Jesus Is with Us

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Matthew 28:16-20

There was a big movement a couple of decades ago of ministers vacating those grand elevated pulpits such as we have here in order to preach from a lectern on the floor.  Part of the reason for that is how it feels to preach from way up there.   Hovering (maybe even sometimes havering) about up there, above the congregation makes us feel conspicuous, overbearing, and stuffy, not to mention cut off from the people.  Whereas being down on the floor makes us feel like we’re one of you.  It’s more personable and engaging.  It even invites conversation.  On the floor we feel more like a coach while up there we feel more like a pontificator, even though the Latin root of that word, with a bit of irony maybe, means “bridge-builder”.  How do you build a bridge from way up there?

The rest of the reason for the move has to do with what the location of the pulpit says about God to the people in the pew, especially those visiting.  The high pulpit can give the impression that God is above us, always watching, distant and unapproachable.  No matter how much grace we preach, “the medium is the message”.  It is hard to say God has befriended his people when the one conveying the message stays aloof.  One can make the argument that the high pulpit is for reasons of visibility and acoustics.  Maybe so originally, but couple a high pulpit with an obsequious, ashen looking, dower, pompous pontificator telling you that God is a voyeur to your every sin and indeed your every sinful thought.  Woe and curses.  It doesn’t work.  Some people try to soften that impression by saying that God is watching from above making everything go hunky-dory for you.  But what happens when things don’t go hunky-dory?  Did God stop watching?  Moreover, a distant God is just as easily kept at a distance and then, just as easily dismissed…as has happened in Western Christianity. 

Preaching from a lectern on the floor at the level of the congregation on the other hand says that God is with us.  Jesus did not make the promise, “I will be above you always, watching until the end of the age.”  His promise was that he would be with us.  

Just take a second and think about this.  What if Jesus’ promise to us really was rather to be above us than to be with us?  The effect of placing Jesus above us rather than with us is profoundly deadly to the church.  If he is above, then he is not with us.  He is not presently involved in the work of his church or present to us in our individual lives.  He has simply left us, down here, to fend for ourselves trying to figure out what God wants from us.  Trying to forge the way for the church in the 21^st Century in the wake of the death of cultural Christianity simply becomes our task rather than our participation in what he is doing.  It is like he has left us to our own efforts to save his church from oblivion.  That’s just wrong.

If that’s what happens when the church thinks Jesus is above us, then what does it do to us as individuals?  If Jesus is above me, distant from me, a complete non-participant in my life, then faithful living is just a matter of my own efforts, of doing what I think best hoping that God will bless it from above.  If that is the case, then no wonder we conjure up some sort of magical power we call faith (If you just believe hard enough...), invent rituals which must be followed to the T for them to gain God's favour, and negotiate contracts with God (“I’ll do this for you God, if you do that for me.”).  If Jesus is above us, we are simply left to our own.  That’s scary.  But praise be to God! Jesus is with us.  He is not above us.  He is with us.  We are not alone nor abandoned to our own efforts.  

Maybe the most significant change that needs to happen in the church today is a change in our thinking, in our way of understanding the very fabric of reality.  Everything about the way we do church and practice our own personal faith in Christ, I believe, is based in an understanding of reality in which God is above us, in which Jesus is above us.  Our perception of reality needs to effectively change to that of Jesus is with us.  For our churches to make the switch from being the religious institution that undergirded our culture in these days when the culture doesn’t want us to be that anymore into being a church that is out in the world in a missionary kind of way in this land which is now a mission field, we must cease thinking of Jesus as being above and let Jesus retrain our thinking by letting us know he is with us.

I had this change of thinking and this is how it happened with me.  I was raised as Christian.  As a child, my family went to church on and off with irregularity.  Going to church was something you knew you were supposed to do.  It was the super-daddy of all New Year’s resolutions.  It was a good habit to be into; one that would make the rest of life go better because God, who was way off somewhere up there, would bless you for it.  

Well, on New Year’s Eve when I was almost twenty I threw a party and nobody showed up and that just seemed to be the culmination of a life that had been quite emotionally and relationally painful.  Things got dark for me that night.  I started to think that if this was the sum total of my life, then why is it worth living.  I thought about ending it but in consideration of the pain it would cause my mother, I chose differently.  I listened to a different tug going on inside me and figured Jesus could do a better job with me than I was.  So, I decided my life was his.  I called my best friend’s mom the next morning and asked if she was going to church.  She said, “yes.” And I said, “I’ll see you there”.  That’s when I made the decision to start going to church on my own.

I also started sensing that God was calling me to the ministry and so I made a bargain with him.  I said, “God, I will go this route as long as I don’t have to go it alone.  Bring me a wife…the sooner the better.”  You just got to laugh at that.  A year later I was in university and I had just got dumped by the girl I thought was “the one”.  I knew I was called to the ministry, but it looked like I was going alone.  The bargain I made with God ended through no apparent fault of my own but according to Jimmy Buffet it’s always one’s own damn fault.  I sat there in my dorm room, all alone, having a pity party.  It is hard to describe what happened next.  All I can say is that it was like a door opened in my sense of reality and Jesus stepped in.  From that moment on I have had the awareness that I am not alone.  That he is with me.  Jesus is always with me.  I’ve nothing to fear.  It was also during those days that I really began to realize that God loved me, that I was one of his beloved children.  This change in my perception of reality changed the way I did things.  Prayer for example,  now when I pray, instead of praying to an old man who is seated on a throne somewhere above the expanse of this infinitely huge universe, I pray to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who are seated in the room with me.

I always feel like people look at me like I’m mentally ill when I tell these stories.  And it’s odd because the only place I ever really tell them is at church among church people.  As a minister, I get very little exposure to non-church people.  Regardless, we church people, we really need to wake up to the reality that Jesus is with us.   We shouldn’t think it odd if someone says “it just feels so good here.  There’s a peacefulness here at church.” Or, “I was looking out the kitchen window with a world of worry on my mind and a sudden calm came over me.”  We shouldn’t think it strange even if someone says, “I heard the voice of Jesus say.”  That happens.  We, the disciples of Jesus, should expect to have an awareness of Jesus being with us and celebrate it when it happens.  

It would also be great if we as congregations gathered really had the awareness that Jesus is with us and that by the power of the Holy Spirit he is leading us.  In order to figure his leading out, we need to do things like getting together outside of Sunday morning to study the Bible and pray together.  He’ll make his presence felt. Jesus' presence with us isn’t something that only crazy people sense.  It is something he has promised to his disciples.  He is with us.  Amen.

 

Big Changes

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Numbers 11:4-30

To be honest, I don’t deal with change very well.  I have my little agoraphobic world that I subsist in where everything’s the way I’m used to it.  I may not like it, but it is what I’m used to.  I like my chair, my room, my bed, my routine, what I eat, being lazy, what I watch.  Don’t change my it.  My it don’t change.  Can anybody relate?  Do I hear an “Amen”?

But, you know, change, the change itself, isn’t the real culprit when it comes to our reluctance to change things.  Change, whether good or bad, is a fact of life.  It happens with regularity.  It’s not the change that’s difficult.  It’s the transition that occurs as we adjust from the way things used to be to a new reality, a reality that is a huge unknown.  When a change happens it inevitably means we have to let go of some thing’s in ourselves and in our identity, and start doing things a different way, and at some point, eventually accept a new it.

Nevertheless, in the midst of the transition things are quite ambiguous and that makes us feel quite anxious.  The feelings associated with the stages of grief come up.  We enter the deep river of denial and isolation; feeling like we’re the only person to have ever gone through this.  We can be perpetually angry or at least grumpy all the time.  Or, we can start to dwell on the past, constructing a list of regrets, of “if only I had done this or not said that” in a futile effort to get back what’s gone.  We understandably feel sadness even to the point of depression.  We can’t seem to get it in gear.  But, in time the shock wears off and we feel like maybe taking a kick at this new can.  All those feelings and stuff, that’s the transition that comes with change and its why we naturally don’t want to go through change.

The Israelites are a good example of this.  They were slaves in Egypt.  Their workload was ever-increasing under cruel taskmaster’s.  They cried out. God heard them and with a mighty hand freed them.  In the process God humiliated Pharaoh, devastated his armies, and showed the gods of Egypt to be impotent.  Then, God veiled in a cloud personally and powerfully led them to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, but they still had to go through the Wilderness to get there.  You’d think that they would have shouted “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God we’re free at last.” and danced their way to Canaan’s Land.  But…, no, that wasn’t the case.

In the transitional days of the Wilderness they were scared.  They complained…a lot, the food’s terrible and where’s the water.  They pined for Egypt where there were cucumbers and leeks, where they had the security of being slaves.  Slavery may have really sucked but at least they could count on it.  And, yes, returning to Egypt would have meant returning to the protection of those impotent gods of Egypt and worshipping them.  They didn’t trust they’re leaders or their ability to lead.  Then when they arrived at the Promised Land and they spied it out, they were too afraid to enter it.  There were giants in the Land.  Only two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, were bold enough to say, “To God be the glory, we got this.”  It all boiled down to the cold, hard fact that the Israelites just didn’t trust God to settle them in the new Land, the God who had parted the Red Sea and drowned Pharaoh’s army, who had led them and fed them all the way through the Wilderness.  So, God made them wander in the Wilderness some more so as to learn faith.  Forty years and a generation later, the people of Israel finally crossed the Jordan.  The only two people of the first generation to settle in the Promised were Joshua and Caleb, even Moses didn’t make it.

The “Change” was God’s delivering them from slavery in Egypt to go live in the Land God had promised to their ancestors.  The “Transition” was what they went through in the Wilderness to get there.  The “Change” was a powerful work of deliverance by God’s hand, but powerful works alone do little to build our faith and identity as God’s people.  The “Transition” they experienced in the Wilderness was where Faith happened – loyalty and devotion to God.  Following the presence of the Lord in the cloud, listening to Moses, and living under (and pardon the phrase) austerity measures changed the Hebrew people from being slaves to Pharaoh into the beloved people of God.  You see, you can take the people out of Egypt, but how do you take Egypt out of the people?…wandering in the Wilderness.  They had to learn to trust and follow the Lord without reservation because that’s the type of people they needed to be to live in Canaan’s Land where they were not welcome and where they faced the threat of becoming just like the people of Canaan.

Looking more towards today, most churches today resemble God’s people in slavery in Egypt.  People who participate in a congregation such as ours today are likely to feel like slaves to an institution.  Having fewer people means more work for fewer and fewer able bodies.  The financial burdens of full-time clergy and aging facilities necessitate greater giving by fewer and fewer people just to keep up.  Congregational self-esteem plummets.  Whole congregations get depressed.  There’s grumbling, complaining, and fighting due to real but unchecked anxiety about the future of “my church home.”  

So many churches see their only option to be the either/or of staying open until someone pries the church key from Mr. Heston’s cold, dead hands or making proactive decisions around closing or amalgamating.  But, closing a church and forcing a church family to go elsewhere isn’t at all like moving from the recliner to a table to eat my dinner.  Leaving a church building that you’ve called “home” and/or a group of people that have been friends who are family for years to decades does not come without a truly painful personal cost to one’s own faith.  When people leave a church today, no matter the reason, they are likely to not go anywhere else.  Do a survey of retired clergy and see how many of them still go to church…that’s if they can retire.

Something called discontinuous change has come to our land.  Congregations today face the harsh reality that the communities in which we are situated are not Christian anymore while we, the Church, have existed in our culture as part of the culture bedrock.  The people in our neighbourhoods are secular and post-Christian often with a bad taste in their mouths.  Some may claim to be “spiritual” and whatever “spiritual” may mean to them, it’s private and don’t go there unless you’ve gained a lot of trust first.  They are definitely poised against participation in the institution of the Church and that’s if they have any inkling at all of what Christian faith is.  The media tends to make a mockery of the Christian faith and in some cases that is deserved.  Something called discontinuous change is upon us. 

Sometimes change is simply an adaptation in order for things to continue the way they always have.  This was the church from the 70’s to the early 90’s.  Praise bands, PowerPoint presentations, a sermon that sounds, feels, and looks like a self-improvement seminar that your boss sent you to in order to increase productivity in the workplace - the congregations who made those adaptations experienced institutional growth up until about 20-25 years ago but the growth was mostly from church swappers rather than new believers.  These changes within congregations were in-house adaptations to the change in media and technology that everybody has grown accustomed to since the advent of television.  But now, even the churches that made these adaptations are beginning to struggle.  The Discontinuous Change brought upon us by our surrounding culture has truly become pervasive.  The people in our surrounding communities are no longer simply back-slidden or latent Christians who just need to find their way inside these doors.   

I think we need a truer understanding of what the church is in order to exist in this Wilderness of discontinuous change.  We can no longer simply strive to make adaptations in style.  There is nothing we can do technologically or stylistically to compete with what the handheld smart device, social media, and a culture-wide addiction to revenge have done to our culture over the last 20 years.  What we must be is a compassionate fellowship of friends who are family who participate in Jesus’ own ministry of healing, prayer, and forgiveness.  We must be a fellowship where things of status like wealth, ethnicity, race, and prestige don’t define a person.  God does not discriminate against people when deciding whom to pour his Spirit upon so as to adopt as his own beloved child, and that’s everyone.  God is indiscriminate in whom he wants to heal.  

The compassionate fellowship in Jesus that persists through this wilderness of discontinuous change will emerge as a community of healing in which God has poured his Spirit on each and every one of us not just the elders as he did in Moses’ day.  This healing fellowship is where people who are suffering the burdens of the world are prayed for and they indeed find relief in the presence of the Lord.  This fellowship of forgiveness is where people come and share their weaknesses and own up to their short-comings and the pain they’ve caused and rather than judge them we pray for them so that they feel those burdens lifted up and born away by Jesus.  It’s a wonderful feeling of deliverance, if you’ve ever felt that.  The soul-healing that Jesus has to give is akin to resurrection from the dead.  Indeed, it is the proof and foretaste of resurrection from the dead.  What is even more amazing is that he uses our ears and our prayers in the process of bringing this soul-healing about.  

The church that survives this discontinuous change will be the compassionate, healing, forgiving fellowship that happens over the backyard fence or the cup of coffee in conversations where we love our neighbours, our actual neighbours, enough to sincerely ask them how they are and listen to them, really listen to them hearing the burdens they bear and praying for them rather than judging them; expecting nothing in return from them but from Jesus, expecting him to bring them soul-healing as he has done for us.  Amen.

  

A Eulogy for Jesus

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Luke 24:44-53

If you’ve ever had to do it, you know that it’s not easy to give a eulogy.  The word literally means good word and to eulogize is to speak good things about someone.  In most cases, finding nice things to say about a person you’ve known since way back when is not a difficult thing.  The difficulty arises when it’s a funeral and you are grief-stricken.  For that reason, the task of eulogizing the dearly departed will from time to time fall back on me, the minister.  

When that happens, I like to get the family together a day or so before the funeral and get them to start telling me stories about who this person was.  I don’t tell any of their stories in the eulogy.  That gathering simply gives me a sense of who that person was and then I try to say how God worked through this person to love and bless her family, friends, and even whole communities.  Some people are so saintly that I can say that God gave us a glimpse of himself through this person.  

But then there’s that odd funeral when trying to find something good to say…hmmm…better talk about something else.  I‘ve had to do that twice in 30 years of ministry, twice too many.  I’ll tell you about the first time.  I was in my first year of ministry down in West Virginia and I hardly had a clue what to do for a funeral anyway.  In seminary, they wisely taught us to avoid eulogizing people if at all possible because our role at a funeral is to proclaim resurrection in Christ.  In our theological tradition, the service we do at death isn’t a funeral service nor a celebration of life.  In our Book of Common Worship, it’s called a Service of Witness to the Resurrection.  We’re supposed to talk about resurrection.  That’s why if you come to a funeral that I conduct you won’t hear me talking about going to heaven when you die but rather I talk about resurrection in a new creation.  You will also notice that I don’t take my seminary professor’s advice as I will always say something about the person we’re commending on.

Anyway, here’s what happened.  It started when the local funeral director called me and said a family wanted the Presbyterian minister to do their father’s funeral because Grandma so and so from way back when was a Presbyterian and that’s what they thought they must be.  Being the only Presbyterian minister for miles around I consented.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get the family to agree to meet with me for storytime.  It simply would have been just too difficult for them.  One of the daughters led me to suspect that her father wasn’t all that great of a man.  I also asked a few people who might have known him or at least of him and they all agreed he wasn’t the finest example of a human being.  So, I was left with a mess on my hands.  I had to do the funeral for a man most people regarded as “Hell bound”.  My usual funeral plan wasn’t going to work because I had no evidence that God had blessed this family through their father and he certainly hadn’t been a person you’d look at and say God is like that.  

Well, showtime.  I stood there and did the service before his two daughters and son as they wept.  There were less than ten people there in total.  I sensed there was a lot of unfinished business in that family.  So, instead of eulogizing I talked a bit about how to deal with grief and that death is not the end of things.  As I expected, they didn’t pay me any attention.  No matter.  What really wretched my gut with that funeral was that I was unable to tell a grieving family that their father was a blessing to them. That’s pretty messed up.  This man’s funeral had no eulogy.  I am saddened with the thought that this man’s life may have lacked God’s blessing and therefore there was no reason for his family to bless God and be thankful for their father.  If assumptions or should I say judgments are correct, this man was one of those people that make it hard for us to say that Jesus Christ is Lord for if he is Lord, why would he let someone be so hurtful to his own family.  We have all known people like this and I’m sure that is a question we’ve all asked.  I don’t know the answer.

Well, this is Ascension Sunday.  Today we celebrate that Jesus the resurrected one has ascended to the right hand of the Father and from there reigns in the power of the Holy Spirit; and by power I mean the power that comes through the vulnerability of self-denying, self-giving love.  We would like to believe that the way God reigns in his creation is through blessing the good and cursing the wicked.  But, thinking of the man I spoke of earlier, we want to ask why God didn’t get that man for causing so much hurt.  I can’t answer that question, the justice question; but with respect to how Jesus reigns in this world, I can say that Jesus’ reigning in this twisted world is going to look like his death on the cross.  The cross was his throne and he reigns in unconditional love.  Jesus shows us how God rules in his creation by suffering for us and with us whether the suffering comes as just part of life or because of the bent and twisted will of others not to mention our own.  

To that weeping family I could have said that Jesus was with them in the sufferings they have endured from being the children of that man but I had no details to point to.  I could have said that their expectations of God should be that somehow God was going to take all the hurt that man caused them and instead of letting it remain as senseless hurt, use it as the means of blessing them and others.  The blessing will primarily be experienced as knowing God and God’s love, which tends to heal and change us so that we might be a blessing to others in their suffering.  The reign of Christ is that he will bless us by being present with us in our hurts and then making those hurts to be the means by which he blesses us with new life in himself and then others through us.  He reigns by suffering with his own and healing us in such a way as we wind up knowing God himself, being healed and changed by God, and them being part of God’s blessing to others.

Well, if you are wondering why I’m talking about eulogies and blessings, I have no short answer to give you other than at the end of our passage from Luke he says that the disciples were continually in the temple blessing God.  The Greek word for blessing is eulogia – literally, eulogy.  The apostles spent their days after Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father in the temple eulogizing Jesus.  Ascended to the right hand means what it sounds like.  Jesus is God’s right-hand man so to speak, the one through whom God does what God does in God’s Creation which is to save and heal his Creation and those in it.  What Jesus did as he ministered back then, is what God continues to do through the people of Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: healing, restoring, reconciling, resurrecting in the power of self-giving love.  

Immediately after Jesus ascended, the disciples went back to Jerusalem to eulogize him.  The evidence that Jesus Christ has ascended and reigns in this world is that there are those who know him and can eulogize him because he has acted in their lives for healing, reconciliation, restoration, indeed given new life to them by the presence and good work of the Holy Spirit.   These people know they have been in the presence of God and blessed by God and the wish to witness to that, to eulogize.

The Trinity works in our lives and through us by means of blessing us so that we are a blessing to others.  Jesus, the Son blesses us by letting us know that he is the one who suffers with us, who prays continually for us, and reveals the self-giving love of God to us.  This blessing bears its fruit as we get involved with being Jesus’ blessing of others.  If we’ve got a friend at work suffering through a divorce, or grief, or whatever, this means we will be inclined to be part of God’s blessing to them by suffering through it with them.  Be the one who is intentional about being there and listening.  Be the one who gives hope and encouragement.  Be the one who helps people to forgive and reconcile.  Be a living eulogy of Jesus, the proof of his ascension and reigning.  Be part of his good healing work in the lives of others.  Amen.

God Is Knowable

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Acts 17:16-31; John 14:15-21

I wonder what Paul would have to say to us today after walking around in our culture reflecting upon our objects of worship.  In Paul's day usually the only things portrayed publicly by images of persons were gods or rulers.  Therefore, I think he would mistake nearly every billboard and every advertisement he saw as an icon of some god.  They would lead him assume our gods would be food, radio stations, automobiles, real estate agents, financial institutions, athletes, and underwear models.  Some of the same gods would still be around like Nike.  He would think that we had a god for every activity in life just like they did in ancient Greece and Rome; gods of partying, wealth, power, sex, family, trades, cities, kingdoms, war, sports, etc.  I would also be interested in hearing his thoughts about these handheld smart devices to which we are so glued.  Would he think they are a portal into the realm of the gods?  I’m certain he would think that we are possessed by them, that through them some unseen powers control us.  I suspect that in the end, he would conclude that we are as extremely religious as the Athenians were and be troubled.  

Paul described the Athenians as being extremely religious.  The Greek word for that basically means an excessive fear or excessive respect of supernatural powers which they called daimones.  It’s the word we get our word demon from except to them a daimon could be either benevolent or evil.  For us, post- the vivid imagination of Medieval Christianity, we talk about blessed angels and evil demons.  But, to the Greeks and Romans the daimones were lesser deities or guiding spirits who could help you or hinder you and even possess you.  People believed that the daimones were a present help for the things of daily life because the big gods on Olympus didn’t care.   And so, in Athens there were shrines for just about every god and daimon imaginable to which the Athenians went to perform the prescribed rituals in the hopes of keeping the spirits appeased and on their side.  

As Paul walked through Athens on a preaching tour, he noticed all these shrines.  Among them, he saw a shrine with the inscription “Agnosto Theo”, to an unknown God or an unknowable God.  FYI, the Greek word agnosto is the word from which we get our word agnostic.  Some philosopher types who heard Paul preach took him up to the Areopagus, “Philosopher's Hill”, for him to present his “new ideas” of Jesus and the Resurrection.  He started talking about the shrine to the unknown or unknowable god.  He suggested that this God whom they thought of as unknown or unknowable is actually the one true God, the Creator and Lord of Creation who has revealed himself to humanity, indeed, truly made himself known and knowable to humanity in, through, and as Jesus the Jewish Messiah who continues to be knowable to us by means of the Holy Spirit.  

Paul hit a core nerve with the Athenians that we would do well to ponder.  The reason the Athenians were so extremely religious was that they believed that knowing a god personally was impossible.  God and the gods to them were essentially unknowable and could only be managed by rituals or through the help of daimones.  A person could have experiences of daimones, but a true honest to God encounter with God or a god was impossible.  To the Athenians, encounters with gods were the things that myths were made of similar to how some people say that only the people in the Bible had experiences of God but not us today. Because they believed that gods were ultimately unknowable, they built shrines where they went to perform rituals that were supposed to incite the daimones to regard them favourably and grant their requests.

Returning to our culture, Paul's diagnosis of the Athenians' excessive religious-ness fits us quite well.  If Paul were to walk through our cities and countrysides he would see Christian symbology everywhere particularly the crosses people like to wear and think us very committed to Jesus.  But he would also wonder why there are all these churches that have become community centers or are just boarded up or have so dwindled off in membership they are about to become community centers.  His diagnosis would be that after nearly 2,000 years, even we the disciples of Jesus have bought into the idea that God is ultimately unknowable.  We too have become agnostic and because of this, the church is dying and people are yet again seeking spiritual experience by means of the daimones (guiding spirits).  Palm readers, spiritual guides, mediums, witches, crystal vendors, marketers of the magic of ancient peoples, and your corner drug dealer all have a guaranteed clientèle these days; and most common to just about everyone are our little handheld portals to the realm of the gods (smartphones).  Our culture as a whole, head over heels and foot in mouth, believes God cannot actually be known, but yet we blindly seek something more than “this”, something “beyond” ourselves, that good life that our little portals to the realm of the divine continually advertise and which we hope to experience with every next swipe.

Paul just might tell us that we have a theological problem and by theology I don't mean the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods.  The word theology means the study or contemplation of one's personal/experiential knowledge of God.  In the first couple of centuries of the church, theology was first and foremost the act of prayer and sitting with the awareness of God’s presence and a sense of God’s goodness, faithfulness, love, beauty, and joy.  Then in the second place, Christian theology was pondering and talking about how God has made himself known in, through, and as Jesus Christ who continues to make himself known to us by means of the Holy Spirit.  Ultimately, theology culminates in our prayerfully pondering that God is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has graciously adopted us each into God’s very self so that we know we are God's children just as Jesus is.

Theology works with the basic premise that God is knowable and can be known albeit by revelation.  We in our pride and brokenness are prone to create gods in our own images and would not know the True God from a tree apart from God getting a hold of us and shaking us down with an overwhelming sense of God’s love in the face of our having to face ourselves in all our false successes and glorified failures.  We are never going to understand God fully, but understandability is not the same thing as knowability.  God is knowable.  The fact that most Christians think that theology is the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods drives home the point that the average Christian believes that God is ultimately unknowable and just a matter of dogmatic belief and rituals. 

God is knowable, but not knowable as some sort of experience of the supernatural powers or the daimones.  The Christian faith is that, not believes that, the Christian faith is that God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus so that we share in his relationship with the Father.  This is what our reading in John is all about.  True theology, true spiritual experience is to personally know that God the Father has been steadfastly loving and faithful to you, to me, to all just as Jesus himself knows it and to share in Jesus' own love for and faithfulness to the Father.  And, empowered with their loving communion living within us each and in us as a community of faith by the presence of the Holy Spirit we share in the Jesus' mission to go into the world obeying the commandment that we love one another so that the world may know what God looks like and want to enter into the community that bears the image of God the Trinity and come to know God.  

Speaking with regard to myself, my personal practice of theology (prayer, sense of God’s presence) culminates in the awareness that I am God’s beloved child.  Even when I have thoroughly blown it, God does not abandon me but guides me to grow up and fix it.  When the feathers come flying out of left field and then hit the fan and life comes crashing down in hurt, especially then when it seems more apparent that there cannot be a god, God finds me to whisper “You are my beloved son.  My delight.  I will work this to your good.  Sit and rest.  Weep, wail, and rant if you need.  I’m here.  I'll listen.”

Let me share with you one of the first lessons I learned in parenthood.  When William was just born, I was in to see my doctor and reflected on that parental fear of absolutely blowing it.  He said, “Don’t worry so much about that.  You know how you feel about your father.  Your son will feel the same way about you.”  Through his mistakes, failures, and success, he was still my dad.  There’s a bond of love there that’s hard to put words to.  And for mother’s I suppose it’s even deeper we little beggars grow inside you and feed off you.  It’s a completely unique bond I can't pretend to understand or romanticize. 

Not long after that conversation when William was just a few months old it became the pattern that around 5:00 AM he would begin to stir and grumble and complain.  We learned that we could usually get another hour of sleep out of him, if one of us went and got him and brought him to bed.  After a couple of good kicks to the stomach, he would snuggle in and fall back to sleep.  I didn't sleep much for that hour but it was just good to hold him.  That bond of love is good.  So is the bond of love that we share with God in Christ by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  That bond I feel about my son and my daughter, that’s a small taste of how God feels about me, about us all.  God is knowable and makes himself known to us by making us to know we are his beloved children.  Amen.

 

Long for the Pure, Real Milk

1 Peter 1:22-2:10

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Many of you may remember the Nestle Boycott back in the late 70’s due to its unethical marketing of infant baby formula in poorer nations.  Nestle was promoting its baby formula with several blatant lies such as saying it is a healthier option to breastfeeding or that it would free up a mother for other things like working outside the home to make money.  They used advertisements that stigmatized breastfeeding as disempowering to women.  

Well as it turned out, that baby formula proved problematic in poor areas where clean water wasn’t available and proper sanitation practices are difficult to observe.  Mixing powdered formula with tainted water was giving babies dysentery and worse.  Moreover, because formula was more expensive than breast milk people were watering it down to make it go further resulting in babies becoming undernourished.  And to cap it all off, Nestle had the audacity to sell to poorer countries baby formula that was not as nutrient rich as what they were selling in richer countries so that white Westerners who used it had a better go with it giving the “home front” impression of “well it works for us so the problem must be them”. 

Babies do better physically and emotionally when breastfed for at least the first six months of life.  That's an indisputable scientific fact true for all mammals and marsupials.  Breastfeeding passes immunities and other beneficial goodies from mother to child that infant formula simply cannot.  It strengthens the bond between mother and child by the physical, skin-to-skin contact breastfeeding involves, which incidentally, also produces stress reducing hormones.  Baby formulas are a godsend if there is some reason, like latching issues, that breastfeeding just can’t happen. Otherwise, real mother’s milk is the best food for a baby to grow on.

Back in Bible times they had alternative foods for infants other than their mother’s milk.  They knew that human breast milk was best for the baby.  But they also had this Nestle thing going on too. If you were rich and didn’t want to be “inconvenienced” by motherhood, you procured a wet nurse slave to nurse your child.  Unfortunately, it often meant the death of the slave’s own child because yours came first.  So also, if you were not well off and a breastfeeding issue arose, you had the wet nurse option if another woman in your family was nursing at the time.  But most often, if you couldn’t feed your baby your own milk, you had to feed her milk from a goat or an ox.  This meant that your baby would not have the immunities it should have and the chance of infant mortality was greater.  Though they didn’t understand germs, they did see the risks.  It was risky not to feed an infant human breast milk. 

That in mind, Peter tells us here in our reading, “Like newborn infants long for the pure, genuine milk so that by it you may grow into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”  You folks have heard the phrase “Born again” that comes from the Gospel of John.  It really means to be born from above.  The Greeks had two words for being born; one pertaining to the moment of conception emphasizing the male’s role in birth and the other pertains to coming out the birth canal emphasizing the female’s role in birth.  Translated literally, what we are used to hearing as “born again” should really be “sired from above”.  It means that God the Father has sired us anew with the Holy Spirit so that we are now his children, members of his family, brothers and sisters of and in Jesus the Son.  Peter plays that image out a bit further to post-birth pointing to the reality that as newborn infants, we need to eat.  If we are going to grow up into salvation, into people who bear the image of Christ, then we need to eat real food rather than watered down goat’s milk or something like that.  We need pure, spiritual milk.

So back to Peter and to the pure, spiritual milk; what is he referring to?  Well, right at the end of chapter one he refers to the love that is within Christian community, inviting us to love one another deeply from the heart.  We who have been given a new birth by the Holy Spirit so that we are the children of God the Father grow to salvation by participating in the loving community of Christian fellowship. The love we share is God’s image on earth.  

So, in 2:1 Peter tells us to put some things aside and these things are what I would call the watered-down goat’s milk that we should avoid if we are to grow into salvation. And here, salvation does not mean going to heaven when we die.  Salvation is being an active participant in a mature, loving Christian community.  I can’t emphasize that enough. The things that we are to put aside are all things that hurt community and they are unfortunately things or rather behaviours that broken and hurt people do to break and hurt others.  Peter mentions hostility, deceit, hypocrisy or putting on pretences, envy, and spreading lies about other people.  All these behaviours destroy trust and kill community.  They weaken friendships and give a false sense of power and security when all they really are is an instinctual cover for the insecurity we all feel when we don’t have that sense of God’s unwavering love for us.  Bringing these watered-down, unsanitized infant formula behaviours into Christian community kills it.  It turns a congregation into a club dominated by dominant personalities who are afraid of their own insecurities.

Peter says that if we have tasted the good stuff, the love of God in Christ embodied in Christian fellowship, then we are to desire it and choose it above all else.  He invites us to come to Christ Jesus the living stone who is the cornerstone of a living temple of which we are the living stones of which it is being built.  The early church didn’t have church buildings or temples like the other religions.  We only had our fellowship.  To come to church was to come to a gathering of Jesus followers wherever they happened to meet.

Peter also says we are the priesthood of “the temple” who offer up the true spiritual sacrifices that come with helping one another be disciples of Jesus and grow in him.  Christian community is built on discipleship, people committing to following Jesus together.  Small groups of people committed to one another to study Scripture together, to share our lives, our struggles and joys, and to pray together.  

Peter then goes on to point out that Christian community matures into a visible, holy nation among the nations.  The biggest mistake the Church ever made throughout history was to get involved with empires and nations so that a national body can today call itself a Christian State while in turn having absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus; especially his teachings that we are to love our neighbour and our enemy and the immigrant among us.  We ignore these essential teachings all the while co-opting the reputation of God to seek the will of a power hungry few who just want to own everything.  Oops.  Sorry.  Got side-tracked.  

The “Jesus” nation exists in and amidst the nations as small gatherings of people who by earnestly following Jesus strive to do things like eliminate poverty in their immediate communities, care for the elderly in their immediate communities, help with childcare in their immediate communities.  The Jesus nation brings healing to their immediate communities in which they exist expecting nothing in return.  This is the way we proclaim the mighty acts of the one who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.

I know I sound idealistic, but…this is the way the early church was for the first couple of centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early 400’s.  Over the centuries there have been times when the church has risen to the occasion and manifested this idealistic behaviour.  Believe it or not, it was during plagues and pandemics.  When these things broke out it always seemed that the official State church spent its time saying God was getting the people for sins; or, scapegoating immigrants or other ethnic groups as the cause.  Yet, there were also small groups of faithful followers of Jesus who didn’t play like that but rather shut up and fed the hungry, nursed the sick, buried the dead, cared for the widowed, raised the orphaned at great risk to their own health and sacrifice of their own resources, hid Jews in their attics at the risk of dying in gas chambers themselves. 

As I said, I know I’m sounding idealistic, but…this wouldn’t be the first time that longing for ideals has changed the world for the better.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that inspired and is still inspiring good change in the world.  We live at a time when the ideals of Jesus are what this world needs to counter the myths of privatization, consumerism, and materialism and so perhaps we, the followers of Jesus, should begin to long for, to deeply desire, the pure, real milk of Christian community as we have indeed tasted that the Lord is good.  Perhaps this deep longing in reality looks like a deeper commitment to Jesus and to being his disciples together and to let the mighty acts of God arise from us as he moves us to greater acts of love towards one another and for those outside our fellowship.  Long for the pure, spiritual milk that will cause us to grow into the salvation that arises among God’s family loving one another deeply from the heart.  Amen.