Alive to God

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Romans 6:1-14

Sometimes in life in order to understand where we are at in things we need to step back and examine what we would call the “big picture”.  Faith plays a big role in that.  If we are of the conviction that our lives somehow fit into the “Big Picture” of what God is doing in God’s very good Creation we will value things and go about life differently than if we thought we were just here fending for ourselves.  

Our reading from Romans this morning is one of the Apostle Paul’s “Big Picture” moments.  On the surface it seems to be about what Baptism is but when you start mulling on it, it becomes one of those places where we catch a glimpse of Paul’s “Big Picture” of what God did do, is doing, and will do in, through and as Jesus the Christ.  When we get inside his “Big Picture” one thought that really sticks out is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ God has changed human existence.  Jesus is the new Man, Christ, as opposed to the old Man, Adam.  As the old humanity flowed forth from Adam so now in Jesus Christ there is a new human existence coming forth.  The difference is that the new human is in union with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit and that changes everything.  In Paul’s thinking God is changing humanity from “in Adam” to “in Christ”.  At the end of the Age, the Day of Resurrection when Jesus returns, the change will be complete.  All Creation will be made new.  Until that time God the Holy Spirit is at work calling people to fidelity to Jesus Christ, creating a community of people centered on him who have a sense of this new life in Christ in which we are being healed of our Sin-sickness. 

The old humanity, which Paul would call “in Adam” and which Paul names after the Bible’s story of Adam being the first human, is diseased.  We are sick in our minds with a disease called Sin that twists our perception of reality to be grossly self-oriented.  It makes us misunderstand God, ourselves, and each other.  We are unable to perceive God as we should and so we put ourselves and other “idols” into the place of God and in turn we each do not just do bad things, but rather we do evil things even when we think we are doing good.  

This disease of Sin culminates in Death and though death frees us from the misery of Sin we are especially fearful of Death because it ultimately dethrones us as our own gods.  Death, and particularly our ignorance of what comes after death, a-fears us with the fact that the day is coming for each of us when the unholy trinity of “Me, Myself, and I” will end, the day when “I” who likes to sing, ‘I did it my way” will be humbled if not humiliated into apparent non-existence because death shows no mercy.

But the finiteness of Death is not the final word in God’s very good Creation.  Because God loves us and is deeply wounded to the core with our addiction to Sin, God has acted to heal us.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ, God the Son took upon himself - unioned to himself - the Sin-diseased nature and flesh of the old humanity, “Adam”.  Infusing himself into humanity is another way of putting it.  Like putting a food colouring in water, the colouring works its way into every molecule of the water changing it to become colored water.  (Also, forgive me for using the male singular pronouns.  The more accurate pronouns for God would be Us-self, Our-self, and We-self but be a bit too distracting at the moment.) 

Back to the topic, as Jesus, God and Sin-diseased humanity became one – two natures, one person.  Just as Jesus touched lepers and took their disease upon himself and healed it, God took the disease of Sin into himself so that we will be healed.  Jesus then lived the faithful life that we are unable to live though tempted in every way as we are.  He then died the death that is the consequence of sin.  Then God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead with a human body, indeed created matter, that is now healed from sin and that will not die - voila, the first born of the new humanity that Paul calls “in Christ”.  In the wake of Easter God has poured the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus.  And to keep us humble, I am quite sure the Holy Spirit is at work in people outside of what we would call the church.  The Holy Spirit opens our eyes so that we see, experience, and understand the nature of God as God has revealed himself in Jesus as unconditional, self-giving, redeeming, healing Love.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us healing our Sin-diseased nature making us desire to be more Christ-like, making us desire to live a faithful life.  Then in the end when the Day comes, God will raise us from the dead as well.  All creation will be healed of the futility it now suffers.

  Back to Paul and his “Big Picture”; Baptism fits into this “Big Picture” as the moment a person has for certain passed from the Old Humanity of Adam into the New Humanity in Christ Jesus.  It is the outward sign of an inward working as theologians of the past called it.  Paul believed that Baptism is a mysterious participation in Jesus' own death and resurrection with the result that the person baptized has died the death that sin begot and is now alive to God in Christ.  The person being baptized is in essence being put to death and raised to new life in Christ.  

Understanding Baptism in Paul’s way is probably a bit out there for most of us.  Most of us have probably just been taught that Baptism is simply a ritual Christians do to say they and their children are Christians.  And, being Christian is simply a way of living where we clean up our acts and try not to do anything wrong so that we can stay on God’s good side.  

But, that’s not what Paul says Baptism is!

Baptism is incorporation into a new humanity – a new human existence that God brought into being when Jesus was conceived in his mother’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit and brought to its completion with Jesus’ resurrection in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We have called ourselves Homo Sapiens but now we are Homo Christiens.  This new humanity is now at work in us as we are “in Christ” by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit who is in us freeing us from our enslavement to Sin and Death as we go about walking in the Way of Jesus. 

Baptism is our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  With respect to that Paul writes, “You must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  Elsewhere he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).  For us, this basically means we are dead.  We no longer have a claim to ourselves to do what we want to do with the lives we still live.  Rather, we must live as disciples of Jesus in prayerful discernment in order to do what Jesus is doing in and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot seek conformity to the world but rather we must yield to the Spirit’s transformative power at work in renewing our aims and ambitions to reflect the new life called “in Christ”.

If we are to take Paul’s Big Picture seriously, then this is who each of us is.  We each have died and been raised with Christ.  We each belong to Jesus Christ who loves us each and gave his life for us each.  Our lives will never be our own.  Therefore, we must live as living witnesses to Jesus and the new life that is in us.  God has rebirthed God’s image in us.  As God is the loving Communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Three Persons who give themselves so completely to one another in unconditional love that they are One and the Same in Being, so are we to put “me, myself, and I” on the back burner and live according to unconditional love in all our relationships.  Afterall, “me, myself, and I” was crucified and buried with Jesus.  We must give space and time in our lives to foster the awareness that the Holy Spirit is with us – we are never alone.  Nor are we left to our own efforts for the Holy Spirit is at work in each of us making us each more like Jesus.  We must listen for Jesus to speak and sense the Holy Spirit’s moving and prodding.  Most importantly, we must learn to rest ourselves in the sure knowing that we each are a beloved child of God and that God loves us each as much as he does Jesus, the only-begotten Son.  We are each here to help and support each other in any way we can to remember who we are “in Christ” and to live as those who are alive to God.  Amen.

 

The Marks of the Kingdom

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Matthew 9:35-10:14

As best as we can tell from the Gospels, it appears that Jesus began his ministry wandering from town-to-town teaching and preaching in the region of Galilee. It seems he liked to start his visit to a town by teaching in the synagogue. We know that he did have some rather large outdoor moments like when he preached the Sermon on the Mount and when he fed the 5,000-15,000. He also wound up getting invited to dinner quite often. And, it goes without saying that he spent a lot of time just teaching his disciples as they made their way from place to place. Nevertheless, the local synagogue on the Sabbath seemed to be where he made his initial stop when he came to town.

Now surprisingly, we don’t know much at all about what went on in the local synagogue back then. Synagogues arose during the Babylonian Exile as places for the displaced Jews to go and be Jews together and the practice followed them back from exile. We know that after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Temple in 70AD and then for sure by the 300’s AD, the synagogue became very important as a place of worship. But as far as in Jesus’ day, we know there was a place called a synagogue in most small towns in Israel and throughout the Roman empire where there were large communities of Jews. The word itself means “the gathering” and that seems to have been the synagogue’s most important function. It was a place for people to gather.

In the first century, the synagogue building seemed to have been a large, walled courtyard that may or may not have had a roof. There were benches for sitting around the walls with one important spot called the “Seat of Moses” where the head teaching rabbi sat when they gathered on the Sabbath. Outside of the Sabbath, it seems the courtyard served as a marketplace or park. Similar to how the rural/small town church used to be the social hub a few decades ago in North America, the synagogue was more so a place for fellowship in first century Judaism. The crowds that Jesus had compassion for were likely townspeople fellowshipping at the synagogue.

As far as what synagogue worship was like, well, your guess is as good as mine. As important as these places were, none of the rabbis or the Temple authorities ever wrote down the rubrics of what synagogue worship would look like. We know there was prayer. They probably read the story of the Exodus, a few excerpts from the Law, and a bit of a prophet read by whoever was invited to read. At some point, a local rabbi would give a short commentary on one of the readings. There might be some discussion. That’s about all we know.

As I mentioned earlier, Jesus liked to start his local ministry in the synagogue, but things didn’t always if ever go without confrontation. He and his Kingdom of God message stirred things up. In the Gospel of Mark as a matter of first course, we see Jesus visit the Capernaum synagogue. Capernaum and a house there seem to function as a home base for Jesus. The people, the crowd, at the synagogue were amazed at his teaching. Just then a demoniac challenged Jesus calling him the Holy One of God. Jesus told him to shut up and cast the demon out of the man, an act of the Kingdom or reign of God being at hand. The crowd was gobsmacked.

But tides change. When Jesus went to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he was given the Scroll of Isaiah to read. News of Jesus and his ministry preceded him. They wanted to hear what their hometown boy, whom everybody knew, would have to say. He read a passage about things the Messiah would do, things only God could do, the miraculous things which he had been doing. For his brief commentary on the passage, he simply said “Today, this passage has been fulfilled within your hearing.” That prompted some heated discussion for which they ran him out of town.

From then on, most of his teaching moments in synagogues which were always accompanied by healings and exorcisms were met with opposition from the synagogue authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. No wonder Jesus said that the crowds for which he had such compassion were like sheep without a shepherd. When it came to the crowds fellowshipping in the synagogues, distressed and dejected due to Roman oppression, the shepherds did not feel compassion for them but rather an apparent love of authority over them.

So, Jesus would come to a town and go to the synagogue and teach/preach that the Kingdom of God has come near and he demonstrated it by healing people, casting out demons, holding the authorities accountable, touching the unclean, eating with tax collectors and sinners, and sometimes he even raised the dead. To these crowds of troubled people of God and to the outcast among them he came and brought real hope. He didn’t come with a moral code to be obeyed or else. He didn’t come saying, “believe what I believe or else.” He certainly did not come preaching, “Believe in me or go to Hell when you die.” He came bringing the Kingdom of God.

Well, that was a long time ago in a land 9,353 kilometers (5,812 miles) as the crow flies from my recliner. What does Jesus bringing his Kingdom look like today in our communities? A primary marker for the presence of Jesus and his kingdom is compassion for the crowds, a real burden to do something to uplift the multitudes of people in our communities who are troubled, cast out, and vulnerable like shepherdless sheep. Israel in Jesus day was a land occupied and overtaxed by a foreign nation and there was widespread hopelessness. In the small towns the people gathered at the synagogue. That’s not our context today, but there are still a lot of people troubled by economic hardship, medical issues, family problems. It’s a huge list. There are plenty of people ostracized in our communities, lots of young people being ostracized in online communities. There are still all those phobias and -ism’s that people use to build walls to throw people off of. There are vulnerable people all around. People getting scammed in ways we can’t even imagine. Are we moved with compassion?

About crowds, it’s a reasonably sure bet to say that the primary place Jesus saw the crowd was at the synagogue. For us today, local churches are not the place people are gathering to. The gathering places are online. They are at sporting events and concerts. We have to go to big cities to see people crowding through the routines of daily life on public transportation or going to shopping and education centres. Nevertheless, people gathering for fellowship is a rare gift if you can find it. Today is not the day to expect people to come to a church and discover the secret gem of compassionate fellowship that we house in our small congregations. Rather, the harvest is out there at the county fair, the fitness center, the beach, the Tim’s, and so on. But – and this is scary - the predominant place that people are gathering now is online in social media outlets were taking advantage of or outright attacking the vulnerable is the name of the game. Human beings need face-to-face, in-person community.

Jesus said pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers out into the harvest. That’s us. Notice in the passage that those workers were immediately all listed by name. The small church is like the theme song to that TV show Cheers from years ago. “Sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your name. And they’re always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name.” People long to be known. So, we need to be the people who go out there among the harvest and putting our fears and shyness aside we learn people’s names and something about them. We take nothing with us like agendas and we expect nothing in return. We just go and listen giving love and support. We just want them to get a sense of the peace of Christ that abides with us. Who knows? Maybe they will want to know where we got this peace from and come and fellowship with us. Amen.

Matthew's First Day

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Matthew 9:1-34

It is a rare person who hasn’t had an eventful day at some point in life, good or bad, that had the significance or should we say the power of changing everything.  A moment that you know that from this point forward things are going to be different.  The type of days about which we say, “This is the first day of the rest of your life, how are you going to live it?”  “There’s an irrefusable opportunity here, but are you going to take it.”  Or sometimes it is one of those things that happens that leaves us and the people around us saying, “You never know what a day is going to bring.”  Things happen that change everything and you have to go on.  Do you get out of the chair and get on with it?

Here we find Matthew in such a moment – the first day of the rest of his life.  In the Gospel that bears his name, he is the fifth named and called disciple behind the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  Some others seemed to have volunteered but without necessarily counting the cost.  He was faced with an invitation from Jesus to follow him.

Matthew was a tax collector in the small little town of Capernaum up on the northern tip of the Sea of Tiberius, Galilee to the locals, but you know how the Romans liked to put their emperor’s name on things when they occupied a land.  And you also know, tax collectors worked for those Romans collecting taxes for them.  Roman taxes were a burden for most everybody.  It was very easy to get behind on them.  You were taxed on your land and because you had a head (the head tax).  There were tolls on roads and customs at borders.  You were taxed on what you wanted to sell and sales tax on what you sold.  Tax collectors typically came from already wealthy families and found ways to extort more tax than was required to further enrich themselves.  They kept a ledger of who was and was not paid up and had Roman soldiers at their disposal to enforce things.  Thus, they were considered to be traitors.

Matthew was sitting in his tax collector’s booth one morning there on Main Street.  A crowd had suddenly formed down at the sea shore and was rather exuberant, praising God loudly.  As the crowd headed on up into town, he was able to gather that that guy Jesus had told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven which upset the religious hoity-toities.  Then, to prove he had the authority to forgive sins, Jesus healed the man and this wasn’t the first time this Jesus of Nazareth guy had done such a thing in the last few months since that John the Baptist freaky dude got arrested.  A paralyzed man would have been considered cursed by God for his secret sins and by this healing apparently Jesus proved he had the authority to amend that.  Jesus was verging on God’s territory which the hoity-toities claimed as their exclusive domain.  

When Jesus in the midst of the crowd passed Matthew’s booth, he stopped and said to Matthew, “Follow me.”  Perhaps Jesus knew Matthew was looking for a way out of the ledger keeping and the bullying and being seen as a traitor.  Matthew found himself having the courage to get out of the chair and follow.

They showed up at “the house” about lunch time.  It was probably that guy Peter’s mother-in-law’s place.  When they entered the dining room, already reclining there at the table were a few of the other tax collectors in the area and a handful of those people that the religious hoity-toities liked to pass judgement on because they had better things to do on Saturday morning than go to synagogue and listen to the Rabbi’s argue about irrelevant stuff. Nor were they able to afford to make a trip to Jerusalem once a year to make a sacrifice so that they could be considered good people.  Nor could they afford the Temple tax that those religious hoity-toities were glad to collect and take to Jerusalem on their behalf.  With the Romans around you had to pay to live and make a living.  With the hoity-toities, you had to pay just to be a good person.  Matthew started to feel at home with the people at Jesus’ table and reclined.

The hoity-toities from the sea shore also followed Jesus to the house.  When they saw the company he kept, they went behind his back and questioned his disciples as to why he sat at table with such as these, you know, people like Matthew.  I’m sure Matthew was a bit put out by their judging him.  Jesus got wind of it and got quite frank with them.  He quoted a short verse from the prophet Hosea telling them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion rather than sacrifice.”  Boy, did he hit the nail on the head…but who was the “I” he was referring to?  Himself?

Then some of John the Baptist’s followers showed up.  They were staying in the proximity of Jesus since John got arrested.  They had seen the heavens opened and heard the voice when John baptised Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.  John’s disciples, like the hoity-toities, were expecting the Messiah to show up at any moment to kick the Romans out.  They, like the hoity-toities, thought they could hasten his coming by following the Law of Moses and praying and fasting a lot.  They wanted to know why Jesus and his disciples didn’t do the same.  Jesus answered by making a cryptic clue to himself being the Messiah here now and that it was time now to celebrate because it won’t be long before the hoity-toities make him gone, if you know what I mean.  The new, the works of power, that he was doing will tatter that old religion like sewing unshrunk cloth onto old cloth or putting new wine into old wine skins.  So, it’s best to put new wine into new wineskins like these tax collectors and sinners.

Just then one of the town leaders, a powerful man, rushed in, knelt before Jesus, and begged him to come to his house and lay his hand on his little twelve-year-old daughter because she had just died and Jesus could make her live.  Whoa.  Touch the dead?  Raise the dead!? Did this man know what he was asking!  Who did this man think Jesus was?  These are things only God can do.  Jesus didn’t deny having that kind of power nor did he try to talk the man down.  They just all got up from the table and went with the man.

On the way, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years came and touched the edge of Jesus’ robe.  Blood was life and she was bleeding to death from where God brings life into the world.  That’s not good.  The hoity-toities had laws about ritual purity.  They stigmatized her as impure in the eyes of God and by touching Jesus she would have made him impure as well.  Jesus felt the touch, but he didn’t get angry with the woman.  He simply encouraged her and told her that her faith had healed/saved her.  Suddenly, she was healed.  This is new wine for sure.

Then they made it to the leader’s house.  Jesus went up to the dead girl’s room.  He took her by the hand.  Touching dead people also made you impure, by the way.  But the girl got up.  She got up!  That there is some new wine too.

When they came out of the house, two blind men started following Jesus loudly shouting over and over, “Jesus, son of David, have compassion for us”.  Jesus made it back to “the house” and invited them in.  Yes, the blind also carried the stigma of being cursed by God for some secret sin.  “Do you believe I can do this?”  Wait a minute.  Do what?  They answered, “Yes, Lord.”  Hold on. Jews only call God Lord.  What are they saying?  Jesus said, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” He touched their eyes.  Their sight came back.  Jesus told them not to tell anybody he did that, but they went and told everybody.  How could you not?

Now here’s the clincher.  Jesus and the disciples set out from the house to go camping and fishing or something.  Just then someone brought a demon possessed man who couldn’t speak to him.  Lo and behold, Jesus cast that demon out and the man could speak again.  Everybody was saying nothing like this had ever happened in Israel before.  The hoity-toities, well, they said that it was by the authority of the ruler of the demons that Jesus could do these things that only God could do.  

So, that was the first day of the rest of Matthew’s life.  You never know what a day is going to bring.  What a day.  What Jesus did that day impacted Matthew so much that he continued following him.  It led him to collect stories about Jesus and write something called a Gospel voiced to speak primarily to the hoity-toities in the wake of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD.  The Pharisees and the followers of Jesus were the two predominant forms of Judaism that survived that event.  Matthew was trying to build a bridge.

Jesus brought something new, unconditional compassion in the power of the Holy Spirit, while the Pharisees were clinging to the old.  Allowing God, allowing Jesus to do something new in our lives is a difficult thing.  I remember the night I finally said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus saying “Follow me.” And the day I said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus calling me to the ministry.  The first time I stepped into a church service and felt that there was a sweet, sweet Spirit in the place and I knew it was the presence of the Lord.  I remember the day Jesus took away the burden of the anger, hurt, and unforgiveness I felt towards my mother and step-father because they had chosen themselves over their families.  He took that burden, and it weighed a lot, and replaced it with a joyful love for them.  I remember how when antidepressants brought out that old family tradition or should I say the demon of alcoholism even in me, the good son, the minister, I remember the night Jesus utterly took that compulsion to drink before which I was absolutely powerless away.   There’s more, but I think I’ve made the point that Jesus changes things.  He brings new life and changes things.  

But we need to be careful about how we cling to the old, about how we can be hoity-toities.  We can stand in judgement of even our own children and ignore the new, the unconditional compassion of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that he touched us with and claimed us as his own.  Do you remember the day that happened for you?  Amen.