nature of the relationship God has brought us into with himself.  God has included us in the loving Communion of God’s self, the loving family-like communion of Father Son and Holy Spirit of which our Fathers sits at the head of the table with a look of love in his eyes that we will never comprehend other than to know that knowing it changes everything. Amen. 

Hallowed Be Your Name

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Matthew 6:7-13

You folks may remember back in the year 1977 ABC ran a miniseries called Roots which told the story of a young man named Kunta Kinte.  There was a remake in 2016 by the same name.  Kunta Kinte was a Mandinka man from Gambia captured by white slave traders in the early 1760’s.  He was taken to America and lived enslaved on a plantation in Virginia until he died in 1822.  

The naming and renaming of Kunta Kinte is significant in the story.  In the 2016 miniseries shortly after his birth his father takes him out on a dark, beautifully starry night and tells him, “You must hear your name first.  You are Kunta Kinte, son of…..You must always honour your ancestors, the ones who love you and watch over you.  Your name is your spirit.  Your name is your shield.” He then holds the baby up to the starry night sky and says “Allah Akbar” which means “God is Great” and then says to the baby, “Behold, Kunta Kinte, the only one who is greater than you.”  When Kunta Kinte was captured, it is said that his father wrote on paper that his name will be remembered until the end of time.  Well, it’s been remembered for two centuries now.  

Kunta Kinte was “the slave who fought back”.  He tried to escape four times and then they cut off half his right foot.  Moreover, he repeatedly refused to let himself be called by his slave name which was Toby.  That all ended with a scene of him tied up in front of everyone and being whipped with a bullwhip.  The whipper would say “What’s your name?”  He would answer, “Kunta Kinte” and get whipped for it.  Finally after being whipped nearly dead, he broke and said the name, “Toby”.  An older slave named Fiddler, his friend/father/mentor, then cut him down, gave him some water, and tried to comfort him saying, “Don’t you care what that white man call you.  Make you say Toby but you can’t.  You know who you be, Kunta.  That’s who you always be. Kunta Kinte.”  Though Kunta Kinte was beat into submission, he still held out to near death and he didn’t let that moment of submission define him.  He remained the staunchly proud and defiant Kunta Kinte.

Names and naming probably aren’t as important to us today as they were long ago and still are in more traditional cultures.  Your name was more than a label.  It was your essential being.  It shaped your personality.  You took on some of the characteristics of the name.  (I guess it’s quite unfortunate my name is Randy.)  For example, Jesus renamed a disciple named Simon giving him the name Cephas in Aramaic and Petra in Greek or Peter as we know him which meant “Rock” because that reflected his character and his leadership role among the disciples.  

Your name tied you to your ancestors.  If you were named after a deceased relative, you were to develop aspects of that relatives character and you were tagged to assume the role that relative played in the clan.  My middle name, Stuart, is the same one my great-grandmother had.  She was Lena Stuart Benson nee Thompson born 1896.  S-T-U-A-R-T would associate us with Scottish Highlanders, Jacobites back in the 1700’s who wanted the Stuart Lineage restored on the British throne.  Interestingly, my great-grandmother died on my birthday.  Some of my Chesley folks will perk up when the name Thompson is mentioned, but I’m reasonably sure it was spelled with a “P” while most around here lack the “P”.  Names can carry a lot of history.  There’s a lot in a name.

When it came to gods, names were also important.  You may remember in the story of Moses and the Burning Bush how Moses repeatedly tried to get God to tell him his name.  God finally got fed up with him and told him the name “Yahweh” which is a form of the verb “to be” and means “I am who I am.”  Moses wanted to know God’s name because people back then believed that you needed the name of the god to be able to call on that god.  Being able to invoke the name of a particular god by saying and acting in its name gave a person a certain amount of power over that God as well.  By revealing his name to Moses as Yahweh, God was basically saying “I am who I am and you can’t control me.”  In essence, it was a nameless name.  Being able to invoke the name of more powerful gods made one more powerful as well.  It was a very bold move, maybe even a gamble, to declare to have done something in the name of a particular god.  If you were Greek and went to war at sea, you would certainly want Poseidon, the god of the sea, on your side.  Aries, the god of war, wouldn’t have been enough.  Every god was a god of something so you had to know the names of the gods and what god did what so you could stay in their good graces enough to call on them.  

I hope you are kind of getting the feeling for the importance of names and the role of naming in the ancient world with respect to ourselves and our names and to the gods.  For me, it feels hard to define the importance because in our culture, God forbid, somebody’s identity be shaped by the external actions of other people such as naming.  Our culture at its extreme would opt not to name a child, but rather let it grow up and discover who it is and then let it name itself and make its own name great.  Our culture’s emphasis on “I am becoming who I am,” quite frankly broaches on blasphemy.  It puts me, myself, and I and everything about me in the place of God.  But that’s a sermon for another day.  Let’s look at the Lord’s Prayer and how Jesus taught us to address God.

The Prayer begins, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be your name.”  I’m going to reserve the Father talk for next week which is Father’s Day and instead look at the “hallowed be your name” part.  I hope you can grasp that when we mention God’s name, we’re essentially talking about who God is – God’s personality – and about God’s will and power to get things done.  The only name for God that Jesus gives us here at the opening of the Prayer is “Our Father”, which is a pretty bold if not brazen way to address God or any god for that matter.  Outside of that, the name remains nameless, so to speak, void of defining characteristics.  Jesus just says hallowed be your name.

So, what does “hallowed” mean?  Hallowed means to make holy.  The word holy can be confused with things like moral purity or good in every kind of way.  But its meaning is really simple.  It just means “set apart” for a purpose.  For a person to be holy means that person is set aside for God’s purposes.  For our Father to be holy means that God is utterly set apart from the way things are in this creation as it is infected by the disease of sin which culminates in death.  So also, God is not pridefully bent on self-annihilation as humanity is.  God does not deal in death.  God is set apart from all that.

God is hallowed also in that Our Father is utterly different from all the other gods.  The other gods didn’t care about human beings or the creation.  We are just tools and pawns in the grand soap opera of narcissists that was the behind-the-scenes world of Mt. Olympus.  The gods must be bought off.  Whether or not you performed a ritual correctly dictated whether that god would help you.  The gods were fickle, caring only about themselves.  Our Father, on the other hand, loves us each as much as he does his only begotten Son, Jesus, who died for us, was raised for us, and rules for us.  God works all things to the good for those who love him. God delights in us.  Smiles over us.  The God who created all things is for us simply because he loves us.  God is partial to the weak, the poor, the widow, the orphan.  There is no other god we could describe that way.  Our Father is the God who heals, cleanses, forgives, restores, delivers, raises the dead, gives reason to rejoice, reconciles, gives new life.  He dwells in and among his people because he wants to.  I could go on.  Our Father is totally unlike, totally separate from the other gods.  Totally not like them.  Our God is holy.

One more thing to say about God’s name being hallowed, God is totally not like us.  God is God and we are not.  Unlike in the ancient world we can’t do rituals or make bargains with God to get God to do what we want.  We have to accept what God wants for us, which is what is for our best.  The God of all creation is for us because God loves us beyond what we can understand.  This is where we would move on to praying “Your kingdom come, your will be done” but that sermon is a couple of weeks away.

To wind this down, it is important for us to know the personality, the character, the “way”, the nature of the God we pray to.  Our God, “our Father”, is not a capricious narcissist God who has to be bargained with or bought off.  Our God loves us and wants to hear our prayers.  Our God loves us and went through death to do what’s best for us.  Our God loves us and is for us.  God is inclined towards us with a love we cannot comprehend.  Sure, feathers hit the fan.  Indeed, bad things happen to good.  Sometimes things are so foobarred by evil and the hurt done to us so frilling un-understandable that the only way God can answer our prayers is to give us for now a taste of his very self, the Holy Spirit (and that’s all we ever really need).  God can’t answer those prayers now because the answer to them, the BIG healing of what evil and the Evil one has done to us awaits the day of our Lord’s return and we’ll get into that in the coming weeks.  But to close, please remember the God we pray to loves us and that’s what makes our God holy.  Amen.

Rest and Restoration

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Mark 2:26-3-6

I’ve often heard old-timers talking about how when they were children you weren’t allowed to do much on Sunday because it’s the Sabbath.  No cooking or cleaning, no vigorous play, no card playing, no going to the movies, no dancing, no singing unless it was hymns, and definitely no him/her-ring.  No stores were open except for maybe a gas station so that those of laxer traditions which allowed driving on Sunday could enjoy a Sunday drive or a trip to Grandma’s.  The way they tell it, it’s like you couldn’t do anything on Sunday but sit around in your Sunday best in a God induced home incarceration until you nodded off to put yourself out of the misery.  But then again, they all had their stories of sneaking a smoke, or sneaking off to go skinny dipping, or sneaking this, or sneaking that.  It’s as if God made the Sabbath for both resting and sneaking.  That whole way of doing Sabbath was the by-product of a legalistic way of serving that Almighty bearded old man seated on a throne of judgement keeping a list of whose naughty and nice so you better think twice.  Somebody just didn’t get Jesus’ message that “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”

Things have changed today.  Less than 10% of Canadians even attend church on Sunday.  Everything is open for business.  You can even get Amazon packages delivered on Sunday.  If someone doesn’t have to work on Sunday, it’s usually because they have the weekend or the day off because of work scheduling not because of religious reasons.  In the clergy world, IF we take a Sabbath day to rest and relax, it’s not Sunday.  We work on Sunday’s.  In our busy world, to get a day off where you don’t have anything to do is a near impossibility.  And then there are the screens.  Books on the topic of Sabbath these days have whole chapters dedicated to how to take a Sabbath rest from those devices we’re addicted to.  Physiological studies are teaching us that time spent on a device is not checking out for some rest, but rather quite the opposite.  Apparently, we don’t get the message at all that humankind was made to have a Sabbath.  But keep in mind that a Sabbath is more than just a day off to take it easy.  It is the Lord’s Day.  It’s time for resting with him.

Well, there you have it.  A stock sermon on the Sabbath – God made us to have one, so take one, but don’t get legalistic about it because that just backfires in so many ways.  Weell, we could go home now, but I don’t think we’ve really gotten to the heart of this passage.  I kinda think Jesus may have just redefined what Sabbath is.  It’s not simply a day of resting from work that helps us to rejuvenate.  It is a resting in him that restores us to new life in him.  There’s very profound healing in it for us.  

Looking at our passage, the dispute Jesus had with the Pharisees over his disciples’ gleaning wheat on the Sabbath seems to be stuff the usual Sabbath sermon is made of.  The Pharisees were saying that this gleaning is too much like the work of harvesting and shouldn’t be done on the Sabbath.  

Incidentally, gleaning on the Sabbath would been something that the very poor regularly had to do during the harvest season back then and today as well.  Depending on who owned the field, the Sabbath may have been the only time you could do it because the owner was in the habit of harvesting his whole field even though the Law of Moses told them to leave the outer rows for the poor to glean. Or, he may simply have not wanted a bunch of poor people getting in the way of his workers and so you weren’t allowed to glean while they were harvesting.  The farmer himself may not have wanted to suffer the shame of harvesting a ready crop on the Sabbath but would have been ready with excuses why he didn’t leave the outer rows for the poor.  Topping that list would have been “They had their chance”…on the Sabbath.

Jesus countered the Pharisees’ argument by saying that even King David, righteous King David whom everybody loved, once broke Sabbath and in a worse way than gleaning. They ate the Bread of the Presence that Abiathar the High Priest gave them to eat in order to not get famished and be militarily vulnerable on the Sabbath.  The Bread of the Presence was twelve loaves made from very fine and choice flour that the priests put before God every Sabbath in an area just outside the place called the Holy of Holies where sat the Ark of the Covenant upon which God was believed to sit.  The Bread represented each of the Twelve tribes and their hospitality to God.  There was also a constantly burning candelabra there to represent the Light of God and also the prayers of the people.  Only priests were allowed to eat that Bread, but Abiathar gave it to David’s men to keep them alive.  Though it was an unlawful thing to do, it kept them alive and battle ready so to speak.  Preserving life is more important than keeping the jots and tittles of the Law and the traditions.

Looking at the second story, things are different.  For one, the Pharisees are there looking to use Sabbath conduct restrictions as the vehicle to take Jesus’ life.  Hence Jesus’ question: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?”  He’s got their number and they know it.  They stay silent and avoid the question because here they are on the Sabbath making plans to kill somebody.  Jesus get’s PO-ed.  Sorry for the crudeness, but that’s the level of his anger here.  He’s also just heartbroken over them.  But oddly, his response to their religious thuggery, their spiritual abusiveness, spiritual blindness is not “pouring out the wrath of God” on them.  Although, in the Greek the word for wrath is what we translate as angry.  Instead of torching them with holy hellfire (sorry if my sense of humour may be inappropriate her.), Jesus heals a man with a withered hand and redefines what Sabbath is all about.

About this man and his withered hand.  Being a person with a withered hand, whether he was born with it or developed it somehow, was to live a stigmatized life.  People would have seen the deformity as a curse from God because of hidden sin in his life or the life of his parents.  So, he really wouldn’t have been graciously welcomed into community life and especially not at the synagogue.  

Hands also had symbolic meaning.  They represented a person’s personal power.  One raised a hand to great another or to strike another.  Waving a withered hand to say “hello” was something you did not do.  So also, striking another with a withered hand would have brought ridicule.  The condition of one’s hands affected one’s ability to work.  So, how he earned his keep was affected.  In the synagogue, if one wished the right to speak publicly, you stretched out your hand.  It gave you voice.  Stretching out a withered hand in synagogue to ask the right to speak.  

And so, here it is the Sabbath and he just happens to be in synagogue on a day Jesus comes to town and oddly finds himself to be the battle ground over which a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees plays out.  But…Jesus has the reputation for healing on the Sabbath.  Would this be the man’s lucky day? 

Here comes your Greek lesson.  Our translations say that Jesus said to the man “Come forward.”  But that misses something that’s a key reference to resurrection.  The verb isn’t the verb for “to come”.  Rather, it’s the one for “to rise up” or “to get up”.  A literal translation would read “Rise up into the middle.”  Again, it just sounds like he’s telling the man to get in front of everybody.  But that word for “rise up” was a “code word”, so to speak that was used in the early church in reference to people rising from the dead.  In the Gospels, when Jesus raised someone from the dead, he used this word.  In Jesus’ command to this man there is the deeper message here that He, Jesus, has the power to resurrect, to restore life to people.  Hence the question, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to harm” (as the Pharisees were motivated to do), “to save life or to kill” (again, what the Pharisees were motivated to do).”  The obvious right answer there is the Sabbath is meant for doing good, for saving life.

Next, as I said early thoroughly PO-ed and cut to the heart in grief by the Pharisees motives, Jesus says to the man, “Stretch out your hand” and as he did it was restored.  Again, stretching out your hand was the gesture you made when you wanted to speak in the synagogue which was something this man was likely not allowed to do because of his withered hand.  The restoration of that man’s hand was the restoration not only of his voice among the people but also everything about his life.  It removed the curse stigma.  At that act of God, the Pharisees responded not with wonder, awe, and worship.  Rather they left, formed a coalition with the political powers, and began to conspire with them as to how they might utterly destroy this Jesus…and they were the ones who claimed to know and to keep most faithfully the ways of God.

Back to the Sabbath, Sabbath is more than just rest.  It is opportunity to raise up in resurrection newness and do good; to save life.  It is to come into Jesus’ presence and not just rest but also do healing things for people.  We’ve been accustomed to thinking of coming to church on Sunday as being something we do because the Bible says do it on the Sabbath because the good God who created us deserves to be honoured and worshipped.  Worshipping God on the Sabbath is part of the ordering of the universe.  When we don’t do it, things really get out of whack.  One could make a very convincing argument that the breakdown in Sabbath keeping in a culture is a major contributor to global warming.

But Jesus is pointing us into a deeper understanding of Sabbath and what we do when we gather for worship.  Gathering together on the Sabbath is time for us to gather together in the power and presence of the Lord of the Sabbath, time for us to stretch out own withered hands to gain voice in prayer, time to exchange our shame-withered selves for healing and new life in Jesus.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a worship service where people come forward to get prayed for and they get healed; or where the troubled and burdened come and are given peace; or where the lost come and suddenly find the direction they’re seeking; where sinners find the strength to repent.  Sabbath isn’t just rest.  It is the opportunity to stand in resurrection life.  I’ve been to worship service like that.  Hunger and pray for our services to become Sabbath like that, rest that’s utterly restorative.  Amen.