Our New Reality

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Isaiah 43:1-7

This passage from Isaiah is a difficult one to preach because it’s very hard to say any better or explain any better what God himself is saying here.  So, I thought I would do something different today and read it over and over again and just let it sink in.  As I read it just listen and maybe a word or thought will grasp you.  If so, ponder it.  After I read, we’ll sit silently for a minute and then we’ll sing the chorus of The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

This passage is absolutely beautiful.  God says, “I created you.  I formed you.  Do not fear.  You are mine.  I am the LORD, your God, your Saviour.  I have redeemed you, yes you, at the expense of other people and peoples, indeed at the expense of dying myself.  You are precious and honoured in my eyes.  I love you.  Do not fear for I am with you.  You belong to me.  You are called by my name and I have created you to bear my Presence.”  Take this as a word from God, to you and to us as a congregation. “Do not fear. You are mine.  You are precious.  I love you. I am with you.”  Take this word.  It is yours.  It pertains to you.  It pertains to us.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

            I have a particular connection to this passage.  Sometime not long after my first wife and I split up, I was talking with my friend Dwight who taught me to play the banjo.  While we were talking, he got his Bible out and opened it to this passage (really all of chapter 43) and said that many years back the Episcopal priest there in town who was a close friend of his felt led to share it with him to comfort him.  Dwight then said “I give it to you now.  It can be your word.”  He read it.  Later in the chapter it says "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland” (43:18, 19).  There in the midst of having lost everything (emotional and otherwise), Dwight gave me this word, these verses.  It hit me deep.  Instead of lost, devastated, and ashamed I truly began to feel that I belonged to God and that God does love me and was working in me and my life on my behalf bringing about something new.  He was taking all that loss, shame, and hurt and making something new from it, forming me anew.  For had created me, formed me, as he has you, to bear his presence before others.  For probably the first time in my life I found myself able to let the past go and not dwell on it or try to get it back.  Listen again.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

The depth of ambiguity and anxiety that follows things like death and divorce can really become disillusioning.  You don’t know who you are anymore or what to do.  The occasional solitude that used to bring rest becomes relentless. You’re alone all the time and it can be very hard to be alone.  I think in life that it is too easy to forget that we belong to God and how much he loves us.  We forget who God is.  We think everything’s on our shoulders and God is only interested in evaluating our performance.  These verses say the complete opposite.  I give you this word.  Let it be your own.  You belong to God.  You are precious.  God loves you.

Isaiah 43:1-7  ^ESV But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  ² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  ³ For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.  ⁴ Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.  ⁵ Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.  ⁶ I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, ⁷ everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  

We belong to God, who is the loving communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he does not leave us to ourselves and he is not silent.  He is with us.  He speaks.  We have no reason to fear.  We are called by his name and he created us to bear his Presence.  That’s your, my, our constantly new reality.  As that is the case, God is working in and with us as a congregation and as individuals to bear his glory.  The Hebrew word for glory is kabod and its basic meaning is weightiness, felt weightiness, his felt Presence.  God has created and formed us to be those who bear the weightiness of his Presence and to bear it in such a way that the weight of God’s love comes to bear on us and on others.  That means God in his wisdom has chosen to make us the visible, tangible proof of his reality and ways.  Take this word to heart.  Whenever you doubt who you are and what God is doing in your life and even if you lose sight of God and his love for you.  Turn to Isaiah 43 and read it over and over again.  It is your new reality.

 “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.  His mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning, new every morning.  Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.  Great is your faithfulness.”  Amen.

 

Like a Good Mystery?

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Ephesians 3:1-12

There’s just something about a good mystery novel.  They play into our pride, I guess.  We like to think we can solve the mystery before the author ties everything together in the end and thus, outsmart her.  A really good mystery writer will play you to the very end making you think you’ve got it all figured out only to kibosh your arrogance time and again until at the very last she finally reveals who did it.  Mysteries, we love to try to figure them out, but we cannot escape the fact that we are at the mercy of the writer for the final who dun it.  

Since we love mysteries so much, it goes without saying that no one likes a spoiler.  That’s somebody who tells you how the mystery ends before you get to it.  Well, Paul here in Ephesians is a spoiler. His main concern with the letter is to be the spoiler of God’s great mystery novel, the mystery of what God is up to in history.  In fact, Paul is such a good spoiler he is able to say that God is the one who has actually spoiled his own plot - through Jesus Christ God has manifested the Truth that is hidden behind the world we live in…behind history, behind space and time.  Jesus and what God is doing in, through, and as him is God’s revelation of how history comes to its completion and what it will be like.  Amazingly, with the plot spoiled we keep reading the book.

So, what’s being spoiled, what’s now being revealed, as Paul says, is God’s will, the manifold wisdom of God, indeed the mystery of Christ.  Paul says it is being specifically revealed to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms by means of the reality of the church’s existence in this earthly realm.  
This means, and this is huge, that Christian Fellowship, Christian Community…us…we’re the spoil.  To us and through us God is spoiling his own mystery by the living grace that he is making evident in us and the church in all times and places by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit in us who compels us to live according to the New Creation that God has wrought in Jesus Christ and will bring to light in the end.  

That’s pretty deep.  Our Christian community reveals where history is going.  The fellowship that forms as we live according to the Holy Spirit’s compelling us to love God, love each other, and love our neighbour the way God loves us – unconditionally, unselfishly, and sacrificially – is God’s revealing where history is going.  The Christian fellowship that we share is the plot spoiler of God’s great mystery of history and of his Creation.

So, what is this mystery that God has kept hidden from the beginning?  According to Paul back in Ephesians chapter 1 verse 10, it has been God’s plan all along to gather up all things in heaven and earth in Christ (Eph. 1:10); to bring all things together, to bring all things to their created fulfillment under the Lordship of God the Son, Jesus Christ.  Simply put, it has been God’s purpose all along to unite his creation, all things in heaven and earth and indeed heaven and earth themselves in God’s own self with his Son as the head and the Holy Spirit as the uniting bond.  It was God the Father’s plan all along for God the Son to become human and in him by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit all things would share in God, in the loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit.  Indeed, as the prophet Isaiah said, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea (11:9).”   

That is the “what” of the mystery, now comes the “how”. Through the Incarnation and Resurrection of God the Son as Jesus Christ God infused himself to creation and healed it.  Now, God is applying this infusion and healing to each of us and all creation by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on us and in us each.  The Holy Spirit’s presence in us creates a bond, an organic union between us and God and us and us.  The Holy Spirit’s presence in us and his work upon and among us is what we call redemption. 

Redemption or “to redeem” in NT Greek is slave trade language.  It’s the word for buying slaves back from slavery and setting them free.  What that means for us is that we who once were slaves to sin and death now have been set free to live in the New Creation, in the plot spoiler where heaven and earth are one, where all things are united to God in Christ, and where God is making himself known to all things.  Jesus Christ/God the Son, by his birth, life, death, and resurrection, has set us free to enter the end times New Creation now, indeed, to enter unimpeded into God’s presence and this freedom is really applied to us by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit in and among us enabling us to love as God has loved us.

As proof of the mystery Paul presents here in verse six that the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus”.  This was a huge deal for Paul.  You see, Paul was a devout Jew who believed that only the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, had access to God and this was at the Jerusalem Temple.  The Temple in Jerusalem was the only place in their beliefs where heaven and earth coincided and God could be approached.  For Paul to see with his own eyes that Gentiles were receiving the Holy Spirit, the presence of God who was supposed to be only at the Jerusalem Temple, the same Holy Spirit that he had received in his own personal encounter with Jesus resurrected on the road to Damascus, for Paul to see the Gentiles included by God himself into the people of God by the presence of God’s very self meant that the end time New Creation that God had promised through prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had begun.  It began when God raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead.  

For Paul, the supreme plot spoiler appears to have been that Jew and Gentile are now brought together indeed bonded together under the one Lord Jesus Christ through union with him in the Holy Spirit and more so that the fellowship in this new humanity is the place on earth where God actually now dwells.  It is the New Temple of God, the New Jerusalem.  The early Christians called this bit of New Creation in the midst of old humanity the Gathering.  That’s a better translation of the Greek word and less historically/politically loaded than the word Church.  In the Gathering those who had once been enemies were now worshipping and praying together and enjoying a communion in fellowship, a love that surpassed anything known before in history.  God has made the fellowship of the Gathering, instead of the Jerusalem Temple, to be the place on earth where his Holy Spirit will publicly dwell.

This is the ending to the mystery of history, our history, well, I bet you never saw coming.  In each of you and in us together heaven and earth are united and we are in the presence of God because God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth decided from the very beginning to unite his creation to himself by sending God the Son to become human and that union is being extended to us and all the creation by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit until the end when he makes all things to be New Creation.  The proof that this is the Truth is each of us.  Once we were strangers who probably never would have met or become friends.  But since God has called us each to the fellowship of this gathering we have become family in Christ, beloved children of the Father and brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus sharing the “DNA” of the Holy Spirit.  

So, when you look at the news and all the war, and all the troubles and concerns and fears and brokenness and hurt and violence and you wonder where this world is going.  Well, have a look at your Christian fellowship and the love we have here.  That’s where it’s going.  In the midst of all this world’s sick, twisted, hurting brokenness there is Christian fellowship of which this congregation is a part.  The Christian love that is evident among you is the proof that there is reason to hope, that God does care and is involved and will heal his creation.  So, go forth and be plot spoilers.  On the foundation of the hope embodied here go forth faithfully and live as New Creation in the midst of the old.  You are God’s evidence that there is reason to hope.  Amen.