Wasteful Love

 John 12:1-8

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How does one define waste?  One way is to say waste is something that has served its purpose and is ready to be thrown away.  A used tissue is easily defined as waste.  Then again, the conversion of trees into disposable paper products to be used for human hygiene is a huge waste of a tree when you consider that trees are the largest producers of the oxygen we breathe.  There are tree farms for this very purpose.  We can pride ourselves on buying such products made from recycled paper for this purpose, but the chemicals used in producing such paper are never fully extracted and eventually wind up in our water.  And since we are on the topic of waste, if you have ever attempted to wipe a baby’s bottom with toilet paper, then you may have concluded that this particular Modern convenience doesn’t really do down there what we believe it does down there thus making the killing of trees for that purpose all the more just an utter waste.  

So, you may have noticed our definition of waste just expanded from something that can no longer serve its intended purpose to using something for useless, futile purposes.  In that line of thinking we can waste food and natural resources.  We can waste money.  We can waste time.  Above all, we can waste the lives that God has so wonderfully entrusted to us.  There’s the Prodigal Son kind of wasting of our lives where we spend ourselves and everything we have on “desolute living.”  But, we can also waste our lives in the pursuit of what many would call a successful life.  We can work day and night for that nice house, those nice cars, that fine dining, all the stuff that wealth affords.  Yet, is being “wealthy”, being “successful”, really the purpose for which God gave us this “life”?  The fact that there are more poor people in the world than there are Middle Class and wealthy combined should tell us that something is askew with our definition of success or at least with how we go about getting it.

The topic of waste comes up in our reading today.  Judas, the keeper of the disciples common purse from which he was known to dip, asked why Mary had wasted this quite expensive bottle of perfume but pouring it out on Jesus rather than selling it and giving it to the poor.  On the other hand, all the Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus for his burial in the days following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s version Jesus speaks highly of this woman saying that she had done a beautiful thing and that everywhere the Gospel was proclaimed what this woman had done for him in anointing his body for burial would be told also.  It should peak our attention that what Judas the Betrayer, the Keeper of the Purse, called a waste is remembered by the Church wherever the Gospel is proclaimed as a beautiful thing.  Every year in the weeks before Easter, this woman and her beautiful act is remembered.  Personally, I try to at least read this story if not preach on it at least once a year.  What is so special about this waste of expensive perfume?

Well, as Jesus said, this woman had done a beautiful thing.  In the Jewish faith one could say she performed an act of Chesed, an act of loving kindness that truly reveals the heart of God; which is unconditional, arguably wasteful, and one could even say broken-hearted love.  The perfume she wasted on Jesus in an extravagant act of wasteful love was worth upwards of one year’s salary for any of us here.  That would indeed feed a lot of people.  Yet, in Jesus’ opinion, she had done a beautiful thing that revealed the very heart of God.  

You may ask, “How does wasting perfume on Jesus’ feet reveal the heart of God?”  And also, in light of Judas’ question, we may want to ask how does wasting expensive perfume reveal the heart of God any more than selling that perfume and giving it all away to the poor.  Well, her wasteful act of anointing Jesus feet with this perfume corresponds to Jesus’ wasting his life by dying for a humanity that didn’t deserve it.  There’s a Good Friday Sermon here that we don’t have time for this morning, but it must be said that Jesus wasted his life over to death in order to destroy death and its cause, which is the disease of Sin.  Then, by raising Jesus from the dead God created a new humanity that would bear his Spirit and in essence bear the honour of being his Temple, the Body of Christ.  The followers of Jesus are now the place on earth where God chooses to dwell.  The end result is that Jesus’ wasting his life to death restored value to human life which we have wasted in Sin.  We are now also reconciled to God in an organic union kind of way; united to the Son of God, the Living Christ, by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us making us to become Jesus’ sisters and brothers and beloved children of the Father just as he is.  With the wasteful gift of his Spirit, which God poured upon us similar to the way Mary wasted expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, God has truly united us to the love which God is as the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  By anointing us with the perfume of the Holy Spirit, God has made us partakers of the relationship which Jesus the Son shares with God the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Well, enough of this theology stuff.  God has wasted the perfume of his very self on us.  He has wasted the life-giving blood (the life) of Jesus the Son on us in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  I have said "wasted".  This is not a very nice thing to say of us, especially as we know that God loves us dearly, indeed loves all people dearly even the most evil of us who have ever lived.  Yet, when we look at the whole condition of human existence – the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the way we betray and abuse one another, our pride, our self-involvement, our self-indulgence, our self-righteousness, the way we judge one another – it would make more sense for us in like manner to Judas the thief and betrayer to turn to God and say, “Why have you wasted the gift of yourself on us. You should destroy us all and start again!”

Well, here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was such a beautiful thing.  Of all the disciples, only Mary seemed to know who Jesus is and understood that her beloved friend was going to die.  Knowing no other way to express her overwhelming grief at knowing Jesus would die, she rather spontaneously took a bottle of very fine, very expensive, very pure perfume and wasted it on Jesus’ feet.  An act that simply says, “My heart is broken, but I understand that you must die.”  All she could do with her grief was this futile, wasteful act of preparing his feet for burial.

Mary’s beautiful act mirrors God’s understanding and deep grief over our wasted-ness and the inescapable fact that we, God’s beloved children, must die.  God is a grieving God not so much an angry God who demands “obey me or else”.  We are God’s beloved children and we, God’s beloved children, are dying by our own demise.  Of course, he’s upset about that.  God’s response to this isn’t to mope about barking out “They’re getting what they deserve”.  But rather, like Mary, God anoints us for our death and burial. Yet not with just any old perfume, but rather with his very self, the Holy Spirit, so that being made alive in the new life he created by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we also will live through death and be healed of Sin in our own resurrection.  

Instead of destroying us God the Father in an act of wasteful love sent God the Son who in an act of wasteful love gave his life as one of us and died so that God the Father and God the Son might wastefully give us their very life in the gift of God the Holy Spirit that we might live through death.  Praise be to God!  Praise be to God!  God understands us.  God understands that the end result of the dung of our lives is that we must die so that the disease of Sin will end, but out of his love for us he will raise us just as he did his only begotten and beloved Son, Jesus, because he has poured upon us the same Spirit that lived in him so that he may live in us and we may live through death.  

Just as we will live by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, we must now live according to it.  We who know Jesus must waste our lives just as he did, just as Mary demonstrates, we must waste our lives doing acts of extravagant love.  In gratitude, we must live our lives doing beautiful things.  True and abundant life is lived through acts of extravagant generosity and extravagant hospitality and extravagant service to others.  So, Go forth live a life of wasteful love.  Amen.

Check Your Aim

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2 Corinthians 5:4-21

One of my favourite movies is “A Christmas Story”.  It’s about a little boy named Ralphie who all he wanted for Christmas was a Red Ryder BB Gun.  There was something in Ralphie’s wish that struck home with me.  I always wanted a BB gun but unlike Ralphie, I never got one.  Even so, I still got my BB gun experience.  My best friend Ronnie not only had a BB gun, but a pellet gun too, and at some point, he wound up with a BB pistol.

BB guns can be used rightly or wrongly depending on what you’re aiming at.  Obviously, you don’t shoot people with BB guns…but inadvertently that’s what little boys do with BB guns.  I don’t remember ever shooting anyone but I do remember being shot in the back of the hand by a boy down the street who denied it up and down.  Another of my friends got shot, I think in the thigh, and the BB was embedded enough to have to be pried out with a knife.  

You’re not supposed to shoot peoples’ pets either…but that’s what little boys do with BB guns.  A pellet gun pumped only once will only sting an animal.  You can make a cat jump four feet in the air and assure they will never return to your yard like that.  I remember Ronnie’s neighbour had a dog penned up in the backyard that barked incessantly.  Ronnie solved that problem.  Every time the dog started barking, he cracked the screen on his bedroom window and shot it in the bum.  After a couple of days, the dog immediately stopped barking at just the sound of the screen cracking open.  

Another thing you shouldn’t shoot are animals in general…but that’s what little boys do with BB guns.  Ronnie and I needlessly killed bunches of birds and squirrels pretending to be hunters.  The smaller the bird, the better shot you had to be.  I remember one time while spending a week at my great-grandmother’s, we even shot a bull in the tenders.  We were expecting him to run off in a rage, but he only twitched.  

The right way to use a BB gun is shooting appropriate targets like cans or paper targets under parental supervision.  Ronnie was always a better shot than I.  When it came to a can on a fencepost he rarely missed.  I, on the other hand, more often than not missed.  My genius lay in a different use for a BB gun…killing flies with the air burst and stuffing grasshoppers by the head into the end of the barrel and using the airburst to make a big splat.  (I’m glad I’m not preaching for the call with this sermon.)  

Now hold to your thoughts here on the difference between Ronnie’s marksmanship and my own and let’s talk about sin.  The NT Greek word for sin is hamartia and it’s an archery term meaning to miss the mark.  Sin, biblically speaking, isn’t just a collection of things we’re not supposed to do.  If the life that we’ve been given were a BB gun, sin isn’t simply that we use our BB gun to shoot things we’re not supposed to shoot, though that’s a part of it.  Rather, sin would be that we have a problem with our aim.  We can’t hit the target.  So, even when we are shooting at things we’re not supposed to shoot, though it may seem fun or beneficial, whether we hit or miss there is a down side.  Either we kill what we’re shooting at or if we miss, there is always something nearby that’s going to be damaged by the stray BB and usually, it is the people we care about the most.  

Sin is the fact that the human aiming system, how we orient our lives towards goals, our ambition, our endeavouring is fundamentally flawed.  Sin even comes through in people who are religiously oriented.  There is no such thing as saying I’m going to stop sinning and on my own effort start trying to please God that always leads to legalism and self-righteousness because we will supplant pleasing God with serving religious laws.

Sin means that there is a problem with our aim.  In our NIV translation 2 Corinthians 5:9 reads, “We make it our goal to please Him (God)”.  The NT Greek word there for “making it our goal” can also read “we make it our aim” or “we have as our ambition”.  Sorry for yet another Greek lesson.  The word is philotimeomaiand it consists of two words being smashed into one and then being made a verb.  The first word is philos.  We know it as one of the root words for philosophy.  Philos is the devotion friends have for each other.  Philosophy simply means or devoted to wisdom (Sophia).  The next word time means honour.  So, philotime means devoted to honour.  The last part of the word, the ending –omai makes the word a verb in the sense of “I do this for my own benefit, for myself.”  So, to make something your aim, to philotimeomai, is to be devoted to honour for one’s own benefit.  The scope of this word (philotimeomai) is how we bring honour to ourselves?  The point of the verse is that we bring honour to ourselves when we live to please God…when we make it our aim to bring honour to God.

When we talk about sin as a problem of our aiming mechanism, we are saying that we have a fundamental problem with the way we go about trying to be honourable.  God created us, indeed, this whole creation in such a way as it brings honour to God.  This isn’t to say that God is a narcissist.  When an artist makes something beautiful, the artist receives praise.  Part of the beauty that created in us is that when can and should strive to be honourable people.  There is nothing wrong with striving to be an honourable person, that’s the BB gun so to speak.  The problem isn’t as simple as saying we tend to use that striving, that BB gun, in the wrong way.  Yes, we do that.  We will at times seek our own glory by an entirely wrong means.  The problem with sin, the problem with our aim, is that we just can’t hit what we’re aiming at when it comes to being honourable.  In the best of worlds if we strive as hard as we can to bring honour to God in everything we do, there will still always be the specter of seeking our own glory that taints it.  There will always be something lurking about in us that dishonours God, that doesn’t bring praise to God.  It can be overt in our actions; in the way we treat others through our bent to serve ourselves.  It can be covert in our inner world of the things we think and feel but don’t express.  Those things that we hide believing that if anyone knew this about me, I am toast.  There will always be something about us that dishonours us, that dishonours God, and it can, does, and will leave a wake of pain like a spray of stray BB’s.

So now, what does this look like in real life?  I guess it starts with simply asking the question of how am I striving to bring honour to myself and is it pleasing to God.  For example, does our cultural value of striving for wealth bring true honour in God’s eyes?  Let’s also question the myth that wealth is God’s blessing upon those who work hard and are morally upright, i.e., those who are honorable.  Check out the billionaires who have been in the news lately, are they honourable, are they blessed by God?  

I think true honour is not found in playing that evil power trip game of accumulating wealth but rather in the humility of setting oneself aside, not seeking one’s own glory but rather seeking to be compassionate, generous, patient, forgiving, hospitable, faithful, even-tempered, self-controlled and honest to your family and to neighbours and to friends and to strangers and to the downcast.  These efforts bring honour to God.

Above all, I think that just letting yourself be a vehicle through which God proves his love and faithfulness to others is the honourable life.  God has put his own Spirit in each of us for us to be just that, a vehicle.  The Holy Spirit is fixing our aim, making your aim to become more and more like Jesus’ aim in which everything we do brings honour to God.  The Holy Spirit prods that desire in us to be a loyal disciple of Jesus.  Because the Holy Spirit is in us and we have this desire, we each are a new creation.  The old life is gone.  That old life is wrapped up in death.  The old life of being a BB gun that shoots anywhere and everywhere like it had no aim.  We are New Creation.  Let us make it our aim to bring praise to God rather than to ourselves by emptying ourselves of the desire for self-glory and bring praise, bring honour to God through the beauty of unconditional love.  Amen.

 

 

Curing Functional Agnosticism

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1 Corinthians 13:1-13

I’m sure you folks have heard of Agnosticism.  It is not the same thing as Atheism which denies the existence of God.  Rather, agnosticism simply claims to have no evidence one way or the other as to the existence of God.  The Agnostic is unknowing.  There has been nothing in the world of experience that either proves or disproves the existence of God.

I mention this because Paul begins our reading from 1 Corinthians expressing the desire that he did not want them to be unknowing (agnostic) about God’s actions towards the Hebrew people when they were wandering in the wilderness between slavery in Egypt and arriving at the Promised Land.  Some people translate that word unknowing as ignorant, which is inappropriate.  The word is actually the word from which we get agnostic.  Paul does not want them left without evidence either way of God and his steadfast love and faithfulness especially while they themselves were going through the wilderness of disunity in their fellowship.  He wants them to know that the God whom they have come to have faith in was the God of a very real people for whom he did very real things.  He also didn’t want the Corinthians to make the same mistakes the ancient Israelites made, which they appeared to be doing.  He didn’t want them to believe without or apart from the evidence of God’s real acts in history for his people.  That would make them what I would call functional agnostics.   

Functional Agnosticism is believing in God but having no proof either for or against God’s existence.  Paul didn’t want the Corinthian Christians trying to serve a God they didn’t know.  The God they were worshipping is the God of the Jewish people who became the man Jesus of Nazareth who died for our sins and was raised and is also God whose presence they have encountered powerfully as the Holy Spirit in their midst.  Unfortunately, the people of God tend to drift away from a living relationship with this God – the loving communion of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit - into functional agnosticism and once there create a religion centered on their own faithfulness rather than their God’s faithfulness to them.  Paul would have said that serving a God they had ceased to know for themselves is why the Jewish people in his day didn’t recognize Jesus as their God among them.

I would hold that functional agnosticism is at the heart of the decline of Christianity in Western Culture the past 60 years.  We were taught just to believe there is a God and to believe certain things about this God.  We served this God dutifully usually through serving the Church because we believed serving the church is what good people are supposed to do.  But, with respect to having personally experienced God’s presence and God’s acting on our behalf according to his steadfast love and faithfulness, well, we are agnostic.  We have no personal proof as to whether or not God is present with us and steadfastly loving and faithful to us.  So, we wind up being Christians who place our faith in our beliefs and dutifully serve those beliefs which we institutionalize as the Church.  To bitter the stew even more, some of us will regard as religious fanatics those who say that they have experienced God’s presence, steadfast love, and faithfulness.

Our agnosticism becomes functional when we forget or are just plain unknowing that the Trinity is acting in and through us and in turn just do what we believe churches are supposed to do.  We do worship.  We have Sunday School.  We do fundraising.  We help charities, visit one another, and have potlucks.  Yet, somewhere in the mix of doing these things we lose sight of what God is actually doing in and through us.  

What God is really doing in our midst is building community.  God the Trinity works to build community in the Trinity’s own image by pouring his Holy Spirit into us that we may love each other and the world outside as Jesus has loved each of us.  The sure sign of functional agnosticism in a church is that it winds up doing things for the sake of doing things rather than taking the risk to do things to build deeper relationships among themselves and with the surrounding community.

Paul writes the Corinthians hoping to prevent them from falling into this functional agnosticism.  Their churches were being torn apart by factions who were competing for control of the churches in Corinth and the resulting disunity was causing them to lose sight of their Christ-mindedness, their love.  In actuality, they were slipping back into being just like all the other cult-like charismatic religions in Corinth.  So, Paul reminds them of how the Trinity provided for the Israelites in the wilderness.  Together, they followed the whirlwind cloud and passed through the sea.  Together, they followed Moses, their leader.  When, together, they hungered, the Trinity fed them with manna and quail.  When, together, they thirsted, the Trinity gave them water from the rock.  They had provision everywhere they went because Christ, the Rock, was with them.

Yet, regardless of the mighty acts of the Trinity’s steadfast love and faithfulness and even though the Trinity was personally present to and with them, many of the Israelites fell into a most tragic form of functional agnosticism by declaring that none of these mighty acts were for sure the acts of God of their ancestors.  So, they made an idol of an Egyptian god, a golden calf, and claimed it to be the God who delivered them from Pharoah.  Then, they rose up to worship it with a feast that culminated in an orgy.  They also put God to the test, routinely complaining of hunger and thirst and wishing to be back in Egypt where the food was better.  Most strikingly, because of fear they refused to enter the Promised Land the first time they came to it.  So, along the way God struck many of them down and prolonged their time in the wilderness.  Like the Israelites, the Corinthians were in the wilderness, a wilderness of disunity and infighting, a wilderness in which they were having to learn faith.  

God brings us into wilderness places to teach us to learn that he is with us and to rely on his steadfast love and faithfulness.  God brings us to where we hunger and thirst for knowing Jesus so that he may provide what we really need and prove his love and faithfulness.  Wilderness places keep us from becoming functionally agnostic.  In the wilderness we can find ourselves tempted to carry on like the ancient Israelites.  We can and do create false gods out of our perceived needs and serve them hoping that in so doing we will satisfy our hunger and thirst for “in God we trust”.  We will test the Trinity telling him to prove himself in a particular way making the bargain that if the Trinity does what we want, we will do better at what it is we believe serving God is supposed to be.  We complain at the Trinity because life in the wilderness isn’t as fulfilling as doing our own thing was.  We complain about what the Trinity provides for because it doesn’t really meet what we believe our needs to be.  Unfortunately, for some our functional agnosticism in the midst of the wilderness will turn to atheism.

Yet, the Trinity provides us with exactly what we need.  Learning faith is learning that the Trinity can and does satisfy our thirst to have a relationship with Jesus in the Spirit.  The Trinity leads us into the wilderness of trials that are common to life, very painful trials where the test is to trust the Trinity and let him show us his living and healing way out.  As Isaiah said, “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways are not God’s ways.”  When we find ourselves wandering in the wilderness thirsty to know Jesus, asking God are you there or are you real, we just have to trust the Trinity is doing something for our good.  

Truly, when God speaks his word, it accomplishes its purpose.  Everything that happens in our lives good and bad is the Trinity working to establish our faith and to make us more Christ-like.  When we come to the end of our time in the wilderness, and it does end, we truly do find that the Trinity has brought forth a new peace and joy in us that satisfies our thirsting.  Somehow, he speaks and things happen that teach us his love and faithfulness and we can’t help but draw closer to him in faith.

So, my friends, when in the wilderness seek the Lord because it is there in the wilderness that he certainly can be found.  Pray, read scripture, spend time with Christian friends, share your trials and most importantly avoid doing anything that you know is just an effort to meet what you perceive to be your needs.  God is working way deeper in you than you can understand and in time he will provide.  Friends, seek the Lord.  Amen.

Beyond Self-Fulfillment

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Philippians 3:17-4:1

It happened my first Fall in ministry in West Virginia.  I remember like it was yester…no, almost 28 years ago.  It was Thanksgiving Day, American Thanksgiving that is.  Open season on deer happens the week of Thanksgiving down there.  I had a friend from seminary up and we decided we were going to do a 10-mile run.  I thought maybe we’d take a forestry service road up a ridge about 4 miles and then drop down to the Greenbrier River and the rail trail that runs alongside it and come back to town.  Well, we got up on top of the mountain and started to hear gunshots and that’s when it occurred to me, “Duh, we’re out in the woods during deer season in West Virginia wearing white shirts and…no orange”.  But, I thought we’d be okay as long as we talked so that we didn’t sound like white-tailed deer.  

All was well until we came upon the little tent city up on top of that mountain.  That and the gun shots had me thinking this just might be somebody’s still and this might be my last day.  Moonshine and deer hunting are a lethal combination.  So, I figured I’d better go see if anybody was home and let them know we were there.  As I walked up to the tents in my shorts and white shirt, I was greeted by a man whom I later found out was Mr. Buck Turner—Pocahontas County’s self-professed biggest liar as well as probably its most helpful man.  Buck didn’t say anything at first.  He just gave me this look of “You’re not from around here, are you?”  It was obvious that he thought my friend and I had to be the dumbest two human beings alive to be wearing white t-shirts and shorts out in the woods in the first week of hunting season in West Virginia.  In a conversation a few years later Buck confirmed to me that was exactly what he was thinking.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”  If I had to sum up what it is like to be a follower of Jesus, I think that phrase just about does it.  We’re not from around here.  As Paul writes, our citizenship is in the heavenlies and from there we await a saviour, Christ Jesus, to return to transform us and all the creation to fully reflect the glory of God and this waiting, though transformative now, has implications for how we live our lives until then.  Humiliation is the word that Paul uses to describe our life now.  For, we are to pattern our lives after the way of the cross, after Jesus’ way of laying down his life for love of others.

This way of the cross does not fit in the world we live in, especially today.  Self-fulfillment seems to be the goal of Western Culture.  Just to give you a definition, self-fulfillment is attaining a joy that comes from fulfilling your ambitions, dreams, desires, or goals through utilizing those abilities or talents you most enjoy.  The end goals usually involve wealth, health, meaningful relationships, meaningful work, a peaceful family life, etc.  Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, carries pretty much the same definition but is quite more baser in its pursuits.  The problem with self-fulfillment is that it requires others to yield to "me" and "my" pursuit of what fulfills "me" and this gets problematic in that those who seek self-fulfillment will without fail leave a wake full of hurt and confused people.

People are also getting more spiritual today in the hopes that they will feel more fulfilled.  We’ve realized that there is more to life than just the god we’ve made of our consumeristic bellies.  But, even this spiritual seeking at times can be at odds with the cross.  I’ve come across many a disillusioned Christian wanting to live in the fullness of the Spirit, raptured in God’s love in a life where nothing but blessing is supposed to be upon them only to find that fulfillment does not show up quite in the way they want it to.  They get disillusioned because they are not getting what they want out of God as far as fulfillment goes.  

The way of the cross stands earnestly opposed to this self-fulfillment approach to life even when it is spiritual.  You know, the last time I checked, my self doesn’t know how to be fulfilled no matter what I do with it.  All I can do is take Jesus’ invitation to follow him by taking up the cross of serving others in unconditional love and see what happens from there.  True fulfillment requires us to seek what God says is our fulfillment which is himself given to us in the Holy Spirit who leads us to live as Jesus did and does.  I really don’t think self-fulfillment is an attainable possibility in this life.  

To make matters even bleaker, Jesus doesn’t call us to fulfill our lives.  He calls us to lay them down and serve one another in love and humility and this entails dying to this quest for self-fulfillment.  In place of self-fulfillment, Jesus promises that he himself will be our fullness and he will be with us and in him we will find rest, joy, contentment, and peace and to that I would add primarily in our relationships with him and with others.  Jesus’ kingdom, of which we are now citizens, is present most powerfully in the relationships we have that are founded upon him and lived out according to his cross.  The rest that we so desire is in the rest we share with others in him.  Our joy and contentment are in the joy and contentment we share with others in him.  Our peace is in the peace we have with others in him.  Any taste of fulfillment we are going to find in this life is not going to be found in “me and my fulfillment”.  We find it in our fulfillment, the communion of love we share with one another through serving one another.  

If there is anything that I have thus far learned in life worth noting it is that in this way of humiliation fulfillment, as much as we can experience it, is most fully present when we take the risk of friendship rooted in serving others.  The secret is that we do not seek our own self-fulfillment, but rather serve others as Jesus leads them to fulfillment.  It’s what wells up in us as we let Jesus work through us to help others find fulfillment in him.  

Paul presents himself as someone worth taking a look at when talking about what it is to have a fulfilling life in Christ.  I would like to read to you from Philippians some of the passages where Paul talks about what motivates him.  Paul was a devout man who sought more than anything else to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.  He was a good example of someone who strove to be the best he could but found that the best he could be in a career of a Pharisaic Jew actually hurt people and indeed paled in comparison to Christ and his cross and so he left it all behind.  He writes in chapter 3:

“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ ... that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that, if possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” 

Paul paints a picture of life being a forward moving progression of getting to know Jesus mainly through suffering with Jesus for love and service of others and in doing that, discovering what it is to live with Jesus in his resurrection which is the miraculous power of self-emptying love.  In his own pursuit of Christ, Paul spent a good many days, indeed years, in prison and being beaten for his faith, cold, hungry, isolated.  Nevertheless, no matter his situation he learned to be content.  He writes:

“I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.  I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” 

Paul knew that everyday he had in this world was a gift and that Christ would give him the strength to live it to its fullest for Christ.  It did not matter to Paul whether he had plenty or rather he was in need.  He knew his God loved him and he wanted nothing more than that.  Paul was a saint worth imitating.  I invite you to give it a try and you just may find the life you’re looking for.  Amen.

Be Honest and Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

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Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Well, it’s Lent again.  So, it’s time for us to take some time and dwell upon that age old question of “What’s wrong with us?”  It’s quite easy for us to look around at the world and point out the wrong that’s going on and ask “What’s wrong with them?”.   We throw around labels like Tyrant and make diagnoses like narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy, or insanity caused by late-stage syphilis.  We believe ourselves to be basically good people, not perfect people and we scratch our heads in righteous indignation when we see the horrible “That” that “that person” or “those people” have done and continue to do.  It’s quite easy to point the finger at everyone else but when it comes to ourselves…well, that’s a different story.  Lent is the time of year for us to take up the spiritual disciple of looking within ourselves with brutal honesty.  It is a time to ask ourselves how this disease of the mind called Sin affects “me”.

For the sake of time, I’m going to cut to the chase and give a quick answer to that question.  This disease of sin embeds in all of us as our predisposition to be self-deceived with respect to who we are and delusional with respect to the extent of our own personal agency.  To put it a little less academically, we are not honest with ourselves particularly when dealing with the question of “who am I” and we like to believe that Sinatra- mantra, “I did it my way.”  

Looking at our passage from Deuteronomy, it doesn’t outright say that we are self-deceived and delusional, but it certainly implies it.  This reading is a directive that Moses gave to the Israelites about showing gratitude after they had finally settled as a nation in the Land God had promised to give them and had been there long enough to plant and harvest crops.  It was a simple task: take a little basket, put a little of the first fruits of their first crop in it, and go to the priest to give thanks to God.  While standing before the priest, they are to remember who they are and that it was God who had brought them there and made that little basket of produce possible.  Then, celebrate with the priest and any migrants that were among them.  

It is interesting how brutally honest Moses asks them to be about themselves.  The first thing they are to say about themselves is that my lineage is that of a wandering Aramean.  The Arameans were just the common people who lived in what was called the Fertile Crescent in what is today the very dry areas of Western Iraq and Syria along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.  Back then, between 2,500-1,500 BCE, it was quite green.  They use the word wandering which implies they were nomadic shepherds who just wandered from place to place with no place to call home.  They had no property, no land.  They were poor.  Nomads were shepherds and yes, they would have been looked down upon.  So, there with the priest, they remembered their people didn’t come from a line of powerful kings bred in entitlement, but were rather poor, uneducated, dirty shepherds who had no place to settle down.

Well, as if being descended from nomadic shepherds wasn’t enough, Moses also told them to remember that they were oppressed slaves in Egypt.  Their ancestor, most likely referring to the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, eventually wandered down into Egypt and there became a great nation of people so numerous that Pharaoh considered them a threat to Egyptian national security.  But even there in Egypt they were just shepherds and field workers.  They were what we today would call migrant workers, strangers in the land looking after the hard work of agriculture.  

It’s not hard to imagine how paranoidishly threatened Pharaoh must have been.  He woke up one morning and realized that it wouldn’t take much for this people known as the ‘Abiru to rise up and take control of the breadbasket and the stockyards of Egypt where they had lived since they first settled in Egypt at a Pharaoh's invitation.  Those former Pharaohs had let these ‘Abiru have way too much privilege.  So, this smartest and greatest Pharaoh whoever was (probably a guy named Rameses II) rounded them up and enslaved them.  He caravanned them to a different area of Egypt to live in concentration camps. He forced them to make the bricks to build the cities that he named after himself.  Their taskmasters wore red headbands with MEGA printed on them.  Living conditions were bad.  

In slavery, the ‘Abiru became a great nation.  There got to be so many of them that Pharaoh ordered the midwives to kill the little baby boys when they were born.  Though many in number, they couldn’t rise up and deliver themselves, not against Pharaoh's army.  Anytime they complained, the taskmasters made their working conditions all the harsher.  Their only recourse was to cry out to the God of their ancestors whom they had largely forgotten the name of because they had grown too fond of the Egyptian gods.  

This God heard them and remembered them and the promise he had made to their forefathers to make them a great nation living in a land that he would give them.  He called Moses to speak for him and lead them.  God delivered them.  He plagued the Egyptians ten times in ways that showed the gods of the Egyptians were powerless.  He parted the waters of the Red Sea for them to walk through and then drowned Pharaoh's army when they tried to pursue.  For forty years they followed this God, a whirlwind by day and a pillar of fire by night, through the Wilderness until he brought them to the Land.  

Back to our passage, notice that they were to emphatically remember that it was not by their own hand that they stood there with their little baskets of produce.  No, it was God who had delivered them, and led them through the wilderness as they complained the whole way and longed to return to the familiarity of slavery in Egypt.  This ritual of harvest thanksgiving forced them to be honest about themselves and to give credit where credit was due, to God.  They were dirty, oppressed, hopeless slaves with no recourse other than to cry out to a God they had only heard about because the gods of Egypt couldn’t care less about these ‘Abiru, these wandering, migrant, Aramean aliens known for their lighter coloured skin, big noses, and strange language.  It was not by their own hand, but actually in spite of themselves, that they came to this land.  But by the hand of God, the LORD, the God of their ancestors.  The God who hears…them…their cries.  The promising God who remembers…them.  The God who is for…them.  

Moses has good advice for us.  It’s hard for us to be honest with ourselves, about who we are.  We either think too high or too low of ourselves.  When we mess up and hurt ourselves or others, we instinctively set out to deceive ourselves to believe we’re in the right.  We make ready use of the tools of self-justification, rationalizing, and blaming.  When it comes to our successes, we claim it all.  I did it my way.  Or, we chalk it up to luck or something.  We try to build relationships like they are job interviews; competitively emphasize our strengths and list credentials and accomplishments.  But you know, we’re all slaves to something.  We’re all powerless before something.  Brutal honesty with ourselves doesn’t come easy.

Let me be brutally honest with you about ourselves.  We are beloved children of God.  Each of us is beloved by God.  Yes, we are all self-deceived.  We are all enslaved to something.  But God hears us when we cry out for deliverance.  God wants to and will heal our brokenness.  But we have to take up the cross of self-denial and follow Jesus through a wilderness along a path of unconditional love and brutal honesty giving credit to the One to whom it is due…and there will be true friends along the way to help and support us.  Amen.

God Can Be Known

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2 Corinthians 3:12-4:7

To say that we can know God is a bold statement that can seem a difficult pill to swallow, but we can.  One thing that makes that such a bold thing to say is that we have all been enculturated by a particular philosophy of science that boldly says that everything that exists can be known and understood by us because we have the ability to know, to seek, to learn, and understand.  Yet, what we mean by known and understood is that it can be observed and measured or at least proven to exist by mathematical formula or by its effects on other things.  Also, it can be proven by experiments.  Here’s an example of our philosophy of science.

This cookie is an object that we with our ability to know and understand things can know and understand.  We can know and understand its ingredients right down to their sub-atomic make-up.  We can know and understand the processes of chemical interactions that take place as it is transformed by heat from a doughy mixture of ingredients to what we call a cookie.  We can know its smell and most importantly its taste.  We can know it as intimately as taking it into ourselves by consuming and digesting it so that it becomes part of what we are; and if its effect on us is profound enough, if the cookie is good enough, it will change us.  We can say that before I was agnostic about cookies meaning I didn’t know for sure what a cookie was or if it existed, but now, I am a devoted cookie lover with a waistline to prove it.  

Unfortunately, the tragic thing about this way of knowing and understanding something is that the thing we want to know and understand sooner or later ceases to exist simply because we destroy it with our wanting to know it.  We find ourselves consumed with the desire to know the pleasure we derive from the cookie and we create technologies to become more efficient in producing cookies and we produce cookies and consume them until all the resources needed to produce them are gone and we find ourselves buried in the unusable by-products of our consumption…and we’re fat.  This at least has been my own experience of the cookie.

Well, that’s a cookie.  This philosophy of science begins to break down a bit when we apply it to how to know a person.  Rule number one: human persons are not objects to be known the way we know a cookie.  To attempt such a thing would be cannibalism.  The human body can be known as an object, but the human person, the human “being” is a mystery.  A person is not an object for us to observe, manipulate, or consume in our efforts to know and understand them.  I think by nature we all feel very violated when we sense someone is trying to objectify us or manipulate us or consume us.  A person is a thinking, feeling, and willing subject who cannot be known in the way that we know and object.  We can know things about a person, their likes, dislikes, and habits as they reveal them.  But there is a limit to what we can know of a person.  We cannot know what it is to be that other person.  If we could, only evil would result because that would mean we could objectify, manipulate, and consume them at the core of their being for our own pleasure. 

Martin Buber, a Jewish biblical scholar and theologian from the early twentieth century wrote a book called I and Thou, in which he says we cannot really know another person.  We can only know the change that comes about in ourselves from having encountered that person.  We as persons know one another by the way we have been changed by relating to one another.  If my relationship with you has not changed me, then I have not let myself be vulnerable enough to let you truly be a part of my life.  You would be just an object in my life.  Your thoughts, abilities, giftedness, love, support, and even your dysfunctions all have an effect on me that changes me.  Thus, we can never know what it is like to be another person.  We can only know the change a person has caused within us by means of personal relationship.

Now let’s talk about knowing God.  God is not knowable as an object.  God never offers himself to us as an object to be known, God cannot be observed and manipulated.  God cannot be seen or measured.  God cannot be proven by reason or mathematics.  God is not part of what makes things make sense nor is God a part of the equation.  God cannot be known by his actions nor the effect he has on things.  God is not knowable as an object otherwise God becomes nothing more than an idol.  

God makes Godself known to us as a Person.  God is Person and what we know of God personally is the change that encountering God brings about in us.  This entails that we must have an encounter with this God who does not have a physical presence that we can know other than as Jesus Christ whom the Scriptures reveal to us and whom we encounter by the presence of the Holy Spirit who causes us to feel that we are God’s beloved children, God’s family.  So, we say God is spirit, meaning a Person, a personal presence to whom we can be in a relationship with.  Just like any of us in relationships to others, we cannot know God apart from God’s revealing of Godself, a revelation that we can only know because it causes a change in us.  

Let me wind down by saying that if God is a Person whom we know through relationship, then we must do those things that foster relationships.  Relationships are built on time spent with another and communicating and also, I have to emphasize that communication isn’t just a one-way street where all I do is talk about myself.  We have to be open to the other, listening and looking for the subtle ways in which another person reveals their self.  Be open.  Set aside time to be with God.  I’ve spoken before about giving Jesus a chair at the table or there in the room to give the sense that he is sitting there.  Read the Bible listening for God to speak to you.  You folks have been around the bakery long enough to know that the Gospel of John is a good cookie to start with.  If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus, study Jesus, walk in his ways.  Give God time. Spend time with God and sooner or later a light, the Light, will turn on and you will know God is with you, that Jesus is with you.  The more time you spend with him, the more you will begin to learn that he is for you, that he wants to hear your hurts and to heal, that he bears your burdens with you.  You will begin to know that God knows exactly what it is like to be you.  That God has always been listening to you.  There’s a Psalm that says God has kept your tears in a bottle. 

God can be known.  We can know God.  But watch out, God actually does love you and that will change you like nothing else can.  Amen.

 

Live on the Level

Luke 6:17-38

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Please excuse what I am about to say as simply being a bit of humour.  I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything like that, but if I ever invite you over for dinner, please do not politely say to me, “What can I bring?”  If you do, I will politely say, “Just yourself”, which actually does mean don’t bring anything.  And then if you still show up with something in hand, well, of course I will politely accept it and act surprised and blessed and thankful and all that and politely say, “Oh, you didn’t have to.”  But, to be honest (and this is the humorous part), there is a “little me” in here that gets a little bit offended and inside my head “little me” will pass judgement on you for what I consider to be your inadequacy of character.  I will inwardly say to myself “You obsequious Roman”.  I’ll be petty like that unless of course, it’s something personal that you’ve brought like beets you canned yourself or homemade maple syrup – something where you’re trying to share a bit of yourself.  I will graciously accept and cherish that.  

This thing of never showing up at somebody’s house empty-handed, I loathe that.  I really do.  At my house you don’t have to put on pretenses or worry that I might think you ungrateful for showing up empty-handed.  I’m confident enough to say that when you’ve eaten my cooking, you will be grateful and if not, well that’s your problem.  If you come to my house to eat, it is my intent to pour on you grace and hospitality in the same way God pours out grace and hospitality on us – free and lavishly.  I don’t expect anything in return.  If I did, I would just charge you money up front.  The same is true if you happen to show up at my house uninvited around a meal time, I will cook for you and feed you expecting nothing in return. 

Now, I know you were all brought up that “don’t show up empty-handed” way.   There’s actually a name for it.  It’s the way of reciprocity.  The way of "do unto others as they have done unto you".  If someone has treated you mean, you treat them mean in return. If your neighbour’s a jerk, be a jerk back.  If someone has been good to you, be good in return.  And so it is, if somebody invites you over for dinner, you bring something because that’s what respectable, well-mannered, brought-up-right people do.

This way of reciprocity is ancient and it is based in the belief that nothing in life is ever free.  Romans used to give gifts, lavish gifts, to people from whom they wanted something in return.  The way you got things done back then was to make people obligated to you, make people owe you one.  It worked that way in religion too.  If you wanted the favour of a god, wanted a god to do something for you, prayer wasn’t enough.  You had to bring something, something sacrificial.  

On the upside, you would have thought that this way of reciprocity would just set in motion a whole lot of reciprocal kindness being done in society. That "pay it forward" sort of thing.  But in reality, it just made it so that you always had to be suspicious of people’s motives.  It’s like if I, the minister, invited you for dinner just to deepen the friendship, you would have to be asking yourself, “What’s he want from me?  What’s he going to rope me into doing?”  And so, to get yourself out of any obligation that I might make you feel obligated to, you pick up a box of TimBits on the way over.  That way if I were to ask you to do something for the church, you’re no longer obligated.  The TimBits got you off the hook and we would both understand that.  You would no longer owe me one.  I would be gnarled at seeing that box of TimBits, I would have the good wine taken off the table.  That was everyday life as a petty Roman but people still live that way today.

And so that leads me back to Jesus and his Sermon on the Plain, or better yet, his Sermon on the Level.  If I had to come up with what his key point to his sermon is, I would start by noting that he’s got word play of a title here.  We could call it “Living on the Level”.  And then, I would have to say that his key point is that to live on the level is to live mercifully, always showing unconditional love, forgiveness and generosity rather than living according to reciprocity.  The heart of this sermon is wrapped in Jesus’ statement that we are to be merciful as God is merciful.  Afterall, he is our Father and we are his beloved children so be merciful as God is merciful.  The word for merciful there isn’t the word we usually see in the Greek for mercy.  It should rather be translated as compassionate or sympathetic – to feel with somebody.  Be compassionate as God is compassionate.

It's time to pull out my trusty level.  In Jesus’ Kingdom, which we have inherited and are to live according to in this world even if it means that what the world calls a blessing is a woe to us…in Jesus’ Kingdom the bubble in the tube on the level stays in the middle so that things are level meaning equal, fair, and just within the communities that bear his name and one day it will be the whole world.  Just like when you build a house, if the foundation isn’t level, if the bubble’s not in the middle, the house will lean and torque and eventually collapse in on itself.  So it is in our life together as followers of Jesus.  In Jesus’ Kingdom the way things keep level is that the people who call him Lord, who follow his teachings, live according to love, forgiveness, and generosity – off the scale unconditional love, forgiveness, and generosity.  

And there’s a huge rather than implied moral to the story here in Jesus’ sermon.  We live Jesus’ way rather than the way of reciprocity.  Rather than reciprocating hate for hate and love for love, we pour out compassion on everybody just as God does even on those who hate us and do us harm.  We pray for everyone, even our enemies.  We lend and give generously to everyone not just to those we think deserve it or we know will pay us back.  We lend and give expecting nothing in return.  We even give to those who take from us.  We wish well to everyone, even those who wish us harm.  We do good to everyone, even those who do us harm and when we do good, we don’t expect people to do good to us in return.  We treat others the way we want to be treated. 

We love.  We forgive.  We give.  We do good.  We do so unconditionally and generously because that’s the way God is and we are God’s much beloved children.

We also don’t judge or condemn.  Elsewhere in the Bible it says we are to leave those tasks to God.  And, it may surprise us what ultimately happens when God judges and condemns.  You see, God’s graciousness is surprising to say the least.  Here’s some examples from Luke’s Gospel of God’s judging.  A prodigal son who has offended his father in every way is welcomed home with a feast but it’s the unforgiving brother who can’t bring himself to celebrate.  A tax collector who has grown rich by overtaxing and skimming, Jesus calls to be one of his Twelve best friends.  Jesus routinely sits at table, fellowshipping over a meal with “sinners” and it’s an example of the way things will be when he returns to establish his reign.  

Tragically, Jesus himself was judged for doing such gracious things, pronounced cursed by God, condemned and hung on a cross by the religious authorities who assumed they had the right to judge and who expected God to operate according to the ways of reciprocity. 

We love.  We forgive.  We give.  We do good.  We do so unconditionally and generously because that’s the way God is and we are God’s much beloved children.

Finally, Jesus notes here in his sermon that the way we measure it out is the way it will be measured to us presumably by God.  If we measure out vengeance instead of love, forgiveness, generosity, and doing good, we will not know God’s compassion nor know ourselves as God’s beloved children.  If we measure out compassion scantily, so will be our experience of God’s compassion.  

So, rather than living according to the conventions of reciprocity, we love, forgive, give generously, and do good.  That is what it is to be merciful or compassionate as God is. So, since we are God’s beloved children: We love.  We forgive.  We give generously.  We do good.  Unconditionally and generously.  That’s living on the level.  Amen.

 

Abandoning the Heart

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Jeremiah 17:5-10

Back when I was in seminary doing chaplain work at The Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, I got to be the harbinger of bad news late one night.  A young man 15 years of age was brought into the ER.  He had been shot in the heart.  Per protocol, the ER paged myself and the other chaplain intern to come down.  We arrived to the harsh sound of the ER Chief Attending loudly barking about this and that.  He was a gruff man in his late 50’s exhibiting little patience.  We rounded the corner into the ER just as he began to bark for us, “Where’s my chaplain?  I want that chaplain here right now!” “Present, Sir!”  “I want you right now to go tell that family that things are not going well.  Prepare them for the worst.”  I was told that medical staff should do that as to be able to answer medical questions, but the barker was too intimidating to argue with.  Off we went.

We met the young man’s grandfather and uncle in the ER family room.  The grandfather was a retired Pentecostal minister.  We told them that things were not going well and that the doctors were doing everything they could but it doesn’t look good.  The old man looked shocked and immediately fell on his face on the couch praying in tongues.  We sat with them and occasionally he would rise up and compose himself.  They recounted the events of earlier in the evening.  His grandson lived with them and had just left to go to a friend’s house.  He would start crying and then back to the couch he went.  That kept up a little over an hour until a resident, not the Attending who couldn’t be bothered, came to tell them the young man had died.  We prayed with them and walked out of the family room into the main waiting room which was now full of the young man’s friends.  In a voice, similar to the sound of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he said to them, “There will be no retaliation, No retaliation!  The dying stops now!”

That was the closest I’ve come to having a “Jeremiah experience”.  God called Jeremiah to be the harbinger of bad news to Jerusalem and the people of Judah.  Jerusalem and the entire nation of Judah.  They fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE.  Jeremiah was one of the prophets God sent to tell his people that disaster was surely coming and why and the why was that they deserved it.  The Babylonians were going to destroy them and their city completely and the only chance they had to escape with their lives was to surrender without a fight and go into captivity and in 70 years they would return to rebuild.  God wanted Jeremiah to make it plain to this people that it was God, the God of their ancestors, who was doing this and it was because they had blatantly made themselves to be no longer his people.  

Their crime?  They were worshiping other gods to the extent that their leaders and leading citizens were practicing child sacrifice.  They worshiped wealth to the extent of abusing and enslaving their poor.  The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer.  The Israelites were just like all the other nations around them.  There was nothing to distinguish them as God’s people other than the temple in Jerusalem.  Even there, their sacrifices they offered were just a show of hypocrisy.  God’s only recourse was to destroy them as a nation and kick them off the land he had promised their ancestors. In exile, he would prune away how they had perverted their faith.  Then, he would once again teach them how to trust his steadfast love by promising to bring them back to rebuild and keeping that promise. 

Well, the people didn’t respond to the bad news like my Pentecostal grandfather friend – with prayer and repentance.   Instead of believing Jeremiah and returning to God, they accused him of treason, persecuted him, jailed him, and even threw him into a muddy cistern where they left him to die.  Had it not been for one of the king's eunuchs being a man of faith and pulling him out, Jeremiah would have died in that cistern.  But Jeremiah’s story gets bleaker.   If you read his writings, you will realize that he suffered from what we would call clinical  depression.  I can’t imagine having to be the harbinger of such bad, hopeless news and being treated the way he was while being in the emotional muddy cistern of depression.  

Jeremiah was a prophet of the heart.  Paying attention to how he directed his heart is how he dealt with his depression.  He made it quite clear to God’s people that letting your heart turn away from trusting in the LORD only fills one’s life with a desert-like barrenness and, in their actual case, the reality of having their actual land trampled and reduced to a wasteland by the armies of Babylon.  This turning away of the heart to trust in something other than God and his steadfast love makes one unable even to see when relief comes.  There’s nothing worse than for your life to go dry in its pursuits to attain what your heart thinks it needs to be happy only to have relief come and not be able to see it because you simply haven’t got a clue of what God is doing in your life.  Jeremiah tells us that following the heart is like being a shrub in a desert.  The heart is devious above all else.  For decades they had been turning away.  God had tried to call them back by a number of prophets, but they wouldn’t listen.

Jeremiah warns that there is a cost that comes with following the heart into pursuing what it thinks will make us happy as opposed to remaining faithful to God so that God can give us what truly gives joy – a relationship with God.  The cost is that even though you have everything your heart desires, you still feel unfulfilled and you’ve no idea of where to turn for relief from that nagging discontent and so you medicate the malaise in your heart with more stuff or with substances or with looking for love in all the wrong places or just sitting in your little castle on your recliner throne of cynical bitterness like an angry little god condemning the stupidity of the idiots who surround you and pondering how you might get more stuff.  If you can realize it, that’s what happens to the heart when we make trying to follow it our source of happiness rather than disciplining it to follow God which requires we abandon our hearts and its desires.

Jeremiah presents us with an alternative to following the heart.  It is to trust in the LORD.  He writes, "But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the Lord.  He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."  To trust in the steadfast love of God who leads your life according to the hope of a promise means a life of growth, a wellspring of confidence and joy – the wellspring of God living in us.  Jeremiah says the Lord is our trust.  God’s very presence in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the root of faith.  Without it we don’t know what or who we’re trusting.  

Our hearts are deceptive and will be that way until they are firmly rooted in the heart of God.  Faith recognizes that we all have needs and desires.  That is the way God created us but those needs and desires will mislead us and leave us unfulfilled if we seek those desires for the sake of themselves.  The way past the heart problem that we have is what I call abandoning the heart to follow God's promise to give us what we really need.  In that following, God will recreate, renew, and even redirect our heart so that it wants and desires rightly.  We all have need of and desire for companionship, meaningful work, material comfort, and so forth and God promises to provide these things.  We’ve no need to doubt or to be afraid of lacking them.  The problem is that if we pursue them apart from God’s leading, we fall back into relying on our own strength and in turn heading towards the arid wasteland that Jeremiah spoke about.  

The first step of abandoning the heart is letting go and leaving things in God’s hand.  Be warned, for to learn how to let go usually requires going through some difficult times.  But as you come through those difficult times you realize God’s purpose in it, that he was recreating your heart to desire rightly.  Along with letting go, begin to spend time with God.  Sit with God reading the Scriptures daily.  Pray and express your needs even to the extent of saying “God I’m mad as hell at you for not meeting my needs.”  You need to get that out of your system and saying it is about the only healthy way of doing that.  It will pass as God begins to reveal himself to you.  

Along with letting go, focus on God’s presence and trying to see God's work in your life rather than on the pain or the void brought about by the need you're leaving behind.  This is most important.  Spend time with God wanting to know him.  Ask God to give you himself.  God uses the hurt-filled times in our lives to build a relationship with us.  To create in us a sense of his presence with us.  It is his presence in us that cures the heart problem.  

As we draw closer to God, we will find that some needs and desires become more acute while others fade and go away.   When God determines we are firmly rooted in the knowledge of how much he loves us, he will start prompting us to ask and even to ask for certain things even if it seems impossible.  He will even make known to us what he’s doing for us.  The closer God brings you to himself and the more you strive to get close to God, the more you find that the entirety of this creation is held together by God’s love for it and when you begin to see that you’ll know what Jesus meant when he said nothing is impossible with God.  Let God give you a new heart.  Don’t waste your life pursuing property in the desert.  Go riverfront on the river of life.  Everything else will come in God’s time, according to his promise. It really will.  Amen.

 

When God Speaks

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Luke 5:1-11

Putting together a sermon is an interesting task.  It’s more than an exercise in creative writing or constructing a history lesson or a theology lecture.  In a sermon I need to be able to accurately communicate what a particular passage of Scripture says and prayerfully hope God somehow speaks through it.  I have to avoid the temptation of the sermon just being something I want to say and backed it up with a passage or two from the Bible.  It's a form of spiritual abuse when a preacher spouts out agenda-ed opinions with a couple of verses to back it up instead of a sermon that's based in Scripture.  

In seminary, I was taught that the surest way to go when preparing a sermon was, to the best of my ability, try to determine what a passage of Scripture said to the original hearers and then try to find a creative way to convey that message to my congregation in its current context today.  Being honest, I try to do that, but too often it’s not a straightforward exercise for it is rare that a passage of Scripture says just one thing.  Every passage is wonderfully multi-faceted.  So, I have to approach the Scripture with a bit of humility asking “Lord, what would you have me to say?”  Then I read the passage over and over, work with it in its original language, and listen and wait.  Usually, there’s something in the passage that sticks out to me.  I hear the Word of God so to speak and feel the nudge.  Something inside just gives me the feeling of, “Yeah, that’s it.  Amen.”

This week it has something to do with hearing the word.  There in the first verse, it says that Jesus was standing there on the lakeshore and the crowd began to press in on him “to hear the word of God.”  The Greek word for “press in on” means simply to lie down.  My child-like imagination then saw a huge crowd wanting to lie down on Jesus, you know, reposing on him like it’s the Sabbath or the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.  But you folks can just go with the image Luke has here of a very excited huge mass of people crowding up against Jesus and each other like a huge catch of fish in a net.  They are excited to be with Jesus wanting him to speak because they just know that when Jesus speaks, somehow God is speaking through him.  

This crowd of people really, truly needed to hear God speak.  This was a huge crowd of Galileans.  Just everyday people...but people who had had enough.  Roman soldiers bullying them.  Those traitorous tax collectors were overtaxing them to get rich.  Everybody owed.  Everybody knew the slavery of having too much debt.  Then on top of the Romans.  The religious authorities would come up from Jerusalem and police them about the silliest things all the while offering them no hope.  They would say, “God will get you if you do that and if we catch you doing that, there will be a heavy penalty fee to pay to the Temple.”  This crowd of people were done.  They needed God to intervene.

In the midst of those oppressive circumstances, Jesus showed up healing people and casting out demons.  Things only God could do.  Jesus would also say things like “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and that the Kingdom of God is at hand, things for which he was kicked out of his hometown synagogue for saying.  The people, crowds of people, just had this sense that God had heard them crying out and somehow through this Jesus God was speaking and acting.

Well, Jesus commandeered Peter’s boat and sat down and to teach from it, just like the rabbis did in the synagogues. They fluffed their frilly robes and sat down to teach.  There’s no mention of what Jesus said, but for his “sermon illustration” he sent Peter out on a little fishing trip.  Jesus told him to put out into the deep water and let down his nets for a catch.  You know, go out to where you can’t see the bottom or whether there is fish down there.  Go out to where it just seems you’re looking into a greenish black void and there do what you do...fish.  Let down your nets for a catch.

Peter was reluctant but respectful.  He said to Jesus, “Sir, we’ve been fishing all night and…nothing...got skunked.”  I imagine Peter, that he was exhausted, discouraged, and like everybody else there…up to his eyeballs in tax debt to the Romans.  Here he has worked all night long throwing the nets out and pulling them in, throwing them out and pulling them in and they were wet and heavy like December snow.  On the plus side, it may have been beautiful on the lake that night, looking up at the billions of stars and the moon as it rose and set, and then the sunrise.  

And here’s something else to consider…that he was fishing at night may have meant that he was fishing on the Sabbath and not wanting to be seen.  Getting caught doing that would just get him in trouble with the religious authorities only to be punished with fines and public shaming.  Peter likely needed that extra outing of fishing to help pay the Roman taxes.  I can’t help but imagine Peter as being demoralized, hopeless, and borderline dysphoric.  “Why am I here?”  There was nothing meaningful to all that working for nothing.  Why live?  But you keep going because you have responsibilities, you keep going even though life seems to be nothing…a deep void like the deep water."

But all hope is never lost.  Peter was willing to give Jesus a chance. He said to Jesus, “…yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.”  If “you” say so.  Peter was hearing something more than words here.  He was hearing Jesus, hearing Jesus, and against all the physical and emotional fatigue he was feeling, he went and did what Jesus said do…Jesus, the one the crowds were flocking to, the one the Spirit of the Lord was upon, the one kicked out by his own synagogue, the one who was healing people and casting out demons, the one who was the peaceful, calming presence sitting in his boat talking about God whom he called “Father”.  There was just something there that Peter wanted.

Out to the deep water they go and over into that greenish, blackish void they let down the nets for a catch.  When they began to draw the nets in, it suddenly became clear that they needed some help or the nets would burst.  The catch was unbelievably huge to the point of almost sinking their boats.  This catch would likely get him and his friends out of debt.  Peter heard the voice of Jesus and as an act of loyalty, did what Jesus said to do.  Just like the hoards of people thronged to Jesus to hear the word of God so also even the fish in the deep, dark void of the lake heeded him.

Suddenly, Peter realized who Jesus is.  Luke points this out by calling him Simon Peter instead of just Simon.  He fell at Jesus’ knees (an act of worship) and exclaimed, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  What else are you supposed to do and say when you suddenly realize that you are in the presence of G_d?  Peter went from calling Jesus, a respectful, “Sir”, to calling him "Lord".  G_d is the only One a Jew will address as "Lord".  And so, Peter, his brother Andrew, and their two friends James and John left everything…their boats, their nets, even family…to follow Jesus.

Turning the camera onto us, what do you do when you get that sense that God is speaking to you? It’s probably the case that for most of us when we think about hearing the word of God we approach it more like, “Just tell me what it says in the Bible and I’ll do it or at least take it into consideration.”  Yet, this approach reduces Scripture to being nothing more than a manual of moral truths for do-gooder’s and presumes that God just speaks generically and not to us personally.  That would be crazy.  Yet, one thing the Bible clearly and adamantly indicates is that God is directly involved in his Creation and in each of our lives.  We are each part of God’s purposes for his Creation.  I remember reading somewhere, maybe in Proverbs, something that said God created us with two holes in our heads, meaning two ears, so that we can hear him when he speaks.  Please do not underestimate the importance the Bible places on our hearing God personally.  God created us for that.  

But anyway, I guess the question we really need to ask is how does God speak?  How does God speak so that we may hear?  I will confess my insanity here.  I wouldn’t have come to Canada to be a minister had God not spoken an audible word to me to that effect.  Then, there’s the countless number of times when in my daily Bible readings, a verse or verses have stuck out to me that addressed me and the situations of my life in a very specific manner and in time what was said proved true . There have also been times when I’ve actually had the opportunity to sit in church like you folks and God has spoken to me through the sermon or a hymn.  There have also been times when something as weird as a hawk showing up at a moment that was more than coincidental and seemed to me to be God speaking to me.  God speaks.  

And, let’s set the record straight here.  Because I am a minister, does not deal differently with me than he does with each of you.  Since each of us is indwelt with the Holy Spirit who opens our ears to hear, God will speak and it does us well to give him opportunity.  I think, heck I know, that for the most part our problem with hearing God speak is in our not giving ourselves opportunity to hear.  Speaking from the testimony of the Scriptures themselves and my own personal experience, God does and will speak specifically and personally to us particularly when we are at a low point or in the midst of crisis, when we are in need of being turned around, when we need guidance.  God has not hung us out to walk through life on our own hoping we get it right.  Our God loves us.  Our God is faithful.  Therefore, he speaks and he speaks lovingly to us that which is best for us.  Therefore, his word is nothing to fear, but rather the thing upon which we should place our hope.  Jesus told Peter, “Do not be afraid.”  So let us not be afraid that God speaks.  If God doesn’t speak then life really is just our staring over the side of a boat into a greenish, black void not knowing what lurks there.  I find that scary.  Lie down on Jesus, repose on Jesus, press in on Jesus and listen for God to speak.  Amen.