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.

 

The New Amidst the Old

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1 Peter 2:9-3:9

At the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer we pray “Your kingdom come.  Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”  We pray for God’s reign to come to Earth, not the other way around which would be to get us off of Earth into Heaven.  Bringing his reign to Earth is what God was up to when God the Son became human as Jesus.  He became a sinner just like each of us.  That may be hard to hear, but if he didn’t, there is no such thing as salvation.  He was a sinner who struggled with it every minute of the day but he did not sin.  He lived faithfully, that faithful life that is impossible for us to live no matter how hard we try.  He bore sin-filled human being to the cross where it was judged and put to death ONCE and FOR ALL.  With his resurrection, human being was changed in that we share in his new human being through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who is working in and among us, remaking us and helping us to become more like Jesus until he comes and all things are ultimately healed and made new.  This is God’s reign coming to Earth, becoming on Earth as it is in Heaven.  The followers of  Jesus exist as the new amidst the old, the new life of Christ growing amidst the old and dying sin-diseased humanity. Humanity being transformed by the Holy Spirit into the image of Christ on Earth is the Gospel – by grace through fidelity the reign of Christ comes to earth from heaven.  

Unfortunately, when the Roman Empire co-opted the Christian faith beginning in the 4^th and 5^thCenturies, the Holy Roman Empire through the decree of Emperors, Kings, and Popes claimed itself to be the reign of Christ on Earth and thus supplanted the Kingdom of God.  The Gospel of new life in Christ ceased to be proclaimed and was replaced by a coercive gospel that told us to be good citizens submissive to the will of Pope, King, and Church or go to Hell instead of Heaven when we die.  

With this usurpation came a switch in our understanding of the direction of salvation that plagues the church today.  No longer do we envision God’s Kingdom, the Reign of Christ, coming to earth from heaven and ourselves as faithful followers of Jesus playing a crucial role in that.  Instead, we are preoccupied with how do I, the individual, get from Earth into Heaven when I die – that’s if we’re preoccupied with questions of faith at all because Western Christians got burned out trying to be faithful in a world where the Church and the State have done and still do horrible things in Jesus name that far outshadow the good we do.  The Gospel ceased to be the new life in Christ coming amidst the old and instead became simply a coercive vehicle for escaping the eternal consequences of the old life at the moment of death.

That said, our reading from 1 Peter deals with the practicalities of living the new life in Christ amidst the old sin-diseased life in the hopes of transforming the old.  The overarching basic point is that Jesus himself serves as our primary model for how to live the new amidst the old.  The effect of the Holy Spirit living in us making us to share in Jesus' new resurrected life is that we now feel a loyalty to him and a compulsion to strive to live as he lived.  He lived righteously and he lived honourably, subjecting himself to the powers that be even though they had no power over him, and he suffered sacrificially and died for it.  Accordingly, as he suffered for doing good in this sin-distorted world, so will we.  In the end this will bring glory to God and perhaps convince a few that God’s reign is coming on Earth as it is in Heaven.

But one needs to be careful, the boundaries that are in place as cultural norms in the community in which we live need to be respected. Disregarding or dismissing them will bring persecution on oneself and the Christian community by being brazen.  And so, Peter says at verse thirteen, “For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution.”  One view about the ordering of society that is presented in the Bible is that societal authority originates with God as a gift from God for a peaceable society in God’s image.  The image of God is a community thing.  Marriage, family, government; all these orderings are a gift from God.  Living righteously in these orderings should result in a just and peaceable society, but unfortunately, sin has mucked up the way we relate to God and one another, corrupting it totally.  Instead of an ordered harmony among people that glorifies God, people use these orderings for the pursuit of their own pleasure and gain.

Peter’s insight into how to live the new life in Christ is that if we each pattern ourselves after Christ’s way of life, the human institutions of order in society should begin to reflect Christ to the glory of God resulting in harmony, justice, and peace in society.  Peter sums it up when he says, “have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind” this approach to life by individual Christians is our participation in God’s will to heal the sin-diseased state of human society.  Peter addresses civic life and the household here, but for sake of time, I’ll just deal with the household.  

In Peter’s day, much like our own, the household was the basic building block of human society.  The typical household consisted of a husband and wife, children and household servants.  Unfortunately, the way Peter words his thoughts about marriage has largely been misunderstood and misapplied over the centuries.  His telling wives to subject themselves to their husbands' authority has unfortunately too often been used for the subjugation of women.  But, if you dig a little deeper, you find Peter is saying quite the opposite.  He sees men and women as equal in God’s eyes as we are both inheritors of the gracious gift of life and new life in Christ.  

The church believes that marriage reflects the relationship between Christ Jesus and the Church.  A husband’s authority is like Jesus' authority and is based on the principle that in weakness there is strength.  So, a husband is to lay down his life for his wife and family sacrificially serving them in love as Christ served his disciples when he washed their feet.  Husbands should listen to and be understanding of their wives, bring honour to them, and not make them feel degraded or ashamed by making them serve his own needs.  Peter’s word to wives is for them to like-wise serve her husband. 

Peter is not giving us a mandate for spouses to stay in abusive marriages.  Marriage is the basic building block of human society.  It is a holy institution.  Therefore, those who enter into the covenant of marriage are to honour Christ with it, indeed, use it to give testimony to Christ Jesus.  When those in marriage carry on as if they were not married, it destroys the basic rubric of human society.  Furthermore, it is just as damaging for those not married to behave as if they are.  God gave us the bond of marriage to order the relationship between men and women in his creative love.  So, we keep it holy for Christ’s sake.

In summary, in, through, and as Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit God has given the means for humanity to come to a new, healthy, peaceful, and just unity in the image of Christ.  We Christians are called to live in this new order known as "in Christ" in the midst of the old until Jesus returns to make it complete.  Therefore, pattern your lives after Christ Jesus.  Live honourably and honour everyone.  “Have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind” especially in your homes.  Amen. 

 

About Beasts and False Prophets

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Revelation 13

Just a few days ago our denomination, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, released the following statement by means of social media responding to the rather strange relationship between politics and religion that’s exhibiting these days.  We said: “In response to claims made by the President of the United States of America and his administration, the Presbyterian Church in Canada reaffirms its rejection of the sinful use and misuse of the church’s scriptures, language, symbols, and theology to condone or justify violence, killing, and the shame and inhumanity of war.  The PCC also rejects anything that destroys life and diminishes our ability to fight hunger, poverty and disease, and to seek justice in the world.” 

If you have been doing nothing besides binge watching baking shoes the last little bit and have to ask why such a statement was made or had to be made, well here’s just a bit of what’s been going on. The relationship between the American President and the American Vice-President (who is a Catholic) and Pope Leo XIV has begun to resemble the relationship that the ancient king of Israel, Ahab and his wife, Jezebel had with the prophet Elijah.  Elijah kept holding them to account for their idolatry, immorality, and abuse of power until they finally sought to kill him and he had to flee.  I’m not saying that the American President, Vice-President, or the Pentagon have put a hit out on the Pope, but in response to the Pope’s critique of Israel and the US attacking Iran the three have definitely told the Pope to stick to religion and stay out of politics, on the one hand, and to bring his theology in line with the administration’s war policy, on the other, with an implied “or else” attached to it.  All the while, the current administration has no problem invoking the faith of American Evangelicalism to serve their own political interests.  This is a far cry from the relationship that Ronald Reagan had with Pope John Paul II.  Those two actually teamed up to help with the freeing of Poland and hastening the end of the Cold War.

Then there’s the bizarre stuff.  The American President in the middle of the night posted a picture of himself wearing a white robe and flowing red stole. He had healing orbs of light in his hands and was healing a man while surrounded by distraught looking people who were praying to….  This AI-generated picture proved quite offensive to even his Christian nationalist supporters because he looked a little too much like Jesus.  The President took the post down and tried to excuse it by saying he thought it made him look like a doctor.  He soon replaced it with another late-night AI-generated picture of Jesus embracing him.  In the caption he called his opponents a child sacrificing cult and said that he is God’s Trump card against them.  Strange stuff.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the threat he made to completely annihilate Iranian/Persian civilization if they didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by 8:00PM ET on Tuesday, April 7.  

I was glad to see a few days ago that the Presbyterian Church in Canada released its brief statement on these matters.  When the national leader and ruling party of the world’s largest economy and strongest military coopts a faith system and uses it as a means to obtain and consolidate political power and then tries to say God is on his/their side to excuse the misuse of that power in ways that affect global security and the global economy, well the church world-over should rightfully address it.  This unholy relationship between political power and religious faith is, I believe, exactly what the 13^th chapter of the Book of Revelation addresses.  

The Book of Revelation is not a roadmap to the end of time.  It’s the Apostle John’s Holy Spirit inspired attempt to explain to the churches of Western Turkey in the 90’s AD in apocalyptic coded language why they were being persecuted and to assure them that in the end, whenever that may be (God only knows), Jesus will reign victorious.  It needs to be said that there was no official Roman edict to round up Christians at that time.  Persecution happened because Christians, as did the Jews, worshipped only the God of Israel and this made them “different”.  They would not worship or feast the Roman gods like everybody else did throughout the Roman Empire.  When trade guilds and civic activities revolved around such feasting, that could cost you your job and make you a target for thuggery.  Christian fellowship was uniquely open to and inclusive of all peoples regardless of ethnicity, race, and social status and thus it threatened to destabilize the social order of Greco-Roman society.  Finally, the Christian claim that Jesus was Lord and Saviour and Son of God, titles which were all validated by his resurrection from the dead, was treated as treasonous because these were titles reserved for the emperors.  

These claims about Jesus conflicted to varying degrees of severity with the Roman Imperial cult which was the state religion that people of the empire were required to participate in.  In its most benign form people came to the imperial temples to burn incense and offer prayers on behalf of the empire and the emperor and to offer worship to dead emperors who had ascended to Olympus as lesser gods.  But, at least two maybe three of the emperors of the first century demanded to be worshipped as a living god.  These were Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.  Are you ready for some bizarre stuff?

Caligula became emperor at age 20 in 37 AD and was an absolute menace for four years.  This was during the first decade of the church when it was primarily seen as a Jerusalem-based sect of Judaism.  Caligula was sick.  He behaved like he was extravagantly rich and he just liked to be cruel to people.  He wore masks of the gods and pretended to be them in public.  He made the Senate behave subservient to him and humiliated them by making them worship him in public.  He even pretended that his horse was his chief advisor to make the point that he didn’t see anyone in the Senate capable or worthy of doing that.  He was known for standing naked in water and making young boys swim between his legs.  Christianity wasn’t really a thing yet, but he had it in for the Jews because they wouldn’t worship him so much so that he ordered a brass statue of himself be erected in the Jewish Temple.  This caused a non-violent revolt among peasant Jews but fortunately, the Praetorian Guard and a number of senators assassinated Caligula before the statue could be built.  The Christian claims of Jesus being Lord would have only made things worse in their relationship with Jews because it would lead to more Roman mistreatment of the Jews which led to Jewish persecution of the early church.  It was about this time that the Apostle Paul was making his name as a persecutor of the church.

Nero became Emperor at age 17 and reigned from 54-68 AD.  He was a violent man with a love for Greek theatre.  He liked acting on stage and playing his lyre and singing for the public and competing in athletic games.  Early in his reign, he was very popular with the common people and had a gift for knowing what would make them like him.  He liked to wear clever disguises and go party with the common folk and get into fist fights.  He had his “interfering” mother and his two wives murdered.  He gifted the head of his first wife to his second whom he later killed in a violent outburst with a kick to the stomach while she was pregnant.  Her death fed his insanity for he had one of his young male slaves who bore a resemblance to her castrated and he married him.  His popularity faded after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD which he likely had started in the area of the shops so that he could rebuild the area in the style of Greek architecture including a massive golden mansion for himself.  He blamed the fire of the Christians in Rome who were growing ever more popular in the city and ordered they be put to death.  Peter and likely Paul died as a result.  He died by suicide and after his death, three impostors arose creating the myth that he had risen from the dead.  He is the first Beast that our reading refers to.

Domitian became emperor in 81 AD and reigned for 15 years.  Prior to his reign there was a Jewish revolt in 70 AD in which Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.  Mt. Etna erupted in 79 AD destroying four Roman cities.  There were earthquakes and darkened skies and the moon turned orange; all that end of the world stuff.  Domitian was the Roman emperor at the time the Revelation started to circulate.  He was a strong, authoritarian micromanager remembered for being a cruel, paranoid bully with a sadistic bent.  Like Caligula, he liked to humiliate the Senators and have them worship him in public.  He wanted to make Rome great again and liked to build, build, build.  He also wrote a book on the subject of hair care.  He died by assassination.  It is not clear who orchestrated it but it was for sure that everyone wanted him gone.  

Domitian knew that emphasizing his own divine status would help unify the empire.  So, he pushed the expansion of the Imperial Cult throughout the empire by building temples which resulted in Christians being persecuted.  He made no edict requiring the persecution of Christians.  It was patriotism, one could say, that led to persecution.  He had a very large Imperial Temple built in Ephesus in honor of his family line, the Flavians.  A very elderly Apostle John was arrested there and imprisoned on the island of Patmos as a consequence of not participating in all the patriotic fervor.  

Fearing a repeat of what happened under Nero, John compiled the Revelation from prison and sent it seven times over to the seven churches of Western Turkey to explain why they were facing persecution.  Chapters 12 and 13 explain that it is Satan who has given authority to the insane emperors who demand to be worshipped as gods.  It is Satan who has raised up the false faith that causes people to worship these emperors.  John encourages his brothers and sisters in Christ to patiently endure by remaining faithful to Jesus Christ.  Worship him alone.

In the fourth century that unholy marriage between imperial power and religious power began to hide under a Christian umbrella when Christianity became "the" religion of the Empire.  Since, emperors, kings, and priests and presidents and preachers have declared that God is on the side of our nation and Western culture.  It has resulted in much war, poverty, abuse of women and children, and genocide of indigenous cultures.  It has a strong foothold among American Evangelicals at present.  People waking up from it is the primary reason why the Church has declined in Western culture.  There have been men over the centuries who have risen up with inexplicable power who have sought to be emperor over the world claiming Almighty God is on their side.  They have become something the world has had to momentarily patiently endure.  Faithful Christians have suffered for not following them but it is important that the church catholic take its stand when the beasts obviously rear their heads as the Pope has been doing and the PCC did earlier this week.  Amen.

 

About Armageddon

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Isaiah 2:2-4; Revelation 16:12-16, 19:11-21

We are six weeks now into this undeclared war that the United States and Israel have teamed up to wage against Iran.  We don’t have a lot of time for me to rant on politics this morning, so I’ll save that for next week.  Though there has not been an official statement released by the Presbyterian Church in Canada, I suspect that we as a denomination would stand, as do I, in total agreement with Pope Leo XIV and his calls for a return to diplomacy amidst an observation that this warring madness in no way resembles the way of peace that we are challenged with by our Lord Jesus Christ.  Peace does not come by means of strength because there is nothing to keep the strong from just taking what they want from those weaker than themselves…and that they do. 

Since the beginning of this undeclared war, I have heard a few news commentators and seen more than few remarks on social media outlets wondering if or straight out positing that we are in the midst of World War III and headed towards Armageddon, that last great battle between good and evil when Jesus returns to establish the Kingdom of God, a global Christian theocracy.  To speak to those thoughts, World War III…well, I think economics will soon determine how what Prime Minister Carney calls the “middle powers” get involved.  I am thus far surprised that the rest of the world has not responded to Israel and the United States in like manner to how it responded when Russia invaded Ukraine, with sanctions and freezing the personal assets of key government officials and the oligarchs.  But I guess nothing is fair in war and divorce. 

As far as Armageddon, well, I wish we had a few hours to do this one justice, but this being a Communion Sunday we don’t.  First, I’ll give you some background.  There is a Populist movement in the Church in the United States and mostly among the Evangelicals.  It weaves American Christian nationalism and Zionism and a fascination with End-Times Bible prophecy in the context of the Nuclear Age into a tapestry that is quite scary and…it’s likely the largest voting block in America.  They believe America is God’s chosen nation to carry out his will on Earth, the New Israel one might say.  They believe that the Modern State of Israel is the restoration of biblical Israel that they believe was prophesied in the Bible.  For them, this was a sign that the end is near.  They believe the Jewish people need to be in full control of the land of Israel so that they can rebuild the Temple so that Jesus can return.  Thus, there is no questioning on their part with regard to how the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what White Colonials did and still do to Native Americans.  They are expecting an Anti-Christ to arise and cause great economic suffering in the world and a dreadful persecution of Christians that will end with the Rapture of true Christians.  Finally, a great World War will erupt where all the armies on earth will gather to do battle at Armageddon which they believe to be the Jezreel Valley in Northern Israel…and then Jesus will return and defeat the Anti-Christ and his armies and lock up Satan and his minions and Glory Hallelujah there will be a thousand years of unopposed Christian rule on earth.

Well, in order for the tapestry to work you’ve got to read the Bible very literally and in particular, a mega-mess of very weird and very vague biblical prophecies which leave a lot to the imagination.  But, the Revelation was not meant to be read literally.  It was written to late 1^st Century Christians at a time of persecution in an attempt to explain to them why they were being persecuted and to give them hope.  One of the vehicles the Romans Emperors used to unify such a large bit of real estate full of many different peoples and religions was to make them worship the Emperor/Rome.  Historians call it the Imperial Cult.  The Romans built temples all over the empire where the people were to go and worship the emperor and pray for him or even to him as a god.  There was a priesthood that looked after this.  Our reading mentions a beast and a false prophet.  This was John’s way of talking about the Emperor and the Imperial Cult.  One of the reasons for which the early Christians were persecuted was refusal to participate in the Imperial Cult.  I’ll say more on this next week.

Back to the text, if one is going to read this text literally, then one must say that when Armageddon goes down Jesus is going to show up on the battlefield on a white horse and start hacking people to pieces with a double-edged sword which he wields from his mouth.  I got a problem with that.  I think that what John is giving image to here is that all those who have been deluded into following the Beast and the False Prophet and their cult of followers will be brought to account by the truth of the Word of Jesus Christ.  This wouldn’t be the only place in the Bible that the Word of God is called a two-edged sword.  

If I were to take this a step further and apply this image to today’s world, I would and will take my lumps for saying that whenever there is a national leader claiming to rule by the authority of God coupled with a religious movement backing him up as if he were a messiah, that there is Anti-Christ.  That’s the Beast and the False Prophet.  Jesus will bring them to account.  And it might just be the voice of the Pope that God is using to do that.  The irony of it all is that there are many in that group who have often claimed that the Pope and Roman Catholicism are Anti-Christ which might have something to do with why there wasn’t a Good Friday Mass at the Pentagon this past Holy Week.

About Armageddon, the proper Hebrew pronunciation of that is Har Mogeddon, which in Hebrew means the Mountain of Mageddon.  This does not refer to the Jezreel Valley in which sits the ancient city of Megiddo.  Megiddo is not a mountain.  In Isaiah there is reference to Har Magedd being the dwelling place of God; thus Jerusalem on Mount Zion.  That being the case, I am inclined to interpret the Battle of Harmoged, if I dare call it that, in light of the Isaiah 2 passage and the image of the nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of God, to learn the way of peace.  Jesus will settle the disputes between the nations and, “They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation will not take up the sword against nation, and they will never again train for war.”

Harmageddon is anytime throughout history, and this is not the first time, that those political leaders who claim to be enacting the will of God and their cultish followers get confronted by and held accountable to the Truth, the Life, and the Way, Jesus Christ, who walked the way of peace by walking the way of the Cross.  His power is found in our weakness, in humility, in compassion, in serving for when we are weak, he is strong.  Unfortunately, it is a true cosmic battle of apocalyptic proportions for us humans to learn that.  Amen.

 

Witnesses

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Acts 10:34-44

It is no secret that the most convincing evidence in a trial by jury is eyewitness testimony.  There’s the belief that for the prosecution to win, they need only put the victim on the stand to tell what happened and provided the defence cannot find a way to discredit the witness (and they will try), victory is a given especially if there are corroborating witnesses.

Well, that works on TV, but in reality, it has been shown beyond reasonable doubt by study after study that eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable evidence that can be submitted in a court of law.  Even and especially if it’s the victim giving the testimony.  75% of all exonerations by DNA cases involved people who were convicted on false eyewitness testimony.  Most notable among these exonerations was a man named Ronald Cotton who was convicted of sexual assault on the eyewitness testimony of the victim who picked him out of a line-up.  He was sentenced to life in prison.  Ten years in, some DNA evidence was found and the true perpetrator was identified and he confessed. Cotton went free but the victim remains convinced against all evidence it was still Cotton who assaulted her.

Human memory is an odd animal.  We remember images, feelings, smells, etc.  These are what could be called raw data.  But the story with which we tie the data together into a “memory” is actually a creation of the imagination.  Brain scientists have found that when people recount a memory, the part of the brain that lights up on the brain scan is the part we use to create fictional stories.  Our memory of something that happened to us that we think is as factual as a history book is actually a story that we make up and… that story gets rewritten every time we set out to remember it.  And…, every time we rewrite the memory, we mysteriously alter the raw data so that the raw data fits the memory according to the way we want to remember it, not according to what actually happened.   Studies in memory have shown time and again that the further in time we get from an event, the less likely what we remember is really what happened.  This is because we can and will alter the details of the raw data according to the story we want to remember.  This is why when something happens at work that might wind up going to Human Resources for one of those special reviews, we are told to write it down as soon as possible after the incident. 

It gets worse.  We can be motivated in how we shape our memories.  If a memory is of something that we did that we’re not proud of, we will instinctively - not on purpose - change and narrate the details of the memory to paint ourselves in the best light so that we can live with ourselves.  If the memory involves something that someone did to us for which we would like to seek revenge, we will remember what happened in a way that makes that person look their worst.  And even worse, we can create very vivid memories of things that never happened; memories that are so vivid that we will never be convinced it never happened.  When it comes to memory a person can believe something to be absolutely true, when in fact they made it all up to serve their own purposes.  Human memory and thus eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.  

Now you can guess where I might be going with this since here in our reading Peter says that he and the other disciples were “witnesses” to all that happened with Jesus.  They witnessed his ministry in Judea and Jerusalem, his being hanged on a tree (wait a minute, I thought it was a cross), and that God raised him from the dead and that God had chosen Peter and the other ten disciples to see Jesus alive (that seems a bit cliquish, don’t you think? But to their credit the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that over 500 men and women at the same time saw Jesus after his resurrection.  In fact, Peter goes on to say, Jesus was so bodily alive that they even ate and drank with him.  Given that human eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable, how can anything Peter has to say here about being a witness, especially to Jesus’ post-resurrection, be taken not just as true but as reliable?  

I don’t know if this will make sense, but just because someone believes their own testimony to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me God does not therefore entail that their testimony is reliable.  Peter, as do I, believes it absolutely true that Jesus was raised from the dead.  So did the other ten witnesses, the other ten disciples.  Their joint testimony can be and quite often is dismissed as the fabrication of a cadre of revolutionaries who see religious belief as a powerful way to get people to join your quest to take over the world.  Hence, the interesting relationship between authoritarian regimes and the religious nationalists that back them.  So, how do we know their testimony is true and reliable?  Well, let me ramble some stuff off.

First, we have to give some credit that they all saw him together rather than having their own individual moments.  People try to say that they were just having an experience of grief induced mass hallucination.  But that would be the only time ever something like that has happened.  Yes, it quite often happens that in the wake of the death of a loved one, individuals will see the deceased, maybe even talk with them.  But, a whole group of people having the same experience, indeed multiple shared experiences including meals over the next forty days?  That mass hallucinations don’t happen is what leads people to say Jesus never died in the first place.  But, there is no way anyone could have survived what the Romans put Jesus and others like him through before they crucified him.  Moreover, Pilate confirmed with the executioners that Jesus was dead before allowing Joseph of Arimathea to take his body several hours after he died.  And that Joseph of Arimathea, a powerful Pharisee serving on the council that had the Romans crucify Jesus would allow himself to be remembered by name as the one who personally looked after Jesus’ burial  in his own tomb says more for reliability than anything else.

About those eleven eyewitnesses, their testimony has persisted for almost 2,000 years.  Religious movements, political movements, even empires don’t last that long.  They especially don’t last that long under adversity.  Why did these eleven and especially the early Christians of the first three centuries who did not see Jesus post-resurrection continue to witness to him often under severe persecution?  Peter and the others stuck to the story.  They never recanted nor did they seek to use their role to grow rich.  They just did what Jesus told them to do: go into all the world making disciples.  If they were lying, they certainly would have recanted in the face of death.  Peter was crucified upside down in Rome.  Andrew was crucified on an x-shaped cross in Patras, Greece.  James, son of Zebedee, was the first martyr.  He was beheaded by Herod Agrippa II in Jerusalem starting a persecution that caused the church to spread out from Jerusalem.  Phillip was either stoned or crucified in Hierapolis in Turkey.  Nathaniel was skinned alive in Armenia.  Thomas went to India where he was impaled by soldiers.  Matthew was killed by sword or spear in either Ethiopia or Persia.  James son of Alphaeus was stoned in Jerusalem.  Thaddeus was axed to death in either Persia or Syria.  Simon the Zealot was either sawn in half in Persia or crucified in Britain.  John was the only one to see old age but he spent a good deal of time in exile on the island of Patmos.  Facing persecution and horribly painful deaths why would they further a fabrication and why would anyone listen to them and become followers of Jesus?  The obvious reason, I think, is they knew it was true and reliable.  But how?  

The answer to that.  Well, it isn’t a matter of simple rational belief so that  we do what we can to convince someone to rationally accept that God raised Jesus from the dead and thus validated everything about him.  Although, in my humble opinion, the evidence to that fact is as credible if not surpassing in credibility to the details of the lives of any historical figure from that time.  It is also not simply a matter of accepting Jesus’ teachings nor with coming to grips with how his death was for us and for our healing.  It is certainly not a matter of scaring the Hell out of people, literally, “Believe this stuff about Jesus or you’re going to Hell”.  

The proof of it all is what happens when Jesus is proclaimed.  Our text says, “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came down on all those who heard the message.”  Where Jesus is proclaimed as living, witnessed to, lived according to, the Holy Spirit shows up.  Healing happens whether it be emotional, physical, or relational.  People are “touched” by him.  They sense his presence.  His peace.  The Presence of God is what makes the message of Jesus true and reliable.

Jesus is alive and that means there is reason to have hope in this very messed world.  Be his witnesses.  Live like you have hope.  Amen.

 

More Than a Sacrifice

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Hebrews 10:11-25

To understand Good Friday and the meaning of Jesus’ death we have to take a dive into the sacrificial system of ancient Israel and find our meaning for it there.  Otherwise, we are left with Medieval Christianity’s over use of the metaphor of penal substitution, that we deserve the legal penalty of death for our sins but Jesus died in our place and appeased God the Father’s wrath earning us an acquittal.  If you take a plunge into the Book of Leviticus and look at what was going on the Day of Atonement, the day that Ancient Israel dealt with its sin, you will find something there that is markedly different than a sacrifice to appease God’s wrath or what is known as a sacrifice of propitiation meaning going to a god to gain favour.  

The Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur was a very solemn day.  Everyone spent the day prayerfully reflecting on their walk with God and each other according to the Covenant.  They fasted.  No one worked.  It was the day that the Temple, the Lord’s dwelling place, and the people were cleansed of iniquity.  Iniquity basically means stain, the stain of sin.  We feel it as the stain of shame, guilt, regret, betrayal, denial; the stuff that persists in broken relationships.  It’s like if one person in a relationship has done something they wish to hide from the other, that person and that relationship is stained.  Things become different and not in a good way.  The ancient Israelites believed that iniquity, this stain was transferable to anything a stained person came in contact with and in the end, everybody is stained.  It’s like if one person in a relationship stains a relationship it changes the way that person and the couple interact with other people.  

The stain could even be brought into the temple into God’s presence by means of the priests who dealt with the people’s sins on a daily basis.  It’s like germs.  Everything the priests touched in the Temple became stained with the unseen but obvious stain of iniquity.  They believed that if the iniquity of the people became too great God would not be able to continue among them and would vacate the Temple or just go nuclear so to speak.  Therefore, the temple and the people needed to be cleansed from its contact with iniquity and the people’s iniquity was removed far from them.  

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the day they did this in the way that God told them to do it.  The sacrifices on Yom Kippur were sacrifices of expiation through which the LORD God drew forth, cleansed, and healed the people from their sin and its stain.  It’s like if you take a warm moist tea bag and put it on an infected wound, it will draw out the infection.  On the Day of Atonement, the Israelites were not trying to appease God’s anger and stop God from getting them.  None of the sacrifices in ancient Israel were for that purpose.  God gave them this Day as the means of extracting, of expiating, of drawing out the infection of sin and its stain to cleanse and heal them of it.

On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would take a bull and two goats from the people for this purpose.  The bull was for expiating the iniquity of the priesthood, as they stood as representative of the whole people in dealing directly with matters in the temple.  Their own sin-stained hands and lives and the iniquity they incurred from dealing with the sins of the people stained the temple, God’s abode, and themselves.  The High Priest would slaughter the bull by slitting its throat. He would catch some of the blood in a bowl and then take it and some incense and go into the Holy of Holies, the room at the back of the Temple where the Ark of the Covenant was which was God’s throne on Earth.  The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat and it was there that they believed God sat enthroned on earth.  In the Holy of Holies, the High Priest would light the incense and fill the room with smoke.  This represented the prayers of the people and made it so that he could not directly see God.  Then he would dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times on the Mercy Seat.  

Then he would choose one of the two goats by lot.  It represented the iniquity of the people.  He slaughtered it in like manner as the bull and returned to the Holy of Holies to sprinkle the Mercy Seat with it as well.  But on the way to the Holy of Holies, he also sprinkled some of this goat’s blood around the rest of the temple to cleanse it.  When he came back out, he then took blood from both the bull and the goat and sprinkled each seven times upon horns of the altar upon which sacrifices were made and cleansed it of iniquity.

For this all to make sense, we need to know something about what the ancient Israelites believed about blood.  Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.”  The blood of the slaughtered bull and the goat represented life that had passed through death (Yes, just as Jesus has passed through death) and having passed through death it was free of sin.  Being life that was free of sin, they believed it had the power to cleanse iniquity from whatever it came in contact with; and one more thing – it unites God and the people.  

The High Priest who stood in representation of the people gets this blood, this life that has passed through death, on his hand and sprinkles it onto God sitting on the Mercy Seat.  Thus, through contact with the blood – this life that has passed through death – the high priest, the people, and God are united.  The relational bond between God and the people that had been stained with iniquity was cleansed and healed with this life that had passed through death.  That’s what Atonement is (At-One-Ment).  

I hope you see the foreshadowing here of Jesus and his death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  By his death and resurrection Jesus’ human life passed through death and is given to us through the work of the Holy Spirit.  When you hear all those metaphors about being washed in the blood of Jesus and so forth this is what it means.  We are united to God by the Holy Spirit who gives us Jesus’ life which has passed through death.

We still have one more goat to go.  The High Priest then took the second goat and placed both his hands upon its head and whispered the sins of the people into its ear.  Then somebody simply led the goat out into the wilderness and set it free so that it could be utterly destroyed by whatever befell it.  You have heard of the term scapegoat, when some innocent party takes the blame for somebody or usually somebodies else.  This goat bears away the sins of the people to where these sins may be destroyed in death.  

There is something significant we must note here as well.  The Hebrew word for forgiveness does not mean a simple release of guilt. It is not a “legal” transaction where someone apologizes (or not) for a wrong done to someone else and that someone else decides not to punish them for it.  The Hebrew word for forgiving is nasa.  It means to bear, to pick up and carry.  The Space Shuttle would be a good metaphor here.  If you remember the story of the four men who carried a paralytic to Jesus to be healed and how they had to tear through the roof of the house to get him to Jesus because of the crowd outside.  The Bible says that when Jesus saw their faith or rather their faithfulness towards their friend he said to the man “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  These men for love of their paralytic friend whom others would have called cursed by God for some concealed sin and refused to touch him, they picked him up and carried him to Jesus who declared him forgiven.  That act of love and their friendship with someone everyone would have called cursed is what forgiveness is.  

Jesus, the Son of God become human, does the same thing for us as the Scapegoat goat did for Israel on Yom Kippur.  He innocently shares our fallen humanity with us and bears it away into death removing it from us.   This bearing away of our sin is what forgiveness is and it is cleansing.  Just as you would put a tea bag on an infected wound to draw out the infection, so Jesus’ death draws out sin’s infection from humanity so God can heal it with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Looking at our reading from Hebrews Jesus has opened once and for all a new and living way to God.  He has permanently cleansed the living temple of humanity and God the Holy Spirit now dwells in us and works to heal us from the inside out.  God has written his covenant upon our hearts.  And so as Paul writes in our passage from Hebrews: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

God has expiated our sin and iniquity by Jesus’ blood, his life that has passed through death.  There is no longer any need for any sacrifice of expiation and certainly not propitiation.  We are in union with the Trinity atoned by Jesus’ life-giving blood, his life that has passed through death.  Moreover, he has scapegoated our sins away into death where they are utterly destroyed.  The Trinity no longer counts anything against us.  There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  Amen.