tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75046618691463182272024-02-08T14:47:49.192-06:00Snow's placeKick back and take a load off. Give it to God and see what God gives to you.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-34968865543133382252017-03-05T17:44:00.002-06:002017-03-05T17:45:08.429-06:00What is Prayer? ConneXion March 5 2017Good morning all. I chose to address the topic of prayer this morning because I have so many questions and doubts about what prayer is, and if and how it “works”. I did not choose the topic because I know what you need to learn, but because I needed to learn, and knowing that I would be presenting is a powerful incentive to do some learning.<br />
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I begin with a confession. I have a lot of questions and uncertainties about what prayer is, and how we should practice prayer. Is it ever appropriate to talk about “using prayer”? What results we should expect from prayer, and does understanding prayer even matter? Is it better to know what prayer is? Or is it better to acknowledge that I do not know what prayer is, and pray anyway?<br />
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What does prayer look like/sound like/feel like in your life? Think about that for a minute, and be honest, because I won’t ask you to share your thoughts now.<br />
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What is the relationship between prayer and results, or answers to prayer? If your prayers are not answered, is it because you prayed wrong? Or prayed for the wrong thing? Or because you didn’t have enough faith? Does prayer change things? Or should it change people? Or both, or something entirely different?<br />
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When I reflect on the biblical teaching on prayer I have more questions: What is prayer when Jesus frequently withdrew to pray alone? Does that mean that we are such a frustration to God that he sometimes needs to get away from us -shut us out- and meditate in order to maintain equilibrium? Why did Jesus invite three disciples to join him in Gethsemane? Didn’t he know they would just fall asleep anyway? Why did Jesus tell people not to pray on street corners, but to pray in a closet? Are there lessons we should draw about praying in public, or in church? What is prayer when Paul tells us to pray without ceasing? And how does all of this fit with the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught us to pray?<br />
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I am not going to propose to answer all of these questions this morning. What I would prefer to do is to suggest a framework for processing these and other questions about prayer and our faith - faith understood not as a quantity of belief, but as our life lived before the God in whom we live and move and have our being. In fact, I hope some of these questions are blunted by the conversation today, not because these questions do not deserve to be addressed, because no sincere question is ever a bad question, but because sometimes a paradigm shift -sometimes moving to a different perspective- does change the questions that matter.<br />
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Part of my learning for this morning came through reading Everything Belongs: The gift of contemplative prayer, by Richard Rohr. Rohr is a Franciscan priest, and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque.<br />
A flyleaf quote at the beginning of the book quotes Shams-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz:<br />
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<br />
Pulling out the chair<br />
Beneath your mind<br />
And watching you fall upon God -<br />
There is nothing else for Hafiz to do<br />
That is any fun in this world!<br />
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That gives you a taste of where this book about how everything belongs will approach prayer. The central concern in prayer is not us but God and, because of that, we are much more significant than we would be if prayer was all about us. The opening line of the book begins:<br />
p13 We are a circumference people, with little access to the center... we can remain on the circumferences of our lives for quite some time. So long, that it starts feeling like the only “life” available.”<br />
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We live real lives, and we have real concerns, but sometimes we find ourselves paying attention to the urgent at the expense of taking care of the important, and we begin to feel that we are disintegrating, that the center does not hold. Sometimes we confuse attending church with attending to God, which is reverencing the real, and the community which is so vital to our health seems more draining than sustaining. What then?<br />
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In Everything Belongs, Rohr suggests a reorientation to everything that is as a way of practising the presence of God, which is prayer. There are no magical formulae, no special practices or liturgies, though these can be aids -as well as obstacles- to reverencing the real. Prayer should be simple, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be complicated.<br />
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A recurring theme for Rohr is that prayer is not primarily words or thoughts, but a way of living in the Presence; living in awareness of the Presence; enjoying the Presence, which is God. Contemplative prayer beyond words and thought is not a way of thinking, but a way of not thinking. Prayer is standing in the stream of our reality, which is always imbued by the presence of God. Prayer is not a particular practice or technique, but a place, an attitude, and a stance in which we live.<br />
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The primary characteristic of this stance is a radical orientation to love, to God. St John of the Cross was a medieval mystic who said that God refuses to be known except by love. It’s not a confident knowing all about God, or being confident that our God is God and there is no other, but the attitude that the God Who Is is the God we desire. It is being open to God in all of our life, because God can most easily be lost by being thought found” (31).<br />
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It’s not that words and thoughts are antithetical to or incompatible with prayer, but when we have too many words we do not value them, even if they contain life for us. We can use words to pray, or pray in our thoughts, but we should not be disconcerted by the sense that our words are not quite right, that our thoughts are not enough, because our thoughts and words are not the measure of our prayers. When our thoughts and words are the measure and the totality of our prayers, then our prayers only define us. If prayer is fundamentally a stance towards God, then God defines our prayers. When our prayers are not only words and thoughts but a stance and an openness toward God, then God defines both our prayers and us, and then we begin to see ourselves more clearly, our real concerns are brought into sharper focus, and bringing our petitions to God becomes a way, not of demanding particular outcomes, but leaving our cares and concerns -our selves- to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb 10.31).<br />
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This kind of praying in faith is not a faith that expects or demands a certain answer, but it is a praying in faith that acknowledges our desires, and also acknowledges the God to whom we are oriented in a posture of profound gratitude and openness. Meister Eckhart (another medieval mystic) declared that “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” This God can be trusted to know my prayers beyond my feeble thoughts and words, and endorses an understanding of prayer as an orientation to the One who loves us, and understands us, far beyond our comprehension.<br />
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I want to read a column on prayer by Jason Michelli. Jason has a rare form of terminal cancer, and he is responding to Jeffrey Weiss’ editorial in USA Today in which Weiss is explaining his own ‘no thanks’ to cancer treatment. Jason’s column is entitled ‘Prayer “Works” (But not in the way so many suppose)’<br />
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2017/03/04/prayer-works-not-way-many-suppose/<br />
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Mr. Weiss,<br />
Likely, you expect a clergyman to critique your appraisal of the Book of Job and to encourage you, as the TSA agent who recently squinted at the disparity between the pre-cancer face on my ID and the one in the flesh before her, that “prayer works.”<br />
“I’ll pray for you to be healed” she whispered as she circled and checked things on my boarding pass.<br />
With a terminal cancer of my own- mine’s in my marrow, as voracious as it is rare- I actually think you’re exactly right to point out how the Book of Job reveals the theological problem at the heart of how we so often speak of prayer. God, as the Book Job insists, is incomprehensible. As God says to Job, everything that is did not have to be, a reminder woven into the opening line of scripture “In the beginning…” We are, Job learns, contingent creatures. Our knowledge can never bridge the gap between us and our Creator. If this is true, you’re exactly right to caution against the way we speak of prayer working.<br />
To put it more bluntly: Isn’t it ridiculous (and maybe even idolatrous) to think that through our supplications we can persuade God into doing something God might otherwise not do? You might be surprised to hear, Mr Weiss, that I take it as self-evident that the answer to that question is ‘Yes.’<br />
The God of Job isn’t a god we can manipulate by spiritually-sanctioned means to do what we want. Too often when people tell me they’ll pray for me, the implication left unsaid is that God is otherwise not already with me or at work in me and that if I’m not healed then somehow their prayers didn’t work. Such an understanding of prayer is incompatible with the God of the Book of Job, a God who is at every moment the reason there is something instead of nothing.<br />
Not only do I agree with you, Mr. Weiss, I think St. Paul would too.<br />
After stating the obvious (none of us knows how to pray), St. Paul writes to the Romans that whenever we pray, no matter what it might look like, it’s not actually we who are praying. Rather God, the Spirit, prays in us and through us.<br />
This is what gets missed by so many of the people who tell me they’re praying for me, but it’s something you missed too.<br />
Prayer isn’t something we do. It’s something God does.<br />
Instead of a practice we perform for results we’ve predetermined, when we pray to God, we’re prayed in by God.<br />
God is the impetus behind our prayers as much as the object of them. The very wants and desires we pray, runs St. Paul’s argument, are themselves the handiwork of the ever-present God.<br />
What’s this mean when you’re sick with stage-serious cancer and staring down the-house-always-wins odds?<br />
St. Thomas Aquinas doubles-down on Paul’s point when he writes: “We should not say ‘in accordance with my prayer, God wills that it should be a fine day’ we should say that ‘God wills it to be a fine day, in accordance with my prayer.’”<br />
God wills our prayers, says Aquinas, as much as God wills the fine day.<br />
Let me put Aquinas’ point a bit more personally for the both of us:<br />
We should not say in accordance with the TSA agent’s prayer, God wills that I should be healed of my cancer; we should say that ‘God wills that I should be healed of my cancer, in accordance with her prayer.<br />
That’s no guarantee I’ll be healed, and if I’m not healed, there’s no explanation behind it of the sort Job’s churchy friends assumed. However, it is a guarantee that my desire to be healed, as well as the desire of all those praying for me, isn’t our desire alone or even originally. It’s a desire shared by- initiated by- the God who prays in us.<br />
You’re dead on, as contingent creatures we can never know the why behind the Creator’s doings. If we could, then God would not be God.<br />
But to your other suggestion, that God does not care about your friends’ prayers, I disagree. Not only does God care about your friends’ prayers, their prayers derive from and originate in God. Indeed it’s not strong enough to say God cares about your friends’ prayers. Their prayers are, in fact, a sign- a sacrament, as we say in the Church- of God’s love for you.`<br />
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Our prayers are a sign of God’s love. Our prayers are God’s thoughts prayed in us. That makes sense if we are created in the image of God, but it also makes sense that they are sometimes turned toward ourselves rather than God, when we remember that, along with Adam and Eve, we also have an inclination to choose for ourselves instead of God. That’s why this idea of prayer as a stance in which we live in openness to God is so fecund.<br />
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Our prayers are a sign of God’s love. That’s why we pray. God’s love is the primordial stuff of life and all of creation. God’s love was the reason God created. It is the root cause and sustaining force of our existence. We breathe God’s love when we breathe oxygen, and every breath is an unconscious prayer for life. We are nourished by God’s love when we eat the fruits of his good creation, and every mouthful we chew is an orientation toward God and his sustaining grace operational in our lives. Everything we do in gratitude for the gift and the gifts of life is that stance which is praying without ceasing.<br />
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Our prayers are a sign of God’s love. That’s why we pray. That’s why we pray when we are alone, because God loves us when we are alone. That’s why we pray when we get together, because God loves us when we are together. We are all brothers and sisters to the core, and praying together helps us experience our oneness, our love for each other, which is a tangible sign of God’s love for us. That’s why we pray about all the little things that matter to us, because God loves us, and our cares matter to him. That’s why we pray - for the Love of God. Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-13379811679793046792015-08-16T15:57:00.001-05:002015-08-16T15:57:19.851-05:00Promises for those in Exile -from Jeremiah 31I can never just take a text and do an expository sermon, because texts don’t exist in isolation. All of the texts of scripture are part of a fabric, woven and interwoven as a story within the book, and linked to other books and eras, and the fabric of these stories expands and extends, and reaches through time and space to intersect with our stories. We don’t understand the texts of scripture best when we understand them on their own, but when we understand how they link into our stories, how they challenge us, how they call us, how they call us to repentance, because they call us to God and, though we are always looking for God, we so often look in the wrong places. It’s as though we are in a strange land, looking for who knows what, and we need something to show us the way home. Jeremiah was speaking to exiles, many of whom were still lost at home, but they would soon find themselves in exile, and in exile they would find themselves.<br />
Michael Frost in Exiles reminds us that the church is God’s community in exile, we are not at home, so how shall we then live)? What do promises that are unrealized mean for those in exile? What kind of hope is hope deferred?<br />
These are questions we ask from time to time; when we need to find meaning for our existence. These are questions soldiers ask on the trenches when bullets fly overhead and they don’t know if they will ever see home again.<br />
These are questions we ask when we lose loved ones and yet we must journey on.<br />
These are questions we ask when work is boring, when relationships are more taxing than rewarding, when we are hungry and dinner is too long to wait.<br />
Perhaps some of Jeremiah’s most famous words, and also his most misappropriated words, are spoken to precisely this situation, but we need to backtrack a little further to get the context for these promises for those in exile.<br />
Jeremiah began warning his people of the folly of their ways long after the northern tribes of Israel were taken into exile (722BC), but just before, and during the time, when Judah followed her northern sister to similar fate. Things come to head when Jeremiah tells the Jews remaining in the Promised Land that unless they make a dramatic turn in their way of life, they too will be removed from their comfortable enjoyment of the promises of land and rest and prosperity. “For twenty three years I have warned you again and again, but you have not listened” 25.3 It is about this time that the first captives are taken from Jerusalem and Judea and taken into exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar whom, adding insult to injury, Yahweh calls “my servant” 25.9 Jeremiah is threatened with death for his audacity 26.8 How dare he?!?! This is the place that Yahweh had made his home, and their God ruled, so how dare Jeremiah proclaim the destruction of this place, this city, and the exile of God’s people into oppression under the ruleless rule of heathen infidels? This was blasphemy and Jeremiah must die! Fortunately there was enough dissent among those in authority that he escaped the death penalty for his proclamations.<br />
In fairness to the people who seem needlessly confused with the benefit of our hindsight we must remember that Jeremiah was not the only prophet who claimed to speak God’s words to the people. Throughout Israel’s history as recorded in the OT there are conflicting voices about what Yahweh’s word to his people actually was. Moses had warned the people about false prophets, but the criteria was not only about predictions that came true Dt 13. Even false prophets can get the future right sometimes, so the distinction between false prophets and true is more complicated. If the predictions of a prophet came true, but his message was one that turned the people from the ways of Yahweh, tht prophet was a false prophet and should die for his transgression. There is no easy way to tell true prophets from false, and the only way to discern required careful listening, and comparing the words of prophets to the word of Yahweh known from Israel’s past.<br />
Hananiah is one such false prophet who claimed to speak Yahweh’s word as a direct challenge to the word of Jeremiah. He took the yoke that Yahweh told Jeremiah to wear as a symbol of the bondage that Nebuchadnezzar would foist on Israel (27.2ff), and Hananiah broke that same yoke as a symbol of how he said Yahweh would break that bondage within two years (28.11). Jeremiah’s prophecy, on the other hand, was that things would get worse before they got better. The first captives from Jerusalem had been taken captive some 10 years earlier, and more would follow in another 10 years and, far from captivity being over in two years, it would be 70 years before later generations would return to Jerusalem.<br />
So how then should the children of Israel live while in exile? Jeremiah wrote a letter to the exiles 29:4-14<br />
This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” 8 Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. 9 They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the Lord.<br />
10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.<br />
And there you have what are likely Jeremiah’s most famous, and yet most misunderstood words 29.11. God’s plans are indeed to prosper his loved ones, to give them hope and a future, but first their deeds will cost them 70 years of exile. While they were in exile they were to build their lives as they would if they were at home, though they could not be expected to, nor should they ever, forget that they were not at home. There is a curious parallel between the 70 years Israel was to spend in exile, and the 70 years that David noted was the allotted time of human lifespan. Is this reminiscent of our lifespan on this terrestrial sphere as an existence in exile? In some ways it is true that we are not at home here, and yet we make it our home, and we believe we do so in some way in obedience to the Creator’s will. We build houses and till the soil, we marry and raise families, all to the glory of God, making homes, yet often feeling not at home. We yearn for God’s blessing, and we experience God’s blessing in spades, yet almost always long for more. We hope, and often realize the fruition of our hopes, and often not, but is that hope deferred? Or is that just the reality of mundane existence here? What does God mean when he says “You are going to Babylon for 70 years. Make homes there for yourselves, make houses, and gardens, and families, and seek the prosperity of the cities in which you settle. But I will bring you back.” Bring us back?? In 70 years?? Get real, Yahweh! I can almost hear the exiles complain “Our bones will be staying in Babylon!” But God says 29.11-14<br />
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.[b] I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”<br />
What follows in Jeremiah is repeated encouragement to make homes in Babylon, to walk in the ways of God, and to keep the faith in spite of exile, in spite of friends and neighbours, in spite of even family who choose the ways of evil. Keep the faith for it is Yahweh`s will; it is Yahweh`s plan to restore Israel. God will restore his people, not because of their faithfulness, but because of his own faithfulness. In fact, the old covenant was always lopsided in favour of God`s responsibility to uphold the covenant (remember the ratification ceremony in Genesis 15, where Abraham sleeps while Gods indicates his commitment to the covenant), but the new covenant would be even more so 31.31-40.<br />
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,<br />
“when I will make a new covenant<br />
with the people of Israel<br />
and with the people of Judah.<br />
32 It will not be like the covenant<br />
I made with their ancestors<br />
when I took them by the hand<br />
to lead them out of Egypt,<br />
because they broke my covenant,<br />
though I was a husband to[d] them,[e]”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel<br />
after that time,” declares the Lord.<br />
“I will put my law in their minds<br />
and write it on their hearts.<br />
I will be their God,<br />
and they will be my people.<br />
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,<br />
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’<br />
because they will all know me,<br />
from the least of them to the greatest,”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
“For I will forgive their wickedness<br />
and will remember their sins no more.”<br />
35 This is what the Lord says,<br />
he who appoints the sun<br />
to shine by day,<br />
who decrees the moon and stars<br />
to shine by night,<br />
who stirs up the sea<br />
so that its waves roar—<br />
the Lord Almighty is his name:<br />
36 “Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,”<br />
declares the Lord,<br />
“will Israel ever cease<br />
being a nation before me.”<br />
37 This is what the Lord says:<br />
“Only if the heavens above can be measured<br />
and the foundations of the earth below be searched out<br />
will I reject all the descendants of Israel<br />
because of all they have done,”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
38 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when this city will be rebuilt for me from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. 39 The measuring line will stretch from there straight to the hill of Gareb and then turn to Goah. 40 The whole valley where dead bodies and ashes are thrown, and all the terraces out to the Kidron Valley on the east as far as the corner of the Horse Gate, will be holy to the Lord. The city will never again be uprooted or demolished.”<br />
Yahweh had always lived up to his commitments under the old covenant, even when Israel did not. That was the problem with the old covenant- it allowed Israel to wander. It left room for Israel to break the covenant, to break the relationship with her God - her lover, even when her lover was faithful (hear echoes of Hosea here). So Yahweh planned a new covenant, one that would predispose his children to know Yahweh, because to know Yahweh is to love Yahweh. He would put his law (and this should not be understood simply as rules to be obeyed. Think of this more as the law of the universe, the code by which the world works, the law by which the righteous live; the law which alone is the way of life) He would put his law into their minds, and write it (not ‘laws’ or ‘them’ - plural, but ‘law’ and ‘it’ - singular) on their hearts, and they would all know him, from the least to the greatest. God would never, no, NEVER reject his children for their actions. What they deserved was not the criteria. Henceforth what God desired would be the standard.<br />
But Jeremiah`s words take a very fascinating turn - 31.38-40<br />
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when this city will be rebuilt for me from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. 39 The measuring line will stretch from there straight to the hill of Gareb and then turn to Goah. 40 The whole valley where dead bodies and ashes are thrown, and all the terraces out to the Kidron Valley on the east as far as the corner of the Horse Gate, will be holy to the Lord. The city will never again be uprooted or demolished.”<br />
This city (Jerusalem) would be rebuilt as Yahweh`s city. All of it from the Tower of Hananel, to the Corner Gate, to the hill of Gareb and then toward Goah. The whole valley where the dead are buried and where ashes are discarded, all the terraces of the Kidron Valley as far as the Horse gate, will be - holy to the LORD! Some of these geographical terms are obscure and the precise boundaries of the territory are unknown, but the geographical terms are not the most significant descriptors of this new Jerusalem, because what is clear is that some of the very spaces that are foundational images and metaphors of hell will be - holy to the LORD. Does this mean that hell doesn`t have a future? The place of the dead? The place where ashes are scattered, the place where all that is left when the fire that consumes finally goes out, is discarded? Even this place will be holy to Yahweh?<br />
Maybe even now not everything is clear, but everything is hopeful. No, not everything is hopeful, but in everything, there is hope. Not because of circumstances, or because of a better tomorrow for us, but because Yahweh has plans. What kind of hope is that? What kind of hope is that?Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-33800212600723225152014-04-26T11:44:00.001-05:002014-04-26T11:44:26.219-05:00Easter Sunday 2014 Living the ResurrectionHe is Risen!<br />
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This morning we will read the story in John 20 of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb and the ensuing events. Then we will use this story as the context for a reflection on what it means for us to live after the resurrection.<br />
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John 20:1-18<br />
20:1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb<br />
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Now I need you to try for a moment to suspend what we already all know about this story, and put yourselves into the sandals and the robe, into the mind and spirit of Mary Magdalene, early in the morning, while it is still dark, going to the tomb of the person who has, in every way, turned your life around, and because of whom your life is now turned upside down.<br />
Mary Magdalene is the one from whom it is said that Jesus had cast out seven demons. We can only imagine, but not likely even approach an understanding of the change in her life that was effected by reason of her relationship with Jesus. For three years, perhaps more and maybe less, Mary, along with friends and companions, has had her life turned around, has felt divine healing poured into her soul, scouring the sins, and bringing new hope - new life - and her existence had gone from a dismal trauma from which death may have seemed at times a sweet reprieve, to a renewed hope that life could be good, that life would be good, because of the love, the truth, the life that was gently bringing hope and awakening a renewed sense and appreciation for the gift that life is.<br />
But now it seems that hope has been sparked only to be cruelly dashed before it had a chance to flower. The Master is dead. Killed by the hated Romans at the request, nay, at the stubborn insistence of her religious leaders, the same leaders who would keep her kind at the fringes of their precious sanctimonious society. Killed under false pretenses on the strength of spurious charges about his teaching instigated by those who had never been able to properly understand their own law, much less Jesus’ exposition of that law which was given for life. The leaders had never been able to counter the convincing authority and quiet integrity of his interpretations of their beloved law, but they had found a way to silence him for good.<br />
Her hope for life is dead, cruelly snuffed out, and she is on her way to do the only thing she still can do for the one whom she called her beloved Lord. We don’t know how she has chaffed at the religious sensitivities that kept her from her friend’s side during the long Sabbath between the time of Jesus’ death on Friday afternoon, and this early morning journey on the first day of the week to perform the last loving service to his body. We do know that she wasted no time after the Sabbath, rising while it is still dark and making her way in the dark to the tomb where she had seen his body laid on Friday. And so Mary Magdalene came to the tomb...<br />
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and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.<br />
20:2 So she ran -she ran!- and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."<br />
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As if losing his living presence was not enough, now she has also lost his body. Even the last few moments with his body, doing what little she could in respect for Jesus, even that has been taken from her.<br />
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20:3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb.<br />
20:4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.<br />
20:5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.<br />
20:6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there,<br />
20:7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.<br />
20:8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed;<br />
20:9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.<br />
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So what did the disciples believe? They saw the linens that had wrapped his body, and the cloth that had wrapped his head, rolled up and lying by itself separate from the linens, and they believed, but they did not yet understand that Jesus must rise from the dead. What did they believe? If they had believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, would they have returned to their homes? Would they have returned to their homes and left Mary crying by the tomb? Would they have later locked themselves in a room in fear of the Jews? When Peter and John saw the empty tomb they believed that his body was gone. They did not believe that he had risen from the dead. That was preposterous. Dead bodies don’t came back to life. And so<br />
<br />
20:10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.<br />
20:11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb;<br />
20:12 and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.<br />
20:13 They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."<br />
<br />
No inkling of a resurrection here. Her best hope is still to locate the lost body of her Master. Somebody has taken his body for unknown reasons, and she does not know where his body has now been laid, but she wants to know. She wants to find his body.<br />
<br />
20:14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.<br />
20:15 Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."<br />
<br />
Jesus’ first words to her do not break through the fog of her grief. Again she hopes only that this stranger will be able to help her find Jesus’ body so she can take him away. She still desires only to ensure that his body is properly respected and cared for.<br />
<br />
20:16 Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher).<br />
<br />
Everything changes when Mary hears Jesus speak her name.<br />
“Mary”<br />
“Rabbouni!!”<br />
<br />
Notice that things didn’t change when Jesus rose, or when Mary saw Jesus, or when Jesus first spoke to Mary. Mary heard Jesus speak to her, and responded in conversation, but she did not recognize her conversation partner. Everything changed for Mary when she recognized Jesus’ voice addressing her.<br />
This is what I want to explore for a little bit this morning. We live after the fact of the resurrection, and I believe we live in a daily experience of resurrection life, but it’s impact in our lives is stunted and muted as long as we don’t recognize the risen Jesus addressing us in a resurrection conversation in the mundane experiences of life. So how is this done? How do we learn to recognize the voice of Jesus engaging us in a resurrection conversation?<br />
I believe this happens in a two-step dance that includes retreat from, as well as engagement in, mundane life. We need to stop the hustle every now and again and take a moment to reflect; to smell the roses, or the coffee, along the way. This retreat from should not be seen as the only times of refreshment or the only times of this resurrection conversation. If all of life is part of the fruit of the resurrection life that we are given through Jesus, then these retreats should be moments of re-orientation in which we remind ourselves of the fact of the resurrection, and we learn again what it looks like, so that as we re-engage mundane life, we do so with a renewed perspective, and a reinvigorated purpose to recognize and live the resurrection every day, in every way.<br />
Jesus says:<br />
John 10:2-5, 14-16 “the one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep recognize his voice and come to him. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 After he has gathered his own flock, he walks ahead of them, and they follow him because they know his voice. 5 They won’t follow a stranger; they will run from him because they don’t know his voice. I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, just as my Father knows me and I know the Father.”<br />
In this word picture, the result of the recognition of the shepherd’s voice is finding pasture and daily sustenance for living. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it is finding life in the most ordinary of life events. It’s eating and drinking, and recognizing in the food we eat, and the water we drink (and maybe in some other beverages), that our shepherd cares for us, and is giving us life - resurrection life. We retreat to remind ourselves of this, so that as we re-engage we learn to eat and drink mindfully of the resurrection life that is being given to us daily.<br />
<br />
One of the way in which God speaks life to us is in creation. Psalm 19 tells us that<br />
1 The heavens proclaim the glory of God.<br />
The skies display his craftsmanship.<br />
2 Day after day they continue to speak;<br />
night after night they make him known.<br />
<br />
All of creation is God’s speech act to us, making known his glory, and making God known to us. There is no act of worship more authentic than wonder at his words in the creation we see around us and particularly, as Trudy reminds us, in people who are the acts of creation that carry the divine image.<br />
<br />
3 They (that is, God’s speech acts in creation) speak without a sound or word;<br />
their voice is never heard.<br />
4 Yet their message has gone throughout the earth,<br />
and their words to all the world.<br />
<br />
God has made a home in the heavens for the sun.<br />
5 It bursts forth like a radiant bridegroom after his wedding.<br />
It rejoices like a great athlete eager to run the race.<br />
6 The sun rises at one end of the heavens<br />
and follows its course to the other end.<br />
Nothing can hide from its heat.<br />
<br />
The sun itself is God’s love story to his creation, to you and to me. It is small wonder that cultures that we call pagan often engage in some form of sun worship. It is perhaps more of a wonder that we call them pagan cultures. Every sunrise is God saying “Good morning! My love!” Every sunset is God saying “Good night, my precious one.” We could reflect on how sunrise and sunset intimate birth and death, and we could consider implications of the cycle of days and nights for notions of eternal life and the immortality that we often link to resurrection life, but I will leave that for another time.<br />
What I want to highlight now is that sunrise and sunset happen every day, with or without our awareness. We would certainly notice if the sun ever failed to rise, and it would doubtless cause no end of trouble and consternation, but as long as it goes on as it always has, we pay little heed to many of the most important processes without which we could not live. If we do not stop and reflect, we do not notice. Our life is sustained by these processes whether or not we are aware of them, but our experience of these things is accentuated, and the tenor of our life is enhanced when we remind ourselves to recognize - to notice and appreciate - the mundane events without which we could not live. Even though we live in the midst of resurrection, we need to stop and remind ourselves to see resurrection life in bloom all around us, we need to remind ourselves to recognize God’s voice shouting out to us in a deafening roar that we find so astonishingly easy to ignore.<br />
<br />
The surest way to cultivate this awareness of resurrection life is, I believe, to practice thankfulness. The way to the experience of resurrection life is the way of discipline, a way of discipleship, of falling at the feet of Jesus to say thank you. When Jesus was hailed by ten lepers, and they asked to be made whole, he sent them to show themselves to the priest to be declared healthy. Luke 17:14 “And as they went, they were cleansed.” Of the ten lepers who had their skin cleansed, one came back, threw himself at Jesus’ feet, and thanked him, “praising God in a loud voice.” Jesus notes that ten lepers were cleansed, but he says to the one who came back to give thanks “Your faith has made you well.” All ten were cleansed, but only one was made well. Ten lepers had their bodies cleansed, but only one had his life healed, and the text makes note that he was a Samaritan. You can be bouyed along by resurrection life, but without recognizing the resurrection - without thankfulness - you may be just living, instead of living the resurrection!<br />
<br />
So how does living after the resurrection look? What does one do when one has recognized the voice of the Master? When one realizes that one is living in the midst of resurrection? Jesus and Mary visit, we don’t know for how long, but Jesus soon has instructions for Mary that quite specifically grow out of her new recognition of resurrection life:<br />
<br />
20:17 Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"<br />
20:18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.<br />
<br />
“I have seen the Lord!” When you have seen the resurrected Jesus; when you realize that you live by the bounteous grace of resurrection life, you want to tell others; you need to tell others. When you find yourself healed, you love to tell people. When you have great news, you want to share it, and the gospel is good news; gospel means good news. What better news could there be than that the Creator cares for you and wants you to experience abundant life; resurrection life?<br />
<br />
So let us go, looking and listening for God’s voice calling our name, in the reading of scripture in quiet places, in the speech acts of God’s creation among which we live and move and have our being, and as we learn to read hints of resurrection in our world, let us learn to live resurrection with thankfulness, in our daily mundane existence. Let us learn to celebrate life, to let God’s resurrection power flow through us, resurrecting our lives and our world by God’s generous grace.<br />
Amen.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-83013966345087253682013-09-29T12:51:00.002-05:002013-09-29T12:51:37.842-05:00The Parable of the SowerMark 4<br />
1 He began to teach again by the sea. And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land. 2 And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching, 3 “Listen to this!<br />
<br />
Listen! Hear this! Allusion to the Shema, the most well known passage of the Hebrew scriptures Dt 6.4-9<br />
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!<br />
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.<br />
“These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.<br />
“You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.<br />
“You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.<br />
“You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.<br />
<br />
The importance of listening and hearing in the Jewish tradition cannot be over-emphasized. The Jewish tradition was an oral tradition. The stories were told and repeated and passed on for countless generations before they were ever written, and even when the stories were written, to this day the telling and hearing, the listening continue to play a prominent role in Jewish tradition. These laws which were the heart and soul of the Jewish faith tradition were passed on by telling and listening. Their Bible, basically, was transmitted by oral telling and listening. Listening without really paying attention was unthinkable. To frivolously listen without hearing was sacrilegious.<br />
“Listen!” Jesus says. “This is important. Listen and hear what I am telling you. You need to get this so you can pass this on to others who need to know about this!”<br />
And then Jesus tells them a story:<br />
<br />
Behold, the sower went out to sow; 4 as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil. 6 And after the sun had risen, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. 8 Other seeds fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.” 9 And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” <br />
Did you catch that? “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Listen!<br />
<br />
10 As soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the twelve, began asking Him about the parables. 11 And He was saying to them, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables,<br />
You have already been given the mysteries of the kingdom, but those who have not been given the mysteries get the mystery in parables<br />
<br />
12 so that WHILE SEEING, THEY MAY SEE AND NOT PERCEIVE, AND WHILE HEARING, THEY MAY HEAR AND NOT UNDERSTAND, OTHERWISE THEY MIGHT RETURN AND BE FORGIVEN.”<br />
<br />
That sounds harsh. Outsiders are given the mystery in parables so they won’t hear? Won’t see? And won’t turn and be forgiven? Then why not just say nothing at all? Especially when listening very carefully to understand is so critical in the Jewish tradition?<br />
Now it must be recognized that, while listening carefully to understand is indispensable in the Jewish tradition, it did not always happen that way. In fact, the story of Israel is a long and convoluted story of listening to hear and understand, interspersed with listening to subvert and sabotage God’s message; with false prophets who cried “Peace, peace! When there was no peace” (Jeremiah 6.14; 8.11)<br />
This particular quote Jesus pulls from the well-known call of Isaiah in Isaiah 6. In the context of a rebellious phase in Israel’s history God is calling Isaiah and sending him out to call his children to repentance when they have shown themselves stubbornly uninterested in listening to understand and obey. Though they have ears they will not listen. Though they have eyes they will not hear. Because his children are not willing to repent, so they cannot allow themselves to listen; they cannot allow themselves to see, because to listen and to see would mean to repent.<br />
The same dynamic is at work now. The parables are told so that everyone can hear and see, but those who are not willing to repent cannot afford to listen and see, because to hear and see life, and yet choose death, is an unthinkable and excruciating agony that ultimately betrays the very self one wishes to preserve at all costs.<br />
That the intent of the parables is to disclose truth, and not to disguise truth is made clear later in the chapter:<br />
21 And He was saying to them, “A lamp is not brought to be put under a basket, is it, or under a bed? Is it not brought to be put on the lampstand? 22 For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light. 23 If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” 24 And He was saying to them, “Take care what you listen to. By your standard of measure it will be measured to you; and more will be given you besides. 25 For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.”<br />
<br />
If you listen to understand, your understanding will grow, if you repent when truth is revealed. If you refuse to repent when truth is revealed, then you refuse to understand, and your hearing will become dull, and your vision will grow dim. Listen! So that you do not have ears, but can’t hear! Look! So that you do not have eyes, but can’t see! Repent, for the kingdom of God is near!<br />
The kingdom of God. That is what this parable was about. The mystery of the kingdom of God, and Jesus explains the parable to his disciples:<br />
<br />
Explanation<br />
13 And He *said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How will you understand all the parables? 14 The sower sows the word.<br />
<br />
The sower who sows the word is Jesus, telling the stories of the kingdom, spreading the good news of the kingdom, inviting everyone who hears to repent and enter God’s kingdom.<br />
<br />
15 These are the ones who are beside the road where the word is sown; and when they hear, immediately Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them. 16 In a similar way these are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; 17 and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away. 18 And others are the ones on whom seed was sown among the thorns; these are the ones who have heard the word, 19 but the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. 20 And those are the ones on whom seed was sown on the good soil; and they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.”<br />
<br />
The seed sown by the sower has astonishing power. With modern intensive methods and technology a farmer who plants two bushels of wheat per acre is delighted to harvest sixty bushels per acre - a thirty fold crop. A sixty fold crop would be legendary, and a hundred fold would be winning the lottery.<br />
However, the point is not precisely what multiplication factor is operative or possible. The point is that the harvest will be huge! Even with all of the seeds that do not realize maximum potential, the impact of the seed is phenomenal, and it changes everything. The sower knows that not all of the seed will sprout, but he sows anyway. He sows prodigally, anticipating a bounteous harvest.<br />
He heals, knowing most will be distracted by the immediate fruits that are far more alluring than really listening, seeing, and repenting, but he heals in hope that a few - maybe one in ten - will hear and see and understand, and will turn around (repent) and give thanks.<br />
He tells parables, knowing many will only hear stories and be entertained, but he tells stories in hopes that some will see and hear and understand, turn from death, and follow him to life.<br />
The story that follows this parable reinforces the notion that the mechanics and dynamics of the growth of planted seed is a mystery, but the harvest is tangible. The farmer sows, then sleeps while the crop grows without his participation or machination. Then when, after his neglect the harvest is ready, he reaps the benefits of what he had no hand in bringing about. Likewise, the kingdom of God is fecund; it produces fruit and a bountiful harvest far beyond the paltry influence we fancy that we could bring to bear on it. We do not begin to understand how it grows, but we can be sure that it grows.<br />
So how then shall we live? How do we live in the mystery of a kingdom that we do not always see, but a kingdom that we are assured, by the King himself, is growing all around us, a kingdom that is bursting into bloom while we sleep? How do we live in faith when storms rage around us and God sleeps? How does God sleeping in the storm become for us a sign that engenders faith rather than a disconcerting absence?<br />
We live by sowing prodigally. We do good when we have opportunity without worrying too much about how it will be understood, how effectively it will bear fruit, or whether people will see our generosity and try to take advantage of us. We scatter as much seed as we can, knowing that, while much may seem to go to waste, the harvest is the King’s business and it will be plenteous.<br />
We treasure God’s words in our hearts, and we meditate on them day and night, speaking of them to our sons and daughters and neighbours when we sit in the house, and when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise up.<br />
We have ears, and we listen.<br />
We have eyes, and we look.<br />
We turn our face toward Jesus, and look to him for the healing we need for our every day life.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-13645215339745274792012-10-28T16:36:00.000-05:002012-10-28T16:36:31.152-05:00Faithless Israel, Faithful God Jeremiah 2-8<br />
<br />
This morning we look at Jeremiah 2-8. This is a lengthy text, and we will be reading quite a bit of the text because we need to follow Jeremiah as he speaks to Judah. We will read sections of the text, and from time to time I will interrupt the reading to reflect on the history that Jeremiah’s words call to mind, or otherwise establish (suggest) a context for Jeremiah’s message.<br />
In this text Yahweh is agonizing about the judgement that is about to fall on Judah. When we read these texts in isolation it can seem to us that God is pretty quick to judge. In this case I want to get a sense of the agonizing that Yahweh experiences, and the delays he engages, to give his children chance after chance to turn from idolatry, so that judgement need not fall. In the end, we know, judgement will come, but it is not for a lack of calling, cajoling, pleading, waiting, and warning. In the end Israel and Judah were judged because they chose their ways rather than Yahweh’s ways.<br />
<br />
Jeremiah begins by recounting Israel’s early history.<br />
<br />
2:2“‘I remember the devotion of your youth,<br />
how as a bride you loved me<br />
and followed me through the wilderness,<br />
through a land not sown.<br />
<br />
These were the good ol’ days, the days when Israel was, if not passionately, at least somewhat eagerly, for a day or three, following Yahweh out of Egypt, and back to the Promised Land. Even then, Israel seldom managed more than a few days without grumbling and pining for the good ol’ days of captivity in Egypt, but at least Israel was following, albeit often reluctantly, following Yahweh to the Promised Land.<br />
Even then, however, the good times did not last:<br />
<br />
2:5“What fault did your ancestors find in me,<br />
that they strayed so far from me?<br />
They followed worthless idols<br />
and became worthless themselves.<br />
6 They did not ask, ‘Where is the Lord,<br />
who brought us up out of Egypt<br />
and led us through the barren wilderness,<br />
through a land of deserts and ravines,<br />
a land of drought and utter darkness,<br />
a land where no one travels and no one lives?’<br />
<br />
Even before they cleared the borders of Egypt the fathers were whining about perishing at Pharoah’s hand, when they were caught between his armies and the Red Sea. Then Yahweh saved them, brought them safely through the Red Sea while Pharoah and his armies perished, and on the other side the Israelites sang the song of Moses:<br />
<br />
Ex 15:1“I will sing to the Lord,<br />
for he is highly exalted.<br />
Both horse and driver<br />
he has hurled into the sea.<br />
2“The Lord is my strength and my defense[a];<br />
he has become my salvation.<br />
He is my God, and I will praise him,<br />
my father’s God, and I will exalt him. <br />
<br />
Three days later, at Marah, they were again complaining bitterly “What shall we drink?” Three days after enough water to drown Pharoah’s armies they were worried about what to drink, because the water was bitter. Then Moses threw a piece of wood into the water, and the water became fit to drink.<br />
Yahweh kept on leading his people, grateful or otherwise, to the Promised Land. Then, on the threshold of the Land flowing with milk and honey, they decided it wasn’t worth it, the inhabitants of the land were too big for them, and so they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, and it was their children who entered the Promised Land.<br />
<br />
7 I brought you into a fertile land<br />
to eat its fruit and rich produce.<br />
But you came and defiled my land<br />
and made my inheritance detestable.<br />
8 The priests did not ask,<br />
‘Where is the Lord?’<br />
Those who deal with the law did not know me;<br />
the leaders rebelled against me.<br />
The prophets prophesied by Baal,<br />
following worthless idols.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately even in the Land their faithfulness did not last. They erected altars to Baal and followed other gods. It was all but unheard of for nations to change allegiance to other gods, but Israel did it time and again.<br />
<br />
2:11Has a nation ever changed its gods?<br />
(Yet they are not gods at all.)<br />
But my people have exchanged their glorious God<br />
for worthless idols.<br />
12 Be appalled at this, you heavens,<br />
and shudder with great horror,”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
13 “My people have committed two sins:<br />
They have forsaken me,<br />
the spring of living water,<br />
and have dug their own cisterns,<br />
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.<br />
<br />
Israel had privileged access to the spring of living water, but she chose to dig her own cisterns, cisterns that proved to be broken, prone to profuse leakage, and unable to hold water. There was -and is- no God but Yahweh, and yet Israel turned away from the Living God to follow after idols.<br />
<br />
Jeremiah’s job was to remind Judah of her history, and their future, and above all, remind them of their God, who had been spurned so many times, but who was still calling for them, waiting for them, yearning for them to return to him. In spite of all the cycles of betrayal and return that Israel had already foisted on Yahweh, still he waited, still he called, still he stood, with arms wide open, ready at a moment’s notice, to welcome his children back to his bosom, if only they would, but rather than pursuing Yahweh, Israel (and now Judah) pursued betrayal, unfaithfulness, and other gods, who were no gods.<br />
<br />
2:20“Long ago you broke off your yoke<br />
and tore off your bonds;<br />
you said, ‘I will not serve you!’<br />
Indeed, on every high hill<br />
and under every spreading tree<br />
you lay down as a prostitute.<br />
21 I had planted you like a choice vine<br />
of sound and reliable stock.<br />
How then did you turn against me<br />
into a corrupt, wild vine?<br />
22 Although you wash yourself with soap<br />
and use an abundance of cleansing powder,<br />
the stain of your guilt is still before me,”<br />
declares the Sovereign Lord.<br />
23 “How can you say, ‘I am not defiled;<br />
I have not run after the Baals’?<br />
See how you behaved in the valley;<br />
consider what you have done.<br />
You are a swift she-camel<br />
running here and there,<br />
24 a wild donkey accustomed to the desert,<br />
sniffing the wind in her craving—<br />
in her heat who can restrain her?<br />
Any males that pursue her need not tire themselves;<br />
at mating time they will find her.<br />
25 Do not run until your feet are bare<br />
and your throat is dry.<br />
But you said, ‘It’s no use!<br />
I love foreign gods,<br />
and I must go after them.’<br />
<br />
The passion Israel lacked for Yahweh she did not lack for gods who were no gods, but these gods never came through for Israel. Then, when Israel was in real trouble, then she came running back to Yahweh for help, but as soon as the trouble was over, she went back to chasing after idols.<br />
<br />
2:27 They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’<br />
and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’<br />
They have turned their backs to me<br />
and not their faces;<br />
yet when they are in trouble, they say,<br />
‘Come and save us!’<br />
28 Where then are the gods you made for yourselves?<br />
Let them come if they can save you<br />
when you are in trouble!<br />
For you, Judah, have as many gods<br />
as you have towns.<br />
<br />
These charades had been going on now for about 800 years (exodus to Jeremiah), and Yahweh wanted a change. He had patiently waited for many lifetimes, always welcomed his children when they returned, always watched with a pained heart when they wandered, but never repulsed them when they came back, no matter how many other gods they had given their best between times of bedraggled return. What to do? Yahweh wanted lasting reconciliation. He so powerfully desired to redeem his people for himself, he was willing to do whatever it took to welcome them back one last time for good, but what would it take? What would it take? How much more could he take?<br />
<br />
3:1 “If a man divorces his wife<br />
and she leaves him and marries another man,<br />
should he return to her again?<br />
Would not the land be completely defiled?<br />
But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers—<br />
would you now return to me?”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
<br />
Could Yahweh take Israel back after all the betrayal and unfaithfulness and adultery? Should Yahweh take back such an unfaithful people? Was it not high time for them to learn their lesson of the consequences of rebellion? Did not Yahweh owe them a dose of reality after all the generations of chasing other gods? Should he be gracious again? Could he? Could he not?<br />
<br />
3:12“‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord,<br />
‘I will frown on you no longer,<br />
for I am faithful,’ declares the Lord,<br />
‘I will not be angry forever.<br />
13 Only acknowledge your guilt—<br />
you have rebelled against the Lord your God,<br />
you have scattered your favors to foreign gods<br />
under every spreading tree,<br />
and have not obeyed me,’”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
14 “Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband.”<br />
…<br />
19 “I myself said,<br />
“‘How gladly would I treat you like my children<br />
and give you a pleasant land,<br />
the most beautiful inheritance of any nation.’<br />
I thought you would call me ‘Father’<br />
and not turn away from following me.<br />
20 But like a woman unfaithful to her husband,<br />
so you, Israel, have been unfaithful to me,”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
21 A cry is heard on the barren heights,<br />
the weeping and pleading of the people of Israel,<br />
because they have perverted their ways<br />
and have forgotten the Lord their God.<br />
22 “Return, faithless people;<br />
I will cure you of backsliding.”<br />
<br />
Right and fair and just don’t matter. All that matters is God’s desire for his people. Let me rephrase that: Right and fair and just matter, but not as much as God’s desire matters. Right and fair and just must all bow to God’s sovereign mercy. God had said to Moses many generations earlier (Exodus 33:19; Romans 9:15):<br />
<br />
“I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”<br />
<br />
Did Israel deserve another chance? Hardly. Would God be justified in giving up with them and starting over as he had already proposed to do once, when Moses talked him out of it? Most assuredly so, but now, with no Moses to stand in his way, Yahweh still prefers to call again, because God’s justice is not tempered with mercy. Rather, mercy is an integral component in God’s justice. It is not as though God is torn and bifurcated by conflicting desires that drag him in opposite directions. God is love, and God is just, and God is merciful, and so God does as God is, because he answers to no one and no thing. And so if judgement is what it takes to bring his children back, then judge he will, because God’s mercy includes judgment if that is what it takes to call his children back to him, and warnings of judgement are all but ubiquitous in the prophet’s message.<br />
<br />
4:12 “Now I pronounce my judgments against them.”<br />
16 “Tell this to the nations,<br />
proclaim concerning Jerusalem:<br />
‘A besieging army is coming from a distant land,<br />
raising a war cry against the cities of Judah.<br />
17 They surround her like men guarding a field,<br />
because she has rebelled against me,’”<br />
declares the Lord.<br />
18 “Your own conduct and actions<br />
have brought this on you.<br />
This is your punishment.<br />
How bitter it is!<br />
How it pierces to the heart!”<br />
…<br />
22 “My people are fools;<br />
they do not know me.<br />
They are senseless children;<br />
they have no understanding.<br />
They are skilled in doing evil;<br />
they know not how to do good.”<br />
23 I looked at the earth,<br />
and it was formless and empty;<br />
and at the heavens,<br />
and their light was gone.<br />
24 I looked at the mountains,<br />
and they were quaking;<br />
all the hills were swaying.<br />
25 I looked, and there were no people;<br />
every bird in the sky had flown away.<br />
26 I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert;<br />
all its towns lay in ruins<br />
before the Lord, before his fierce anger.<br />
<br />
And so judgement must come, and it will come. It will come suddenly and harshly, and terribly, but not without mercy. Even when it seems that nothing will turn Israel from her idolatry, still God will not utterly destroy that sinful nation. Even when judgement falls as it must, it will fall with mercy, and with hope for redemption.<br />
<br />
27 This is what the Lord says:<br />
<br />
“The whole land will be ruined,<br />
though I will not destroy it completely.<br />
28 Therefore the earth will mourn<br />
and the heavens above grow dark,<br />
because I have spoken and will not relent,<br />
I have decided and will not turn back.”<br />
29 At the sound of horsemen and archers<br />
every town takes to flight.<br />
Some go into the thickets;<br />
some climb up among the rocks.<br />
All the towns are deserted;<br />
no one lives in them.<br />
<br />
Even as judgement falls, Yahweh is pleading with Israel to take some thought for what she is doing, for the harm she is bringing to herself, for the vanity of her ways that may seem expedient for the moment, but ways that can only exacerbate her already dire situation.<br />
<br />
30 What are you doing, you devastated one?<br />
Why dress yourself in scarlet<br />
and put on jewels of gold?<br />
Why highlight your eyes with makeup?<br />
You adorn yourself in vain.<br />
Your lovers despise you;<br />
they want to kill you.<br />
31 I hear a cry as of a woman in labor,<br />
a groan as of one bearing her first child—<br />
the cry of Daughter Zion gasping for breath,<br />
stretching out her hands and saying,<br />
“Alas! I am fainting;<br />
my life is given over to murderers.”<br />
<br />
Back in Abraham’s time Sodom and Gomorrah could have been saved for just 10 righteous people. Now God is even more eager to save.<br />
<br />
5:1“Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem,<br />
look around and consider,<br />
search through her squares.<br />
If you can find but one person<br />
who deals honestly and seeks the truth,<br />
I will forgive this city. <br />
<br />
Even when judgement falls, it will not be utter destruction.<br />
<br />
10 “Go through her vineyards and ravage them,<br />
but do not destroy them completely.<br />
…<br />
18 “Yet even in those days,” declares the Lord, “I will not destroy you completely.”<br />
<br />
And again, the warning of judgement to come is interrupted by a reminder that Yahweh had showed them which way to take, but they refused.<br />
<br />
6: 16 This is what the Lord says:<br />
“Stand at the crossroads and look;<br />
ask for the ancient paths,<br />
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,<br />
and you will find rest for your souls.<br />
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’<br />
17 I appointed watchmen over you and said,<br />
‘Listen to the sound of the trumpet!’<br />
But you said, ‘We will not listen.’<br />
18 Therefore hear, you nations;<br />
you who are witnesses,<br />
observe what will happen to them.<br />
<br />
And so judgement comes as the fruit of their choices.<br />
<br />
19 “Hear, you earth:<br />
I am bringing disaster on this people,<br />
the fruit of their schemes,<br />
because they have not listened to my words<br />
and have rejected my law.”<br />
<br />
And the judgement comes as obstacles to make their way hard, because the way they choose is a way that leads to destruction, and a good loving God cannot endlessly enable that trajectory. Not even a good and loving God, but especially good and loving God, must eventually step aside and allow the consequences of sin to bear the fruit of judgement. <br />
<br />
21 Therefore this is what the Lord says:<br />
“I will put obstacles before this people.<br />
Parents and children alike will stumble over them;<br />
neighbors and friends will perish.”<br />
<br />
But the purpose of judgement is always correction and refinement and restoration.<br />
<br />
27 “I have made you a tester of metals<br />
and my people the ore,<br />
that you may observe<br />
and test their ways.<br />
28 They are all hardened rebels,<br />
going about to slander.<br />
They are bronze and iron;<br />
they all act corruptly.<br />
29 The bellows blow fiercely<br />
to burn away the lead with fire,<br />
but the refining goes on in vain;<br />
the wicked are not purged out.<br />
30 They are called rejected silver,<br />
because the Lord has rejected them.”<br />
<br />
Again and again, interspersed with the warnings of judgement, are interludes of pleading again for Judah to return to her God.<br />
<br />
7:2 Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. 4 Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” 5 If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, 6 if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. 8 But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.<br />
<br />
Yahweh reminds Israel that he has given them instructions, he showed them the paths of life, and instructed them in how they should walk, and he has sent judges, and prophets to remind them of the right ways, and they had already experienced interludes of judgement and correction, and yet they kept turning away. Time and again they refused to listen and live.<br />
<br />
21 “‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go ahead, add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! 22 For when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, 23 but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in obedience to all I command you, that it may go well with you. 24 But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts. They went backward and not forward. 25 From the time your ancestors left Egypt until now, day after day, again and again I sent you my servants the prophets. 26 But they did not listen to me or pay attention. They were stiff-necked and did more evil than their ancestors.’<br />
<br />
This particular section of Jeremiah does not end on a hopeful tone:<br />
<br />
8: 3 Wherever I banish them, all the survivors of this evil nation will prefer death to life, declares the Lord Almighty.’<br />
<br />
Judgement will lay heavy on the people, but judgement is not inevitable. The passages that speak in those tones come across as Yahweh urging himself to hold the course, to allow his children to bear the consequences of their choices, and not to relent too easily and again allow them the terrible delusion that bad choices do not carry commensurate consequences. Yahweh has been patient with his children for 1600 years (Abraham to Jeremiah), but the time for judgement has come. Nevertheless, even now it is clear that judgement comes not as vindictive retribution, but as redemptive action that hopes for restoration. As we read further Jeremiah contains incredible passages of hope for a future bright with promise.<br />
For now, however, it is time for judgement and as history unfolds, Yahweh’s pleadings for Israel to turn are again unheeded and terrible judgement falls, clearly against Yahweh’s fondest hopes and deepest desires. However, it is a measure of Yahweh’s mercy that restorative judgement comes and Israel does finally learn the folly of her idolatry. This is not to say that all is well after this lesson is learned, because then there are more lessons to be learned. Though Israel never again fell into the same kind of idolatry of worshipping the gods of the nations around her, she still did not recognize her God when he took on flesh.<br />
But who would? Who could??? Yahweh becomes flesh to bear in his own body the judgement of his childrens’ sins? Our sins? That is preposterous! It is unbelievable!! And yet... And yet… this is the preposterous story that is told by Christian theology – that God himself suffers the worst of our judgement with us and for us, so that even while we suffer, we never suffer alone, and in our suffering we reap the benefits of God suffering for us, and we suffer in hope. But Yahweh, who judges, does not simply pass judgement as one would expect a sovereign deity to do. When Yahweh finally allows judgement to come, he lays aside his royalty, he takes on flesh, and serves not only as the Judge, but also as the judged, and he himself participates in the judgement for sin. And so, always we have hope, along with Israel, because of Christ.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-61763643991991215752012-09-26T22:43:00.001-05:002012-09-26T22:46:34.076-05:00Hobby FarmerI visited this hobby farmer yesterday. He had these piglets. They are not very big now, but cute, and they came when he called. Crazy farmer, he is. It was a blast to see his place.<br />
<br />
He gets on the fence and calls his pigs, and I’m thinking to myself (didn’t say anything, of course) “The bloke’s a wee bit daft!! Pigs don’t come when you call ‘em. Dogs maybe, and horses, maybe, but pigs? Nah.” Then wouldn’t you know it, before long there is this black shape on the ground some distance away, undulating in our direction. And then there is this monster big thing that is unmistakably a pig, running across the horizon, obviously not coming our way. Turns out the black shape is a horde of piglets coming from the barn, running all hell bent for leather in a mad dash to be the first to get to the farmer. And the big sow that was obviously not coming our way? Just running alongside a fence to find its way around it, and it's heading this way too! Well I never! And in no time he is surrounded by piglets and the monster, all scrabbling madly to be closest to him. And all the while, he is feeding them carrots and talking coolly about how they are all destined for the slaughter. Except the mother. She needs to make more bacon yet.<br />
<br />
Then later, when he went to call his chickens, my incredulity was a little more tempered, but I was still thinking “No chicken ever has had sufficient brain power to respond to a farmer calling them”, but I was wrong. Again. They all came, clucking and chortling, to see what the farmer had for them, and just a touch was fine. No food required, they just liked the man. I figured (but didn’t say nuthin’ again) somebody ought to explain to these poor biddies that the farmer just wants their unborn babies. That appreciation may be mutual, but the affection ain’t.<br />
<br />
Then he had Dexter cows, and miniature horses, including one itty bitty miniature horse born just last Saturday. He had no idea the mare was even pregnant. Just got lucky. And a dog, and cats. Apparently one of the cats they affectionately called their teenage cat – all respectful and cooperative, I assumed.<br />
<br />
Quite the experience, it was.<br />
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-18412945318884717472012-06-24T15:57:00.000-05:002012-06-24T16:09:23.470-05:00Reflections on Isaiah 6Isaiah prophesied in the mid to late 8th century BC, beginning before the northern tribes of Israel were carried away by Assyria 722BC. Isaiah 6 is the story of his call to Yahweh's service. Israel has already had a long and checkered past in their relationship with Yahweh, who has at this time been relentlessly pursuing his children for thousands of years, with often dismal results. The call of Isaiah is another in a long series of attempts to get Israel's attention, to persuade them to listen to his call, to catch a glimpse of Yahweh's vision for his people, to turn and be healed.<br />
<br />
But let's review a little more history.<br />
The story of Israel begins with the story of Creation and the Garden of Eden. In the beginning God created, and after he had made all things beautiful he placed the man and the woman in the Garden to care for it, and they would enjoy each others' company in the cool of the day. Far too soon, however, this idyl was interrupted by human intransigence. When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden he gave them all but one of the plants for food: Gen 2:16f “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...” From which tree did they eat? And thus was set the course of human ingenuity for the rest of history – Tell them what not to do, and that is the very thing they will do.<br />
<br />
For their own good, humans are expelled from Eden before they can eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their sinful brokenness. A few generations later human wickedness threatens the entire species with extinction.<br />
Gen 6 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.<br />
This is the first recorded instance of human activity fomenting climate change that resulted in the destruction of the planet.<br />
<br />
Years later God calls out an individual whom he promises to bless, and through whom he will bless all peoples of the earth. When Abraham and Sara run out of patience waiting for the fulfilment of the promise of many descendants they resort to what was a common and entirely acceptable alternative of that culture and time. Sara offers her servant to Abraham so he can have children with Hagar. This plan works and Ishmael is born, but then Sara is jealous and Abraham gives her carte blanche to do as she sees fit. The end result of what Sara “sees fit” drives Hagar with Ishmael into the wilderness, and they find themselves only a few breaths from death. An angel comes to their rescue and repeats Yahweh's promise of descendants too numerous to count, in this case the promise is very explicitly applied to Ishmael (Gen 16:10 “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”) Hagar and Ishmael return to Abraham and Sara. Ishmael is circumcised with Abraham as a sign of God's covenant with Abraham, but in the end Sara's jealousy wins out and Abraham sends his firstborn son away so that Isaac will not have to share his inheritance with Ishmael. Abraham has a total of eight sons, a good start for this huge family that he has been promised, but all save one are sent away (Gen 25). The only son who is not sent away comes within a scant whisker of being slaughtered by his own father.<br />
<br />
The pattern you should be discerning in these stories is that people are amazingly adept and persistent in “hearing” God's words, and liking his promises, then running hell-bent for leather in the other direction. Adam and Eve eat from the one tree they are told not to eat. Every inclination of the human heart was seen to be only evil all the time. Abraham may have been quite taken by God's promise to bless him, and to bless all peoples through him, but his actions seem all but orchestrated towards the sabotage of God's intentions for him. He “listens” but runs the other way.<br />
<br />
This pattern continues. When Abraham is shown the land promised to him he sets up a tent (showing spectacularly bad judgement for one who was to inhabit the land permanently) and then breaks camp and travels on to Egypt. He later returns to the Promised Land, but his descendants soon return to Egypt, and not even abject slavery inspires them to return to their Promised Land. After 400 years of slavery Yahweh still has to drag them, kicking and screaming, back to the Promised Land.<br />
<br />
When they get there they are initially led by judges whose role is to lead them in Yahweh's ways. The people prosper when they follow godly judges, but repeatedly fall into idolatry between periods of good leadership. Eventually they come to Samuel, who will be their last judge, and they ask for a king. They don't want to just follow Yahweh, their God who is unlike any other, they want a king, like everybody else. Yahweh recognizes that this is not a rejection of Samuel, their judge; this is nothing less than a rejection of the God who called Abraham out of Haran, and Israel out of Egypt.<br />
<br />
The first king starts well but quickly goes bad. David, possibly the bright star in terms of Israel's kings, is not allowed to build the Temple for Yahweh because his hands are too bloody, and that they most emphatically are. David's son Solomon is touted as the wisest man who ever lived, but by the end of his reign he is leading Israel into idolatry. The kingdom promised to David is divided in his grandsons' day. The ensuing generations of kings are a litany of wickedness, idolatry, and debauchery, with only a few rare flashes of hope as a handful of kings do lead Israel in a return to Yahweh. God keeps calling, pleading, and cajoling, but the people for the most part keep running the other way.<br />
<br />
By the time Isaiah comes on the scene Yahweh has been dealing with these recalcitrant children for over a thousand years. Those of you who have been tempted to think your offspring's teenage years an interminable interim, you ain't seen nuthin' yet! Yahweh has been around the block and back with these guys, and he has developed a pretty good sense of what can be expected, but ... he hasn't given up on them yet. Now he calls Isaiah, and sends him to call again.<br />
<br />
All of the prophets are reiterations and retakes of what Yahweh originally told the Israelites when he first called them out of Egypt. Leviticus 26 promises rewards for obedience, and punishments for disobedience. The punishment discourse is repeatedly interrupted by phrases like ''But if you will not listen to me and obey, then... If after all this you will not listen to me, then... If you remain hostile to me and refuse to listen to me, then... If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me...''<br />
<br />
Yahweh is pleading with his children to turn and be healed, please come back so I can relent from punishing. And at the end, when the children refuse to listen, and are sent into exile, even then Lev 26:40 “‘...if they will confess their sins and the sins of their ancestors —their unfaithfulness and their hostility toward me, 41 which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, 42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43 For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them. They will pay for their sins because they rejected my laws and abhorred my decrees. 44 Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the Lord their God. 45 But for their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors whom I brought out of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the Lord.’”<br />
<br />
Yahweh will never forget his children Is 49:15f<br />
Can a mother forget the baby at her breast<br />
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?<br />
Though she may forget,<br />
I will not forget you! <br />
See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;<br />
your walls are ever before me.<br />
Punishment is always for the purpose of restoration, and Yahweh longs to gather his children, even more than a mother longs to nurture her children. (repeat) Yahweh longs to gather his children, even more than a mother longs to nurture her children.<br />
<br />
Isaiah's call is another step in the same direction. Yahweh is still calling, and he is calling Isaiah to call out to Israel. The text of Isaiah to this point is Yahweh recalling his history with Israel, rearing children that rebelled. There is a plea to ''Come now and let us reason together... If you are willing you will eat of the best of the land.''<br />
<br />
Then we have Isaiah's call in chapter 6. After the call and Isaiah's response ''Here am I. Send me.'' Yahweh's words:<br />
9 He said, “Go and tell this people:<br />
<br />
“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;<br />
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ <br />
10 Make the heart of this people calloused; <br />
make their ears dull<br />
and close their eyes.[a] <br />
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,<br />
hear with their ears, <br />
understand with their hearts,<br />
and turn and be healed.”<br />
<br />
Even in the context of what we have seen in history to this point it is clear that these words do not reflect the modus operandi of the Creator. With our benefit of additional millenia of seeing God at work in his world and among his people, we know this is not a summary of his agenda. Much more, after seeing Yahweh stretch out his hands and die for love of his people, we know with an unshakeable confidence that these words are descriptive, not prescriptive. They reflect the pattern of human response to God since the Garden of Eden. When people hear God, they generally turn and run the other way. That's not what God wants. That's what breaks the heart of God, and yet he sees it happen time after time, again and again. And yet always he hopes ''Surely, this time it will be different. I will send Isaiah to call them again. Maybe this time they will listen. Maybe this time, instead of running the other way, maybe – just maybe – this time they will really hear and come to me.'' But time and time again, people choose not to obey, but turn away, and their hearts are hardened.<br />
<br />
Isaiah is not entirely uninformed about Israel's history, so he asks a very prudent question: “For how long, O Lord?” Isaiah knows his people, so he wants to know how long he will be expected to pursue this mission impossible.<br />
<br />
Yahweh's response is both debilitatingly discouraging, and yet profoundly hopeful:<br />
“Until the cities lie ruined <br />
and without inhabitant,<br />
until the houses are left deserted <br />
and the fields ruined and ravaged, <br />
until the Lord has sent everyone far away <br />
and the land is utterly forsaken. <br />
And though a tenth remains in the land,<br />
it will again be laid waste. <br />
But as the terebinth and oak<br />
leave stumps when they are cut down,<br />
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”<br />
<br />
You keep going, Yahweh says, until the bitter end. You keep calling until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant. You keep calling until there is no one left to hear, and no one left to even ignore your message. You keep calling, because I am Yahweh, and I never give up.<br />
<br />
When Isaiah begins his ministry the Northern Kingdom, the ten tribes to the north of Judah, are not far from their time of exile. Isaiah begins his ministry about 740BC, and the northern ten tribes are carried away in 722BC. That leaves about a tenth of Israel, one lonely tribe of Judah, in the land, but about 100 years later (606BC and 586BC), they too are taken into Babylon, and nothing is left of the once glorious kingdom of Israel. The throne of David and Solomon are just fading memories.<br />
<br />
And yet. And yet ... “as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”<br />
Even when it's all over, when the fat lady has sung, the lights have gone out, and everybody including Elvis has left the building, it's not all done. When all that is left is dead stumps, God still has a plan. God is in the business of redeeming hopeless situations, a Master at raising life out of death. When God's children insist on running the other way every time he calls, he hurts, but does not likewise turn away. He calls, and calls again, and Isaiah is the story of Yahweh calling. Our lives today are another instance of Yahweh calling. Even if a mother forgets her nursing baby, Yahweh will not forget his children. He has engraved us in the palms of his hands.<br />
<br />
So let us hear, and pray for understanding.<br />
Let us see, and pray for vision.<br />
Let us turn, and obey, to be healed.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-76121647121562911392012-06-16T11:24:00.000-05:002012-06-16T11:24:17.158-05:00Reading the Bible After ChristendomThe following book review was written for <i>The Messenger</i>. Much more could be said about the book, but the word limit for book reviews in this publication is 250 words.<br />
<br />
Lloyd Pietersen, <i>Reading the Bible After Christendom</i> (Harrisonburg, VA/Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2012<br />
<br />
There is much lament over the diminished profile of the church in society. Pietersen is keenly aware of this reality yet remains optimistic about the possibility of significant positive benefit arising from a reading of scripture that authentically honours scripture, even when society appears to have rejected it.<br />
Pietersen promotes a “reading from the margins” which reflects the situation and values of the early Anabaptist movement. While it may be true that the church no longer carries the influence that it has in times past, it does not follow that the truth of scripture can no longer effect positive change in people and society. Pietersen believes that this can happen when scripture is read from a place of weakness on the margins, yet with a strong voice of deep conviction that issues a clear challenge to the injustices perpetrated by a society that has lost its moorings.<br />
Pietersen reviews how scripture has been read throughout church history, notes imbalances that were fostered by the church's prominence and authority, and highlights key characteristics of an Anabaptist reading. He rightly cites the biblical indication that Jesus Christ is the clearest revelation of God as the prime concern of an Anabaptist hermeneutic, and then does a high level flyover of the entire Bible that models this consideration. Unfortunately, in spite of the solid merit of this reading, the exegetical work lies beyond the scope of this book.<br />
<i>Reading the Bible After Christendom</i> presents a solidly Christocentric call, and a roadmap, for a return to biblical truth.Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-66186929098656177232012-01-22T16:31:00.004-06:002012-01-22T16:31:44.366-06:00Greg Boyd on Mennonite theologyHi,
Greg Boy's <a href="http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/a-word-to-my-mennonite-friends-cherish-your-treasure/">reflection </a>on the place of Anabaptist-Mennonite theology within the current (in 2008) context of religion in our world is an intriguing read. Greg was an atheist before coming to faith as a student at Yale. Please keep in mind that the theology Boyd appreciates is not reflected in all streams of Mennonite thought, nor is it restricted to those who identify themselves as Mennonite. Boyd lists several movements (eg., the emergent conversation, which was stirring up substantial controversy at the time, I think precisely because it was the sort of prophetic voice of challenge to the evangelical community that Boyd portrays as characteristic of Mennonite theology) that share some of the values of Mennonite thought that he appreciates.
Enjoy.
<a href="http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/a-word-to-my-mennonite-friends-cherish-your-treasure/"></a>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-89470719254001482132012-01-11T22:49:00.002-06:002012-01-11T22:53:42.196-06:00Scripture reading collage for my mom's funeralMy dear mother passed away on her 87th birthday, January 4, 2012. The scripture collage below was read at her funeral.<br />Go with God, mother. Love you so much! Miss you so much. Rest in peace. Till we meet again.<br /><br />Scripture reading collage<br />Job 19:1, 25-27<br />Job answered “I know that my redeemer lives,<br />and that in the end he will stand on the earth.<br />And after my skin has been destroyed,<br />yet in my flesh I will see God;<br />I myself will see him<br />with my own eyes—I, and not another.<br />How my heart yearns within me!<br />Lamentations 3:17-26<br />I have been deprived of peace;<br />I have forgotten what prosperity is.<br />So I say, “My splendor is gone<br />and all that I had hoped from the LORD.<br />I remember my affliction and my wandering,<br />the bitterness and the gall.<br />I well remember them,<br />and my soul is downcast within me.<br />Yet this I call to mind<br />and therefore I have hope:<br />Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,<br />for his compassions never fail.<br />They are new every morning;<br />great is your faithfulness.<br />I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;<br />Therefore I will wait for him.”<br />The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,<br />to the one who seeks him;<br />it is good to wait quietly<br />for the salvation of the LORD.<br />Isaiah 25:6-8b<br />... the LORD Almighty will prepare<br />a feast of rich food for all peoples,<br />a banquet of aged wine—<br />the best of meats and the finest of wines.<br />... he will destroy<br />the shroud that enfolds all peoples,<br />the sheet that covers all nations;<br />he will swallow up death forever.<br />The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces;<br />Isaiah 26:19<br />your dead will live, LORD;<br />their bodies will rise—<br />let those who dwell in the dust<br />wake up and shout for joy—<br />your dew is like the dew of the morning;<br />the earth will give birth to her dead. <br />1 Corinthians 15:53-55, 57<br />For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”<br />“Where, O death, is your victory?<br />Where, O death, is your sting?”<br />... thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.<br />Revelation 21:1-5a<br />Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”<br />He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!”<br />Song of Songs 2:10b-13<br />“Arise, my beloved,<br />my beautiful one, come with me.<br />See! The winter is past;<br />the rains are over and gone.<br />Flowers appear on the earth;<br />the season of singing has come,<br />the cooing of doves<br />is heard in our land.<br />The fig tree forms its early fruit;<br />the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.<br />Arise, come, my beloved;<br />my beautiful one, come with me.”Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-14647503772057692422011-05-16T13:41:00.000-05:002011-10-10T16:44:12.511-05:00Scary Demoniac<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;">Read
Mark 5:1-20</span><br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">What
is scarier than a mad man, strong enough to break the chains used to
bind him, running around in a cemetery naked, and terrorizing all
passerby?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">According
to the story as recorded in Mark 5 (and Luke 8), it is a former
madman, dressed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Why?
When a mad man is healed, we should all be happy, right? Some say
that the main concern of the townspeople was the financial loss
represented by the loss of the pigs. That may have been a factor,
but the way the story is told has me thinking there is something else
going on here. If the main concern was loss of livelihood I would
expect they would have come in anger upon hearing of the loss.
However, both Mark and Luke say that the people who were told of the
events that transpired on the hillside came to see what was happening
and, when they saw the man dressed and in his right mind, sitting at
the feet of Jesus, then they were afraid. Why? Why are they more
scared when they see this man dressed and in his right mind, sitting
at Jesus’ feet, than when he is running around on a lunatic fringe,
naked and unstoppable?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">And
why, when Jesus’ words after his miracles are almost exclusively a
strongly worded charge to tell no one, does he now insist that this
former madman is not to accompany him as he desires, but rather, he
is to stay in his home town when Jesus leaves, and tell everyone?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">My
suspicion is that the reason for the people’s fear is a recognition
what has happened here is something which they do not understand, and
cannot control. They had become accustomed to the lunatic raising
cane, and they had an agreeable arrangement that they stayed out of
his way, and he stayed among the tombs and disturb only the dead. It was an agreeable
arrangement that made life work for all of them. Now along comes
Jesus, he renders their careful arrangements moot, and they cannot
understand how he did it, but they realize that this kind of remedial
action could wreak havoc with their own lives, as it already has with
the lives of their pigs. They do not know or understand Jesus and
his actions, but they recognize a power that lies way beyond their
ken and control. That is terrifying.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
they ask Jesus to leave; they beg Jesus to leave. “Please, just
leave us to the lives we know. We are not interested in change, most
certainly not interested in change we do not understand and cannot
control. Please go away. Just leave us alone.”</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
Jesus leaves. Why does he just leave? The man who was just healed
wants to go along. Who would not? He has just been saved from a
bondage he had never imagined he could overcome, a bondage which he
never could have overcome on his own. With just a few words Jesus
has freed him from his demons. Of course he wants to maintain
connection with this source of healing.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">But
Jesus tells him to go home. “Go home and tell everyone what the
Lord has done for you.” Why does this man get to talk about what
God has done for him? On almost every other occasion when Jesus
healed someone they are told to keep quiet about it. Why does this
man get to tell everyone?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Jesus
knew our appetite for easy answers. If there is a simple solution
for our problems we will take it and avoid the hard work of achieving
an honest understanding our problems in light of truth. We would
rather pray about our problems and Voila! It is gone!! The problem
is that easy answers are usually escape routes from our own
culpability and responsibility. Easy answers are usually structures
that allow or even enable us to live with our sinfulness, rather than
addressing the root problem of our sinfulness. If people catch wind
that Jesus can supply their wishes they will lose interest in having
their needs answered, and Jesus wants to provide far more robust
solutions for our challenges than merely granting genie-in-a-bottle
responses to our fantasy wish lists.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Hence,
in those areas where Jesus spends most of his time the siren call of
easy answers suggested by the stories of healing will distract people
from the whole hearted search for full-bodied answers. However, he
is leaving the Decapolis, and the demoniac’s stories will not
suggest the same easy answers because he will not be just a wish
away. The former demoniac’s story (or testimony) of a life turned
around through the mercy of Jesus will be able to function as a
catalyst for soul-searching and possibility thinking regarding what
could happen in the lives of the townspeople. The former demoniac’s
encounter with Jesus can be the introduction of an encounter with
Jesus that turns the town upside down, or rather, right side up even
though they are currently unaware they are living life in reverse.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">The
demoniac’s encounter with Jesus becomes the door for the
townspeople’s encounter with Jesus that introduces them to
themselves. Just at the demoniac was living in a state of radical
disconnection with the self he was made to be, and was restored to
himself in his encounter with Jesus, so may his neighbours find
themselves in their own encounter with their Maker.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">For
the moment, however, that prospect is too frightening. Finding the
former demoniac, dressed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet
of Jesus, is just too scary. “Please, Jesus, just leave us. We
are fine with the way we are.”</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Allan
Hirsch tells us that the only place for the church to find its
mission is in Jesus Christ. Institutions and structures are not a
substitute for a radical meeting with Jesus the Christ. The only way
for the church to be the church she was intended to be is when her
sole purpose is to be Jesus to the neighbour. Authenticity is found
in Jesus. Institutions and structures must serve the church, not the
other way around. When institutions and structures become the
definition of the church, then the church is not herself. When
institutions and structures become the definition of the church, then
the church is in bondage.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">However,
after living with these chains long enough we become comfortable with
them. We learn to define ourselves by our maladies and the prospect
of change becomes disconcerting and threatening. Our maladies become
our normalcy, and the prospect of finding ourselves dressed and in
our right minds, sitting at the feet of Jesus is just too scary.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Presumably
we are not so scared of an authentic encounter with Jesus that we
will ask him to leave. Hopefully, too, we will not pretend to be
only single-mindedly welcoming of an encounter with the living God.
A measure of trepidation only indicates that we recognize the
potentially devastating consequences of such an encounter for some of
our prized religious constructions that have heretofore provided
cherished shelter from some deeply disturbing introspection and
analysis of how well we reflect the image of our Creator in our
selves and our church.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Nonetheless,
assuming we do wish to invite Jesus to send healing into our own
lives and our community, how do we do this? How do we distinguish
institutions and structures that serve Christlikeness from those that
interfere? Can we hope to have structures and institutions that
reflect God’s wishes for our community any better than we ourselves
reflect the same? If not (and I believe not), how do we allow an
authentic encounter with Jesus to bring the healing to us that we
believe God wants to bring to our community? Will we just be scary?
Or will we be so scary that our neighbours will recognize a potential
encounter with God? And how scary would that be?</span></span></span></div>
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-60016590449787352342011-04-17T14:19:00.000-05:002011-10-10T16:45:01.956-05:00Between Hope and Despair<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Between
Scylla and Charybdis</span></span></span></div>
<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Between
Hope and Despair</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Address delivered at Heartland Community Church, Landmark, Manitoba, Palm Sunday, 2011</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Read Walter Wangerin <i>Book of God</i> p. 764-767</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">I
want to turn our attention to the themes of hope and despair in this
story. What can we learn about hope from the people who so
enthusiastically welcomed Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on a
donkey’s colt? How does the despair we encounter in this story
alert us to the pitfalls that sometimes obscure for us the vanity of
our hope? And how can a recognition of these hazards lead us not to
despair, but to dig down deeper to a chastened hope that can sustain
us through times of excruciating pain and disappointment?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">We
do not know exactly what was in the hearts and minds of those who
threw down clothing and branches to pave the way for Jesus’ entry
into Jerusalem, but they are moved to ecstatic hopefulness by the
appearance of One whom they acclaim as King, and to whom they look
for some sort of salvation. Their cries included expressions of hope
for peace and salvation, but to what extent Jesus’ riding on a
donkey inclined their expectations towards a Prince of Peace rather
than a conquering warrior king is uncertain. There is ample
speculation that Judas was a Zealot whose expectations leaned toward
a military champion who would overthrow the Roman oppressors and lead
Israel back to her former glory as the sovereign power of the
homeland originally promised to Abraham. Bible scholars tell us
that the a king would ride on a donkey in a time of peace. That
makes Jesus’ choice of a donkey in this case, a powerful statement
of his intention to come in peace, and a purposeful repudiation any
notion of a violent overthrow of Roman tyranny. Whatever the precise
nature of the expectations held dear in the hearts of the throng, it
is clear that this was a time pregnant with hope – hope that the
fulfillment of a long awaited and dearly held expectation was
imminent.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">However,
a week later the One on whom the crowd had hung their hope, was
himself hung on a Roman cross. What happened? How was delirious
hope so quickly and cruelly dashed? How was euphoric hope so
suddenly turned to abysmal despair? And where was this throng when
the personification of their hope was on trial for his life? We
don’t know how many of these people were present at Jesus’ trial
and crucifixion, but if present, they certainly seem to have lost
their voice, as there is no record of any significant dissent at the
travesty of justice that was perpetrated less than a week after this
jubilant procession. For those who hoped in Jesus for release from
Roman oppression the tables have been cruelly turned. The One who
was to facilitate their freedom is Himself executed by the very Roman
power that He was to vanquish. Now where is hope?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">We
could go quickly to the Christian interpretation of these events and
settle the matter by recasting the crucifixion as not merely a
political setback, and not even cosmic defeat, but the most
monumentally pivotal victory ever to occur in the history of the
universe. We would not be entirely remiss in doing so, but I fear we
would be covering too much ground too quickly. That Christian
understanding of the event of the cross we whole heartedly take to be
true, thank God, but what does it mean for us to place our hope in
that interpretation of this event? How would that understanding have
impacted the jubilant throng of Palm Sunday when the terrors of the
day we have come to call Good Friday transpired? Is there a thread
of hope that runs between these events or must one give way to the
other? How do we anchor our hopes so that they are meaningful for
the life we live day by day, without anchoring so that our hope is
susceptible to a cruel uprooting in the same mundane events? How do
we anchor our hope deeply enough to withstand the ravages of a life
that sometimes gets very messy, without anchoring at such a remove
from ordinary life that the security of the anchor point becomes
meaningless? How can we hope in the Jesus who rides the unbroken
foal of a donkey into Jerusalem on Sunday, without losing all hope
when that same Jesus hangs on a cross on Friday? How can hope not be
shattered, and how dare we respond with anything other than despair,
when it is not only our hopes, but our God himself who hangs on a
cross?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">The
answer, I think, is as new as today, and as old as Genesis, and it is
not an answer, but an invitation. The answer lies not in a formula
or theological creed or religious activity. The answer is not the
end of a search, but the beginning of a journey that starts at the
cross and must never get past the cross, and can never get past the
Jesus who both rode the donkey and hung on the cross, but then rose
on the third day, burst the confines of the grave, and conquered
death and sin, our worst enemies, and now lives forever.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">A
clue to the answer is found in the substance of Jesus’ expression
of despair in his lament over Jerusalem “If you, even you, had only
known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden
from your eyes.... because you did not recognize the time of God’s
coming to you.” (Luke 19:42, 44b). The people were still consumed
with what they hoped God would do for them, so much so that when God
became flesh and moved into the neighborhood, they did not recognize
that their God who they hoped would do things for them had done
better than save them from a distance. He did not merely offer them
a homeland and freedom and hope and peace, but he offered them his
very self, and they did not recognize him. They didn’t notice that
their hopes had been wildly exceeded, they only noticed that they did
not realize their dearly held dreams. In their obsession with their
dreams they missed their God when he walked among them.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
often we put our hope in what we want God to do for us, rather than
in the God who wants to be for us. Now, it is not entirely wrong to
have hopes for what God can </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>do
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">for
us, but our confidence needs to be in the God who wants to </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>be
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">for
us. This is not to say that God does not want to do things for us,
but that the things we hope for may or may not line up with what God
wants to do for us, and what God wants to do for us is always a
function of who God wants to </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>be
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">for
us.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">This
is why the answer is as old as Genesis. When God created all the
heavens and the earth God said</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;">“<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Let
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>us
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">make
mankind in </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>our
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">image....</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
God created mankind in his own image, </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">in
the image of God he created them; </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">male
and female he created them.”</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">I
won’t pretend to unpack all of the theological significance of
these statements, but it is clear that at the heart of who God is
there is a relationality - for God says “Let </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>us
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">make
mankind in </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>our
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">image”,
and that relationality is at the core of what it means for mankind to
be created in the image of God “in the image of God he created
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>them</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">;
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>male
and female </i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">he
created </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>them</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">.”
We are created for relationship – with God and with each other,
and it is in relationship that we find our anchor point for hope. It
is in the knowledge that God is for us, and in responding in
gratefulness with our being for God, that we find a deep hope that
exceeds anything we could hope for in terms of what we wish God to do
for us. It is in our relationship with one another that we encounter
images of God in each other, and find hope in our being for each
other and in our being for God together. This does not preclude our
doing things for each other and for God, but our being for each other
is both expressed in, and exceeds, the things we do for each other.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Now
how could the throngs that lined the road to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday
have recognized Jesus as God, and as their hope, not only as their
liberator from bondage to Rome, but their hope for freedom from
themselves and their willing servitude to the real enemy Jesus
intended to vanquish? By what sort of dynamic or discipline or
experience could the people of Jerusalem have been expected to hope
for more than what they wanted Jesus to do for them? And how do we
learn to respond to Jesus in a way that exceeds what we wish him to
do for us?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Just
as the people who watched and shouted and worshiped as Jesus rode
into Jerusalem on that donkey’s foal, so do we often find ourselves
shivering in a religious ecstasy when it seems that our expectations
are coming to fruition, only to find our hopes dashed when events
seem to just as suddenly turn against us. Sometimes our euphoria
rides the wave of a new religious experience, or an overwhelming
sense of God’s presence and direction in our lives, or a
satisfaction when our efforts begin to reap anticipated results, and
sometimes we could be hard-pressed to distinguish this sort of
elation from that which we experience as our favorite hockey
franchise embarks on a post-season quest for the Canadian Holy Grail
- aka the Stanley Cup. None of these things are intrinsically bad,
and in fact all of them can quite legitimately be a source of
satisfaction, adding meaning and enjoyment to our lives, but all of
them - all of them - can also serve as place holders in which our
kingdoms dangerously mimic God’s kingdom, surreptitiously obscuring
critical distinctions between our efforts to build our own kingdoms,
and our participation with God in building his kingdom. Programs and
buildings and dogma can be very useful, even indispensable, tools we
use as we work with God to build his kingdom, but God’s kingdom is
about people first, and that means relationships.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">This
is not to say that despair and disappointments will all disappear
when we place our hope in a relationship with our God, and all of our
God’s children. Even if the people of Jerusalem had recognized
their Saviour on Palm Sunday, they would still have been crushed on
Good Friday, for how can we not be crushed when God hangs on a cross?
We cannot truly understand the emotions and despair of Good Friday,
because on our side of the resurrection we know that Sunday’s
a’comin’! However, there is something profoundly significant in
recognizing our God not merely as a God who can do great things for
us, though surely he “is able to do immeasurably more than all we
ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”
(Eph 3.20). There is something profoundly invigorating in seeing God
not simply as a genie who we hope will bend to our every wish, but as
the God who is for us, and “if God is for us, who can be against
us?... No,” Paul says, “in all these things we are more than
conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither
death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor
the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of
God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:31, 37-39)</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">This
relationship with God is part of the treasure that we carry “in
jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and
not from us. (So that, while w)e are hard pressed on every side, we
are not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not
abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Cor 4:7-9)</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">However,
we do not live this relationship in an individual vacuum. We live
out this relationship in the community of faith, and in recognizing
the image of God in each and every act of God’s creation,
particularly in our brothers and sisters with whom we journey, we
retain remnants and glimpses of God to help carry us through our
disappointments. It is in the hope that is nurtured in relationships
of mutual caring that we see Jesus and experience that relationship
which sustains us when things do not work as we wish, or even as God
wishes.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">That
is why the answer is as new as today. Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts. Instead, reach out in response to his
invitation to walk with Him. Reach out and join hands with your
brothers and sisters as we learn and grow into Him together. Anchor
your hope in the Promise that is as old as Genesis, and as new as
today. “And surely,” Jesus promises “I AM with you always, to
infinity and beyond!” (Mt 28:20)</span></span></span></div>
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-73439807372448015962011-01-17T13:39:00.000-06:002011-10-10T17:24:29.455-05:00The Dangerous Idea of God<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">One
of the most profoundly meaningful, and yet insidiously dangerous
ideas to percolate through human thought is the idea of an omnipotent
sovereign Deity that common humanity is privileged to engage in
mutual dialogue. Historically this connection to deity has given
courage to persecuted saints and anguished parents, and it has been
the impetus for sea changes in civil rights and social policy. Brave
souls who championed causes such as the termination of slavery, and
the overthrow of despotic regimes through non-violent means, as in
Ghandi’s India, have cited the will of the Almighty as support for
their cause. On the other hand, the dark side of this privileged
communication has been worked out in atrocities such as the Crusades
and the Inquisition, and from the deadly persecutions of the
Reformation, to the ongoing pograms based on religious convictions.
The tragedy of the World Trade Centers, to the extent that it was
perpetrated in the name of Allah, is neither the most costly, nor the
most fiendish, it is only the most recent example of the extremes of
horror that can arise from an insufficiently self-critical enactment
of the will of God.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Eugene
Peterson says it well in his introduction to Amos: “Religion is the
most dangerous energy source known to humankind. The moment a person
(or government or religion or organization) is convinced that God is
either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes.
The history, worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing and
oppression is staggering.” (</span><span style="color: black;"><i>The
Message</i></span><span style="color: black;">)</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why
do I see a pernicious danger in the idea of the Christian God? Allow
me to establish at the outset that I am not advocating any form of
atheism or agnosticism, but rather a chastened theism. I am
emphatically not suggesting that the idea of God is so dangerous as
to necessitate our relinquishing any such notion. What drives my
concern is neither new, nor is it radical. It is merely the first
glimmerings of the recognition that we must maintain a distinction
between our concept of what, or better Who God is, and the God Who
Is. We must let God be God, work with all that is in us to
understand this God, without ever confusing or identifying the
Sovereign Lord with our understanding of Him. We must allow God to
be bigger; to be more just, more loving, more merciful; to be simply
more than we know Him to be.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
caution may fall on some ears as unduly radical. To others, who have
firsthand experience with the negative impact of the way in which
certain ideas of God are worked out, this caution will come as a
relief, even a salvific call to return to the God for whom the best
name we have is simply I AM. The One whom Moses encountered in the
burning bush was not inclined to share with Moses a name which would
serve as a neat handle fostering an excessively familiar grasp on the
Almighty. The I AM would not bestow on Moses a secret knowledge
which would allow him to claim privileged access to the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This access would only be facilitated in
a continuing relationship of understanding through obedience.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
caution is an imperative hedge against the danger inherent in an idea
of a sovereign and omnipotent God with whom we have a privileged
communication. Failure to maintain this distinction between God as
we know God, and God as God is, has culminated in the deaths of
untold millions through the ages. More to the point for North
American Christianity, the blurring of this boundary has caused the
unnecessary ostracization of sincere seekers who could not, or would
not, respect the categories established by others within which the
hand of God was to be recognized.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One
of the most seductive dangers in this understanding of God is the
notion of a privileged authority which allows one to speak with
authority in the Name of the Lord. This desire is often nothing
other than a manifestation of laziness, such that one prefers to
invoke an unassailable authority for confirmation, rather than
engaging in the discipline of working out the details of right and
wrong in the arena of mundane life, which is often both confusing and
messy. In this case the desire to declare with authority that “Thus
saith the Lord” or “The Lord told me . . .” is a symptom of a
disease which we must extirpate.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even
the prophets who spoke these words always did so with an element of
risk. God clearly instructed the Israelites to test the words of
every prophet to see that they were indeed the words of the Lord.
God’s word would never advocate turning aside to other gods, it
would always prove true and, most importantly, it would always be
consistent with God’s character. If signs and wonders were
purported to vouch for a message, and if these signs and wonders were
actualized, they did not guarantee that the message so endorsed was
indeed from God. The final test of any message was always the
conformity of the message itself to the character of God. To speak
presumptuously and falsely in the name of the Lord was punishable by
death. (Deuteronomy 13)</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
historical test of actualization meant that one would not always know
immediately whether what was said in the name of the Lord indeed came
as a word from the Lord. It might take some time for such
affirmation. We forget this element of waiting because we read the
recorded words which were proven in the course of time, but we read
it all as past history. We have no way of knowing how many other
claims of divine authority were expunged from our historical records
because they proved false, and therefore related claims of divine
authority were shown to be obviously specious. Hence, there is a
false sheen of immediacy in our understanding of the authority
contained in the words “Thus says the Lord” which these words
never really enjoyed in their historical context. However, even the
actualization of supporting signs was not sufficient to establish a
message as coming from God. The final test of a message inescapably
demanded sober evaluation, reflection, and judgement as to the
conformity of the message to what was already known about God, and
the purposes of God.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Israel’s
history is rife with examples of conflicting claims made in the name
of the Lord. There is the well known story of Ahab asking
Jehoshaphat to join him in battle against Aram. Jehoshaphat was
willing to go with Ahab, but he insisted they first inquire of the
Lord. Ahab called in his prophets, about four hundred, and they
unanimously endorsed Ahab’s desire to go to war, saying “The Lord
will give it (Aram) into the king’s hand” (1 Kings 22:6).
Jehoshaphat was not satisfied with the word of these prophets and
asked if there was not another prophet of whom they could inquire.
Micaiah was brought in, though Ahab despised him because he never had
anything good to say, and true to form, Micaiah predicted disaster,
including the death of Ahab. In mockery, Zedekiah, one of the 400
prophets who endorsed the conquest, slapped Micaiah in the face and
noted the irreconcilable discrepancy between the spirit’s initial
message through Zedekiah, and his subsequent word to Micaiah.
Nevertheless, Jehoshaphat agreed not only to go into battle, but he
even agreed to go dressed in royal robes while Ahab, obviously
spooked by Micaiah’s prediction, went in disguise. The king of
Aram instructed his soldiers to engage only Ahab in combat, so the
soldiers looked for signs of royalty and chased Jehoshaphat down.
Apprized of their error, they left Jehoshaphat unharmed, and an arrow
shot at random found it way between the pieces of armor worn by Ahab,
and he died.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
words of the prophets and the actions of Zedekiah indicate that they
all wish their words to be heard as the word of the Lord, however it
is only Micaiah’s words which prove true, and it is Micaiah’s
words which are recorded as the word from God. With the benefit of
this historical perspective we find it easy to judge which words are
from God, but it is highly unlikely that Jehoshaphat would have
agreed to go into battle, much less so deliberately placed himself in
a position of mortal danger, had he been equally certain which of the
prophets in fact spoke the word from the Lord. Nevertheless, it is
indubitable that the word of the Lord became clearer in the course of
his experience. (For additional stories showcasing premature
proclamations of the ‘word of the Lord’ see, for example: King
Saul’s confident assumption that God had at last delivered the
elusive David into his hands [1 Samuel 23:7]; The account of the man
of God who listened to another prophet whose version of the Lord’s
instructions conflicted with his own understanding, for which error
the man of God forfeited his life[1 Kings 13]).</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
the false sheen of immediate authority implied in the declaration
that “Thus says the Lord” is precisely the site of the danger
inherent in the idea of a God whom we know intimately, and in whose
name we dare to speak. An appeal to authority which allows us to
circumvent the hard work of deciphering the right thing to do in a
particular situation makes it all but certain that we will not
exercise discernment, and if we do not practice discernment, we will
never develop discernment. This is a recipe for trouble in any case,
it is a recipe for disaster when we operate in the arena of divine
proclamations. It seems positively counter-intuitive to rely on
authority as a means of circumventing careful discernment in matters
of utmost importance when the authority invoked clearly disavowed
this approach long ago.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
Jeremiah 23 God spoke through Jeremiah, decrying the glib way in
which words were declared to be the oracle of the Lord. It seems to
have been a rather standard practice that anyone who had anything to
say would routinely claim to be speaking in the name of the Lord,
though more often than not there was no connection to the Lord’s
desires or intentions. God declared Himself to be so sick of this
practice that He ordered the people to put an end to all such claims.
Instead, they were to enter into conversations with one another in
order to discern the will of God by mutual sharing of what they heard
the Lord saying to them.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
method was implemented in Jeremiah 26, when Jeremiah was on trial
under penalty of death for speaking against the temple. Jeremiah
insisted that his proclamation of judgement was the word of the Lord,
and this judgement was carefully investigated in order to ascertain
its provenance, and its conformity to messages previously recognized
as coming from God. Some wanted Jeremiah executed for his
blasphemous talk, but the consensus was that his message was
consistent with the principles of God’s judgements, therefore
Jeremiah’s life was spared. It is noteworthy that even a prophet
like Jeremiah had his claims of speaking the word of the Lord vetted
by peers, and it was only on the basis of such validation that he
escaped the death penalty for some of his harsh proclamations.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All
of this is not to suggest that the word of God is not sufficient to
establish a matter. Quite the contrary, it is precisely because it
is the word of the Lord alone which can establish a matter that any
human declaration of a message from God must be carefully weighed in
order to ascertain its authenticity as being the word of God.
Therefore, what I would advocate is that, rather than purging this
dangerous idea of God from our theology and conversation, we
eradicate all pretensions of a God’s-eye view, and vow never to be
satisfied with buttressing our most controversial proclamations with
the self-righteous indignation of the declaration that “This is
God’s word!” as though that should be enough to stifle any
further discussion. We need not, we must not, we dare not,
relinquish our concern to hear the voice of God in our lives, but
that voice must always be tested in the fires of life, in community
with believers of all persuasions.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
this context we need not forswear all attempts to speak in God’s
name, but when we do so we must always recognize that we speak what
we hear, and we may (and often do) hear incorrectly. It is vital
that we learn to hear God’s words in an expanding community of
believers. The last Word always belongs to God and we will at times
need to wait patiently for that Word to be heard more clearly. In
the mean time we continue to work at an understanding of God’s Word
in our daily lives, an understanding which must ultimately be lived,
not merely intellectually comprehended or evangelically propagated.</span></span></div>
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-30176887270198122652010-11-30T14:25:00.000-06:002011-10-10T16:45:52.819-05:00Saying "Yes"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; line-height: 16px;">This reflection was part of a liturgical service at Morweena EMC, November 2007</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">What
does it mean to say yes? We know what it means to say yes, but what
does it really mean to say yes? To what, or to Whom do we say yes
when we say yes to God? How do we say yes to God, when we are not
sure what that yes means? Can we really say yes if we are not clear
on what that yes means?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Samuel
said Yes to God, but he first disturbed Eli several times saying yes
to Eli, before he realized that the call he heard was the call of
God. And then, when he said yes to God and heard what God had to
say, I suspect he was not entirely sure he had done the right thing,
because the news for his mentor, Eli, was all bad.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Noah
said yes to God, and spent the next 120 years saying a lunatic’s
yes to God, building the modern day equivalent of a space ship in his
backyard, becoming the laughingstock of neighbors, family, and
friends. Then, having never experienced a storm of any kind before,
he spent an entire year cooped up in the ark while the his world was
inundated by a storm the likes of which would not be repeated in
10,000 years, never mind our little storms of the century.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Moses
said yes to God, albeit reluctantly, and spent his twilight years on
a journey which few people in the vigor of youth would attempt today,
leading to freedom a people whose most common complaint was a whining
desire to return to slavery in Egypt, because there at least they
were fed. Throughout this journey the Israelites were commonly on
the verge of mutiny and Moses in danger of losing his life. In the
end he was not allowed to enter the Promised Land, because of an
overzealous moment of weakness in a life of saying yes.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Would
any of these men have said yes to God had they known in advance what
that yes would require of them? Can they really have said yes if
they did not know where that yes would take them? Maybe these were
just poor souls who said yes and found themselves in a mess they
could not have imagined previously; found themselves swept away in a
current that was larger than they were.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">That
actually sounds a lot like our own experience of life, does it not?
Sometimes we too find ourselves caught up in a swell that threatens
to overwhelm us. Sometimes we walk in verdant, sunny plains and
wonder how life could be so good. How often do we consider God? How
often do we hear God’s call on our life in the mundane moments of a
humdrum life? How often do we consider how our apparently
inconsequential decisions are in fact a yes or a no to God?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">But
how can we say yes to a God who constantly eludes our confident
grasp? How can we say yes to a God whose ways are too lofty for us
to understand? Why would we say yes to God when it seems God has
left the building? Why would we say yes to God when we have but the
vaguest notion of what we are saying yes to? That would seem
imprudent. We need to have a contract with an iron-clad escape
clause that covers any eventualities, should we realize we have been
duped, and what seemed to be the call of God turns out to be a
fantasy or a nightmare. That would be the wise course, right?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Wrong.
Why? Because saying yes to God is not saying yes to an idea, or a
plan, or a religion, or a creed. Saying yes to God cannot be a
saying yes to any cozy or even lofty expectations of what that yes
will mean. If we know what we are saying yes to, we are not saying
yes to God. If we know what we are saying yes to we may be saying
yes to a fantasy, or a profound idea, or an eminent religion, all of
which easily morph into an idol, but none of which are God.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Saying
yes to God is saying yes to the unknown and the unknowable. Saying
yes to God is saying yes to what will forever elude our
comprehension. Saying yes to God is saying yes to a mystery. Saying
yes to God is sort of like . . . Getting married. Saying yes to a
lifetime commitment to your best friend is not saying yes to a house,
though the yes may be consummated in a lifetime of commitment that is
worked out in a house. Saying yes to a spouse is not saying yes to
fantasies of vacations together in the sun, though the yes may be
enhanced by such fringe benefits. Saying yes to a spouse is not
saying yes to dreams of career and family, though these may
immeasurably enrich the yes in years to come.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Saying
yes, to a spouse, or to God, is saying yes to Someone. It is saying
yes to an adventure which cannot be known in advance, and it cannot
be exhaustively planned in advance. In marriage to a spouse, and in
life with God, there will be unanticipated events and experiences,
from new understandings that force dramatic, complex, and sometimes
even traumatic re-orientations of what one has always known to be
true, to absolutely unforeseen crises that stretch our yes to the
limits, even past our limits.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">These
are the moments when we must choose - a yes to ourselves or a yes to
God. A yes to the familiar and the well-known, or a yes to something
that exceeds our vision, a yes to One who is not limited by our
vision. We have no guarantees when we say yes that we know how
things will be, or that our lives will be as we think they ought to
be, but if we say yes to God we know, because of Calvary, that we say
yes to ultimate Love, and because of the Resurrection, we know that
we say yes to One who is larger than life, to the One who is Life.
Saying yes to God does not place God within our confident grasp, it
places us within His confident grasp.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">And
so this challenge to say yes to God. In the midst of paradox and
uncertainty say yes to Love and Life. Let us turn from the original
temptation to be gods unto ourselves, and say yes to the only true
God. Just say “Yes”!</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">We
will now move into a time of silent reflection, a time for you to
reflect on the prayers that have been said, the scriptures that have
been read, the hymns that have been sung, but most of all, a time to
reflect on the God who calls you, and to formulate your response to
that call. We invite you to say yes now, and to live that yes in a
“conscious and rededicated relationship to God” in the days to
come. We have a mic available at the front, and if there are some
who want to share their yes with the congregation we invite you to
make your way to the front pew during this time of reflection, and
after a period of silent reflection Matthew will cue your opportunity
to share.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">May
God bless your yes.</span></span></span></div>
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-59451739167869619412010-10-18T14:03:00.000-05:002012-01-22T16:43:27.515-06:00God's Covenants<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So begins
the Christian story of reality. And after God had created, the
production of each day was pronounced “good.” God liked what God
had made. Scripture employs no rapturous superlative descriptors for
what God created on the first five days. It is not described as
awesome or spectacular or stupendously magnificent, just good.
Except for the humans. They were declared “very good.” From the
very beginning humans have had a special place in the heart of God.
Not too surprising, really, considering that God made them (male and
female) in God’s own image. Now humans, as the apple of God’s
eye, were immediately given a position of responsibility in the care
of all that God had made. They were told to nurture and enjoy
creation. And all was well in all God’s green earth.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Or
was it? Somehow humanity was distracted from discharging their
prescribed duties in the prescribed way. They had an idea which
seemed to promise to improve their lot, but that idea proved to be
their downfall. Instead of having a better idea, their attempts to
improve on God’s ideas caused the frustration of their efforts.
First they were removed from their idyllic home in the Garden of Eden
so that they could not make their already difficult situation worse
with more mistakes, but eventually things got so bad that the whole
world had to be washed and sanitized, and then the human project was
restarted.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">God’s
interest remained the welfare of all that God had made, and the new
instructions reflected that. God promised, God bound Godself never
to allow the destruction of the whole world again. It did not matter
how wicked the people became God would never again allow creation to
be so utterly ravished. Hence, after this catastrophe there came
another opportunity for humans to nurture and enjoy what God had
made.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">But
again those humans thought they could do better than merely serving
as God’s peons (which is not an accurate description of what they
were, but in their vanity they thought that their potential was not
being properly appreciated). They would assert themselves, they
would show that they were at the top of the food chain. But then,
why stop there? They would build a city, a huge hulking skyscraper
of a city, one that reached right up to where the gods lived. They
would become like the gods themselves. Why not?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
once again, God had to intervene, before humans dealt themselves the
same fate that met the last creature with aspirations of deity
(Lucifer, the erstwhile Morning Star). In grace the peoples of the
earth were scattered by the confusion of their languages, and their
dreams of becoming divine were stymied. God was still intent on
blessing what God had created, but that blessing would not come in
the form of a condescending wink at their delusional
self-aggrandisement. God’s intent was to bless Creation with a
blessing that recognized it as Creature, as what it truly was, but
that blessing would bid the Creature to grow, fulfilling their
pregnant promise as those who bear the image of the Creator.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
God chose, once again, to bless what God had made. God chose Abram,
called him Abraham, and told him that the plan was to bless the whole
world through him, through the son which he and Sara would have. Now
Sara kept getting older, which was a good thing, but there was still
no heir, which was a bad thing. Never mind, in those days there was
a well-known solution for such a dilemma: Let Abraham father an heir
with Sara’s servant girl. In fact, four of the twelve tribes of
Jacob come into being in precisely this way. That must have been
what God meant. (Sound familiar?)</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Except
that was not what God meant, and the aftershocks of Abraham’s
misunderstanding continue to rock the world. But God was determined
to bless what God had made so another covenant was fashioned, this
one also a decidedly unilateral commitment. When God and Abraham
ratify this new covenant, they each have their recognized roles to
play, but when it comes to the really important part where they are
to walk together to finalize their individual commitment to this
covenant, Abraham falls asleep and God is left to ratify this
covenant all alone. God’s commitment was to bless what God had
made and that commitment would not be easily thwarted, not even by
the Creature’s pugnacity. Sort of like salvation by grace, prior
to any faith. Abraham and Sara would have a son and through that son
Abraham’s family would grow to become innumerable, and those
descendants would inherit the land which God promised to give to
Abraham.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Which
brings us to the story of God’s request for the sacrifice of Isaac.
Why would God make such a request? Abraham’s whole life, it
seemed, had been spent trusting God to do what God promised to do,
even though a lesser man would have given up hope a long time ago.
Now Abraham finally had the first part of the promise before his
eyes, the long awaited son, the idea which had struck his 99-year-old
wife as an outrageous joke a scant year before that son was born, and
now God wanted this son sacrificed? Child sacrifice was a common
demand of all the other gods but never had Abraham’s God suggested,
let alone demanded, anything like this. Without this son there was
no hope of ever possessing the land God had promised. Then again,
with no son to inherit the land what good was the land? Isaac was
Abraham’s hope for a future. Never mind, he and Sara had been as
good as dead before Isaac came along, and if God could raise life
from death, if God wanted to push the envelope a little further, who
was Abraham to argue? What God wants, God gets, and Abraham might as
well go along with the charade sooner rather than later.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
Abraham set out toward the mountain of sacrifice and when his son,
whom Abraham was on a course to slaughter as a sacrifice to God,
asked where the sacrifice offering was, Abraham’s response was “God
will provide.” What was Abraham thinking? Did he think all along
that God had a last moment reprieve in mind, in which case Abraham
was not showing faith at all but merely calling God’s bluff? Was
he giving voice to a confidence he did not really have, just putting
on a brave face? Did he simply mean that God will provide whatever
God will provide, thinking that God had already provided the
sacrifice, Isaac, and what God had in mind now God only knew? Who
knows?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Clearly,
aside from the most pessimistic and cynical readings of this story,
what Abraham was doing was giving up everything he had held dear for
all his life in an attempt to be faithful to his God. Whether this
was done as the last desperate, and perhaps exasperated, act of a man
who saw the last hopes of his life rapidly fading into the dark
shades of permanent night, or whether it was a remarkable act of
faith by a man who was so confident in God’s intervention that he
remained relatively untroubled by what he was about to do (which I
seriously doubt), this is certainly one of the most problematic
stories in the Bible. So what can we learn from it?</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Let
me explain why I started this meditation with a review of the
covenants God made with God’s Creation, beginning with the people,
but always including the whole of Creation. The theme that strikes
me in every renewal of God’s covenant is God’s desire to bless
Creation, to see Creation prosper, to see the Creature who had been
created in God’s own image enjoy what God had made. It seems as
though God’s joy was indissolubly linked with the joy of God’s
Creation. And when that Creation fell, God came looking for them,
calling them, picked them up, and sent them out to try again; and
when the Creature messed up again, God cleaned them up again, and
instructed them again on how to enjoy what God had made for their
enjoyment, then told them again to go and prosper; and when those
creatures were still defiant, God frustrated the ways which those
creatures set for themselves, ways which could only lead to their own
destruction, all because God was determined to bless what God had
made. We followed this trail of covenant renewal and blessing to
Abraham, but it continues in the same vein throughout Israel’s
history, through the prophets, reaching a pinnacle in the historical
story of Jesus the Christ, and it is repeated through modern history,
and continues to be experienced in each of our lives whether we
recognize it or not.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Abraham’s
story is a concrete example of God’s desire and intention to bless.
God’s intention was always to bless Creation, all peoples, and
God’s covenant with Abraham was the way in which God intended to do
so. Unfortunately, people keep misunderstanding, or worse,
deliberately subverting, God’s plan. God told Abraham to go to the
land God wanted to give him, and Abraham went to the land, but it was
unfruitful, so Abraham kept going till he got to Egypt. There
Abraham chose to lie about his relationship with his wife and let her
be taken into Pharaoh’s bed because he feared for his life. He
tried to “help” God with the promised son. And when God was
making a big ceremony out of the new covenant, Abraham fell asleep
when he was supposed to be keeping scavengers from the sacrificial
offerings.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Abraham
had no idea how grand were God’s plans for his children. Abraham
had no idea that God intended to be born to one of his own
descendants. He had no idea that two thousand years later, God’s
own Son, the One born of Abraham’s descendants, would be hanging on
a cross on the same hill where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. Only
this time God would not intervene to stop the sacrifice, because when
God’s Creation messes up, when there is a terrible price to pay,
God would rather pay the price Godself, than to exact that price from
the Creature God wishes to bless. Abraham had no idea that God was
not only giving him family and land, but in all of this God was
inviting him home, calling Abraham to live with Godself.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Abraham
was willing to throw it all away for God, if only because without
God’s help he was as good as dead anyway. But Abraham had no idea
of the enormity of what he was about to throw away. Even less did
Abraham have any idea how God wanted to bless him, and to bless all
people through him. In what must have been one of the darkest days
of his life, he found himself trudging up Mount Moriah, to give back
to God what he had waited all his life to get from God; to give back
to God what God had promised would be his future. Because Abraham
understood that if you trust God only because you think God has your
best interests at heart, only because you think it will go better for
you if you trust God, then you are still serving yourself, and you
are only using God as an instrument for your own benefit. So Abraham
went up the mountain, and there, inspite of Abraham’s self, God met
him, and there God blessed him with such a powerful blessing that
Abraham came away from this encounter and never fully understood how
rich a blessing had been lavished upon him. A blessing of love and
goodwill that refuses to be extinguished no matter how selfish,
disobedient, and un-cooperative Abraham became. A blessing of
relationship and partnership that was not - it could never be -
Abraham’s own doing, because it was a vision far too grand for
Abraham to imagine or understand, much less devise and work out on
his own.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">God’s
best blessings come on God’s own terms. They have to be God’s
terms because our terms are too easy, too short-sighted, too anaemic.
God’s desire to bless us far exceeds what we in our wildest
dreams could ever imagine, which is why we can never anticipate them.
We want a home and a land that we must ultimately leave, God wants
us to learn to know Godself, to experience an eternal life that wraps
each finite moment with a depth that cannot be adequately captured
outside the infinity of an eternity. God wants to call us home
forever, and all of this happens in the mundane moments of life, such
that the most mundane moments are the most momentous moments because
of their nexus with eternity. It is in the valleys that God walks
with us though we know it not, and too often it is on the mountains
tops that we forget our need of God because we think we have
everything we need, though we have but the faintest understanding of
what it is that we need most. But God knows, and that is why the
best blessings come on God’s own terms, and are often accompanied
by feelings of having been abandoned by God. That, too, is something
that the Incarnate God understands. In this world things are often
cruelly taken from us and we should not be too hasty in saying that
God took it away. These disappointments -tragedies even- may simply
be the way of this fallen world, but God is not powerless to bring
blessing out of sin-cursed soil. In fact, that is God’s specialty.
The fact that God brings blessings out of curses should never be
understood to mean that God needs the sinfulness of this world in
order to advance God’s plans. Bad things never happen because they
fit into God’s plan. God’s penchant for raising blessing from
sin cursed soil only indicates that even as vulgar a monstrosity as
sinfulness will not easily be allowed to thwart God’s plans for
blessing what God has made.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">So
when you find yourself in the blackest night of your life, turn your
eyes to the east, because that is where the sun rises. Wait for
God’s visit because for those whose hope is in God alone morning
follows night with more certainty than night follows day. And if you
wait in faith, God will meet you, ready to shake your world with
blessings that will blow your mind. You may wait a day, or a month,
or years, but never an eternity. And when you meet God you will know
you are home. Sometimes going home calls for patient endurance and
vigilant watchfulness, but never forget while you are going and
waiting that God wants you to enjoy the journey, and that God walks
with you, so listen for the sound of God’s voice, and watch for the
guidance of God’s footprints. But while anywhere with Jesus is
home, don’t forget that every journey has a destination. You, like
Abraham, are going home, so listen for the Father’s call. Learn to
distinguish the Father’s voice from all the siren calls of
destruction. Learn the importance of obedience and faithfulness in
working out your own salvation, but never forget that your salvation
rests first with God, who desires your salvation and blessing more
than you do, more than you know, more than you could ever imagine,
and then follow the Father’s trail of blessing all the way home.</span></span></span></div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-36248145563289496142010-09-06T14:08:00.000-05:002011-10-10T16:48:02.936-05:00Boundaried Communities<div align="CENTER" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
(Note: This is the text of a meditation delivered in the early days of the ConneXion community.)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We
gather here this morning as a community, as a community observing
communion. What does it mean to be a community? What does it mean
to build a community? What is the significance of a community
observing communion together? We – meaning this group, we who have
chosen to identify ourselves as the yada yada supper club – have
always stressed the communal nature of our activities, both in what
we do and in what we intend to do. We have become an identifiable
community known as the yada yada people, though the name is often
invoked with perplexed expressions. I think all of us have come to
appreciate this community as a unique opportunity to indulge, both
gastronomically and socially. We derive significant benefit from
this group, but we also have realized significant responsibilities.
We don’t just get together to eat, but in getting together to eat,
we also get together to feed each other. This is the strength of
community. Suppers are enhanced because, while all of us expect
wholesome, nutritious, and delicious sustenance at home, we do not
anticipate the same variety that we enjoy when we get together and
pool the fruits of our labors. Diversity enhances our community.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Herein,
however, lies part of our challenge. Diversity enhances our
community, but yesterday’s diversity is today’s normal, and it is
tomorrow’s threat of death by suffocation of tedium. Hence it is
imperative that our community, which today thrives on diversity,
continues to reach out to expand the boundaries so that our community
and our diversity can grow and remain a vigorous experience of life.
But herein also lies an ominous threat, because if our community
changes it ceases to be the community we know; if our community
changes, it dies, in a sense. The reality, however, is that if our
community does not change it dies in every sense. Brennan Manning
reminds us that to live without risk is to risk not living. So how
do we build community? How do we ensure that the passing of today’s
community becomes the seed germ for tomorrow’s healthy and vibrant
community? Can we build community without risk?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We
have often made the point that we intend to touch our community for
God. This does not translate into the notion that we have failed if
we do not convert our friends to Christianity. We will be successful
if we build relationships and realize opportunities to share the
lives of our friends and neighbors. We will have been successful if
we learn to see our God in a new light through these contacts. We
will have been successful if we learn to live with greater integrity
than we did before, because integrity is a core doctrine of the
theology which begins with “The LORD, The LORD our God is One.”
Hence, it may well be that our reaching out will be most successful
if our new friends (and all of us here are new friends by virtue of
the dynamics of our interaction in yada yada) convert us away from
our obsession with religion to a new authenticity of godliness.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Today
we got together for brunch, and we thought it prudent to partake in
an observation we call communion. Why? How is communion related to
our community? I am sure there are many avenues that could be
explored, but I am struck by a phrase in Paul’s introduction of the
topic in 1 Corinthians 11:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">23For
I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord
Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24and when he had
given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for
you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25In the same way, after supper
he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood;
do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26For
whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the
Lord's death until he comes.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Why
is it significant to Paul to note that the institution of the Lord’s
Supper took place “on the night he was betrayed”? How clearly
did Jesus foresee his betrayal? Why, if he knew he was about to be
betrayed, and he seems to have had a strong sense even of who would
do the betraying, did he not only stay, but even continue to feed
those who would viciously feed on him, given the chance? Without
wishing to undermine the rich theology that has been developed around
this event, allow me to suggest that he did it because community was
worth it. Paul’s reading of the crucifixion repeatedly emphasizes
the unifying aspect of Christ’s death. National, social, cultural,
religious, and gender distinctions, among others, all are swept away
in the flood of Christ’s blood on Calvary.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Far
more important, however, is the gulf between humanity and Deity that
was bridged by the selfless giving of God’s self. In a large
measure, it is this estrangement from God that drives us to
barricading ourselves from others. The profound psychic uncertainty
that comes from this estrangement allows us no security in unredeemed
relationships because we recognize that the same insatiable desire
for satisfaction that plagues us also drives others to seek solace
where ever it can be found, and the prime targets to fill the void
created by our distance from our Maker are those who bear the Maker’s
image. We feel our need for relationship keenly, though we pretend
otherwise, but we betray our deep seated need in our inability to
give unless we receive. This concern to preserve limited resources
for those who will cooperate in mutual trading causes us to establish
boundaries and erect barriers designed to protect ourselves against
unsanctioned demands of others who have not first agreed to give as
good as they get. However, all the boundaries which we employ to
secure ourselves against intrusion turn out to be fatal to ourselves
because, in the words of John Donne “No man is an island”, and
the more we insulate ourselves against community, the less we live.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jesus
does otherwise. He does not force himself into relationships in
which he is not welcomed, but he establishes his boundaries as
boundaries of invitation. What are boundaries of invitation? We
normally use boundaries as boundaries of exclusion or, at a minimum,
as a means to control access. What does it mean to say that Jesus
established his boundaries as boundaries of invitation? When we
define ourselves as a community we define ourselves as something that
is at least somewhat exclusionary, but a negative definition is not a
good definition; defining a thing by what it is not is not a
satisfactory definition. A good definition tells you what a thing
is, not only what it is not. However, saying what a thing is can be
far more exclusionary than saying what a thing is not, if the thing
is to be known as only what is positively included in the definition.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We
define ourselves as a community, which immediately sets us apart, as
something which the rest of the universe is not. We define ourselves
as a community because we wish to promote certain values. However,
we do not wish to define ourselves by excluding, but by including.
We define ourselves as a community of God’s children, who are known
by God, and wish to know ourselves and others in the light of God’s
love. As such, we do not exclude people, but we do exclude that
which runs counter to the love of God. However, to the extent that
we see God’s love as an invitation extended to all, we establish
our boundaries as boundaries of invitation. We do not include
everything, but we include everyone who is willing to explore what it
means to live as a community of God’s love.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jesus
establishes his boundaries as boundaries of invitation. When those
whom he has chosen turn against him he allows them that latitude, but
he does not rescind his invitation. He gives himself, not as a trade
off for community, but as an invitation to community. The invitation
can be refused, and Jesus can lose his life for nothing, but his
motivation for giving is not mercenary. He does not give simply for
what he can get, though he most certainly hopes to get. Jesus gives
when return is uncertain because the hope – just the hope – of
community is worth it. Jesus gives because he is a giving God.
Because he is God he can give without return. He can invite without
the assurance of an accepting response.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Herein,
I think, lies the secret for our community, and the reason we share
the Lord’s Supper. Paul quotes Christ’s invitation to do this in
remembrance. We will not plumb the depths of what was done for us at
Calvary, but we are invited to observe and to remember, but not only
to remember. For it is in observing and remembering that we declare.
We remind ourselves and the world of the God Who gave against all
odds, and in a small but not insignificant way we participate in this
giving, first as recipients, but than as sharers, not only with each
other, but as an invitational community.</span></span></span></div>
Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-47839847208871565982010-08-12T17:28:00.004-05:002010-08-12T23:26:23.378-05:00Big Tent Christianity<img src="http://www.cst.edu/tag/C4_BigTent_Small.jpg" /><div><div>This post is part of a synchro blog event sponsored by <a href="http://www.bigtentchristianity.com/">Big Tent Christianity</a> Please check out lots of additional posts on their website, and consider attending the Big Tent Christianity conference in Raleigh, NC September 8-9. Go to the website for all the information and conversation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Big Tent Christianity?? What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is that? For many the very notion of Big Tent Christianity sounds like a shortcut to hell, under the pretense of being on the high road to heaven. For others anything less than Big Tent Christianity smacks of a parochial religiosity that emphasizes very limited human formulations of God and salvation at the expense of a recognition that salvation is God's work, never our own doing, even though Paul tells us to "work out our own salvation", and he tells us to do it "with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).</div><div>How do we make real progress towards Big Tent Christianity without sacrificing the very diversity that makes this world a rich place? Is Big Tent Christianity even a worthy goal or is it a distraction best ignored? The last thing I am interested in Big Tent Christianity that turns a vibrant mosaic of Christian expression into an amorphous mass of like-minded believers who can never have a meaningful and challenging discussion about theology because we are all in such sublime agreement. That is not unity, but uniformity. Judging from the diversity that is displayed in God's handiwork of creation such uniformity would be decidedly ungodly, and likewise unchristian. It is our diversity that makes us strong, and without diversity our facility for modeling the imago dei is fatally compromised.</div><div>I believe passionately that the only way to broaden our vision is to narrow our focus. The more detail we wish to include in our definition of Big Tent Christianity, the more we will require our fellow believers to surrender if they wish to be part of this "larger" Christianity. Our only hope for a Big Tent Christianity is to get back to the original formulation of Christianity, the formulation that predates Christianity itself.</div><div>How radical are we willing to be? Are we willing to get so radical that we lose our Christian identity in Christ? Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John 14:6). If it is really all about Jesus Christ, and if Jesus is The Way, then Christianity is not The Way. If we define Christianity by salvation in Jesus Christ, then Christianity loses its status as a favored religion because salvation is in Jesus Christ, not in any religion. That no religion saves is an old saw that Christians are only too happy to enunciate, if ultimately reticent to follow to its logical conclusion. However, that most narrow definition of Christianity is in fact the most comprehensive definition.</div><div>It is this most narrowly focused, yet comprehensive definition of Christianity that lays a solid foundation for a Big Tent Christianity, a Big Tent Christianity that is big enough to include even those who subscribe to an other religion, because if religion cannot save, neither can it single-handedly preclude salvation. Jesus told enough stories about people who espoused a particular truth, but lived another truth, to make it clear that what we say with our words can neither save us nor condemn us, without regard to what our lives say. It is not those who say "Lord, Lord", but those who do his will who enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21ff; 25:31ff).</div><div>Hence, the notion of a Big Tent Christianity carries within itself the seeds of it own demise as a unique way to God, because the Tent must become large enough to problematize the nomenclature of Christianity as a term that is sufficient to encapsulate God's salvific work. But that, too, is a biblical notion. Jesus said "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." (John 12:24) That was said of individual believers, but if the metaphor works for wheat and humans, it likely has legitimate application for broader body politics as well.</div><div>I dream of Big Tent Christianity that is large enough to realize that we can never take God’s Word to where it has not yet been, because God’s Word is already everywhere (Psalm 19). I dream of a Big Tent Christianity that is small enough to recognize that a cup of cold water is God’s work. I dream of a Big Tent Christianity that learns to notice what God is already doing in the world, and delights in participating with God in loving an awesome Creation. I dream of a Big Tent Christianity that is satisfied with God’s kingdom advancing, rather than advancing a particular version of Christianity/Christendom.</div><div>Even so, come, Lord Jesus!</div></div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-40303105674693174762010-06-26T17:39:00.000-05:002010-08-12T17:42:16.058-05:00Book review:War Peace and Social Conscience<div>Schlabach, Theron F., War Peace and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics Herald Press, 2009</div><div><br /></div><div>War Peace and Social Conscience is a tribute to Hershberger, a leading thinker and writer in the Mennonite Community Church through much of the 20th century. Schlabach begins with a brief biography and does well to situate Hershberger’s thought in the context of his life. Schlabach poses probing questions about the impact of Hershberger’s experiences on his thought, does not shy away from pointing out perceived gaps and inconsistencies in his stated positions. While the biographical considerations are an excellent consideration, throughout the rest of the book one encounters confusing time shifts as the author follows the train of Hershberger’s thought at the expense of a consistent chronology. The effect is unavoidable but draws attention to the challenge involved in writing a theological autobiography.</div><div>Hershberger has clearly been a seminal thinker in the Mennonite Community and a radical pacifist who was very concerned to ground that pacifism in scripture rather than any particular cultural or ideological sensitivities. That he is quite radical in his pacifism is reflected in his suspicion regarding Ghandi’s commitment to non-violent resistance. For the young Hershberger any form of coercion was a form of violence, and that rendered any action in favor of justice all but impotent. Hershberger deserves full credit for integrity as he does modify some of his positions in the course of his life as experiences and intellectual interactions drew attention to areas that required development.</div><div>Our own conference and Dr Archie Penner are mentioned in a brief account of Hershberger’s work with our churches regarding an appropriate response to labor unions (231ff).</div><div>Hershberger’s thought and life is driven by his community values, and in the spirit of this interest in community he was a key figure in several experiments in community living in both urban and rural settings. He was also a supporter of the MMA as an attempt to band together as community for mutual aid in preference to institutionalized commercial insurance.</div><div>War Peace and Social Conscience is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in peace theology and one man’s project to bring this theology to bear on all of life, encompassing personal, social, and industrial, as well as national/international concerns.</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-19480902948710394242010-04-21T18:08:00.001-05:002010-10-12T21:49:36.578-05:00Falling for a Shadow<div>John Mason Brown was a drama critic and speaker well known for his witty and informative lectures on theatrical topics. One of his first important appearances as a lecturer was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Brown was pleased, but also rather nervous, and his nerves were not helped when he noticed by the light of the slide projector that someone was copying his every gesture. After a time he broke off his lecture and announced with great dignity that if anyone was not enjoying the talk, he was free to leave. Nobody did, and the mimicking continued. It was another 10 minutes before Brown realized that the mimic was his own shadow!</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of us have been victims of frightening monsters which turned out to be nothing but innocuous shadows. Many of us have worked hard at achieving goals only to realize that the promise we sought was but an insubstantial shadow. In Philippians 3 Paul warns us against falling for a shadow - the shadow of a religion that promises more than it can deliver, the shadow of a religion that pretends to show us Christ, but which is in fact a chimera that blocks our view of Christ and ultimately distracts us, with its siren call, to our own demise.</div><div><br /></div><div>Paul writes this letter from prison, likely in Rome. He begins with robust statements of thanksgiving for the Philippians and their “partnership in the gospel” (1:5). The letter exudes appreciation for their spirit, and exhortation to emulate the humility of Christ, who being in very nature God, did not consider it necessary to grasp at all the trappings and accoutrements of divinity to which He had indisputable claim (2:6). Paul’s concern for the welfare of the Philippians is palpable and his burning desire is for their continued growth to maturity. He has invested himself into this church and he is eager to see that investment return dividends, not for himself, but for the Philippian believers.</div><div>In chapter 3 we are given a profound insight into the nature of this development which Paul longs for them to experience. “Finally”, he says “rejoice in the Lord.” This is evidently a recurring theme with Paul, because he freely allows that he is repeating himself, but he expresses his hope that this redundancy will prove beneficial to his listeners.</div><div>So he wants his Philippi an believers to rejoice in the Lord, but his elaboration as to how this should occur takes a surprising turn. Immediately on the heels of this injunction to “rejoice in the Lord” Paul issues a warning: “Watch out for the dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.” Evidently one of Paul’s primary concerns regarding the Philippians joy is the threat posed by certain “men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh”. The concern clearly runs very deep with Paul, yet calling these people dogs seems strong language. What is it that has Paul so incensed? On the face of it this seems to be an issue regarding circumcision, but Paul himself has been all over the place on this circumcision thing. In his earlier days he would have been mortified had he not been circumcised, so how is it that he now considers proponents of circumcision to be dogs? What’s more, the very next line has Paul making the claim that “it is we who are the circumcision.” Paul seems to be saying there is a real circumcision, but what these people are chasing is only a shadow.</div><div>Circumcision, you will recall, had been a distinguishing mark for as long as the Israelites had been a people. If you are circumcised you’re in, if you’re not you’re out. It was how the chosen people had marked their uniqueness as the people of God. It was a reminder, a very physical and indelible permanent reminder to them that they were chosen, called out to be a special people for God. They were in, everybody else was out.</div><div>But circumcision was more than an arbitrary mark to set themselves apart. It was done in explicit obedience to the God who had called them out in the first place. Circumcision was the sign given to them by Yahweh himself, and Yahweh instructed them to be careful to observe this practice as an everlasting covenant.</div><div>Genesis 17:9-14</div><div> 9 Then God said to Abraham, "As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner—those who are not your offspring. 13 Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant."</div><div>So there you have it. God himself told them to do this, so why is Paul getting all bent out of shape over what is clearly a simple matter of obedience? How can Paul call people dogs for doing what God had instructed them to do? Is it really possible that the very people who are most devout in their insistence on obedience are in fact chasing shadows?</div><div>Philippians 3:4b-6</div><div> If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.</div><div>Nobody, but nobody, would out-circumcise Paul. If there were markers to distinguish true believers, Paul had them all. He was a Believer among believers.</div><div>But if this is about markers, how do we translate this into our own time? By what marks do we know which side we are on? How do we separate the sheep from the goats? There could be many interpretations, but how’s this: Baptized at 14, an adherent of the Christian religion, a Protestant, an evangelical, denominationally affiliated as a Mennonite (or insert your favorite non/denomination), saved by faith not by works, a holy passion to know God, I faithfully memorize scripture and pray before all meals.</div><div>But Paul goes on:</div><div>3:7</div><div>“But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.” What? All this good stuff is loss?? What’s with you today Paul? First you derisively call those who obey God “dogs”, now everything we have been taught to value and cherish in our heritage is to be considered loss? What is going on?</div><div>Keep in mind that Paul is not simply saying that all these things are bad. Read Romans for a glimpse of how Paul feels about his heritage, about circumcision, and about the law. In Romans 2 Paul talks about the Jews and the law and he says “Circumcision has value if you observe the law.” Clearly circumcision is not a bad thing in Paul’s view. When Paul talks about the futility of seeking righteousness by keeping the law, he says (7:12) “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good”. These words are not to be taken lightly. Paul has an astonishningly high view of the law and places great value in keeping the law. In chapter 9 Paul expresses the great sorrow and unceasing anguish of his heart for his people and their heedless squandering of the incredible blessings that are theirs as God’s chosen people. In fact, he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his people. Not for moment can we allow ourselves to think that Paul has anything but the utmost respect and enduring appreciation for these things which he now counts as loss for the sake of Christ. Paul enjoins obedience to God and to scripture frequently, and many of these things which he now considers loss, circumcision is one example, are done in obedience to divine instructions. So how does obedience become an occasion of loss?</div><div>If all these things are good things, why does Paul consider them loss for the sake of Christ? It would be relatively unproblematic if he called them useless or neutral, but he does not. Paul calls them negative baggage, they are a loss, they put him at a disadvantage when he wants to know Christ. These things get in the way. But how do good things get in the way of what is best in our lives? How do these good things, these things that are intended to help us toward God, in fact become obstacles between us and God? More to the point, is this a problem unique to Paul and the Jewish people or could we suffer the same problem? Could it be that the better our religion works for us, the greater the danger that it will in fact become an obstacle between us and the God we claim to serve?</div><div>3:7,8</div><div>7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.</div><div>What did Jesus say in John 14:6? “I AM the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” But if Jesus is the only way to God, then our religion is not the way. If Jesus is the only way to the Father then my beliefs and my confessions are not the way. If Jesus is the only way to God then there is no other way and any other way which is purported to be a way can only be a distraction from the one true way. That is why all these good things, which are intended to help us find God, so easily get in the way of our finding Jesus as the only way. That is why all these good things, all these markers by which we distinguish who’s in from who’s out, are a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, our only way.</div><div>Are these things bad because they distract us from Jesus? No, because they are given to us a tools, as guidelines to help us find God. In Galatians Paul calls the law a tutor who was given to lead us to Christ. The law is a good thing, and our religious heritage is a good thing, but the more we revere the law, and the more confidence we place in our religious/cultural/social heritage, the greater the danger that we will become satisfied with the tutor and abandon our quest for the God who is always here, always with us, always within us, but also always beyond our confident grasp, because God owns us, we can never own God.</div><div>3:7-9</div><div>7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.</div><div>No amount of law-keeping, no amount of right living, not even any right believing will be for us the righteousness that God gives. The righteousness of God comes only from God as a gift, and we appropriate it by faith, but it is not given only if we have the right kind of faith or the right kind of belief. Indubitably we experience it in proportion to our faith and our obedience, but our experience never accurately reflects what we have been given. Now we can only see through a glass darkly, then we will know fully as we are fully known by God even now. Paul seems to emphasize the radical gifted nature of this righteousness when he restates his original statement “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ” and he repeats it as “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” Faith is subsequent to the gift of righteousness which is bestowed as a free gift, but living faith is how we experience God’s gift of salvation and it creates space for salvation to take root in our lives and grow to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Just a little earlier Paul told the Philippians (2:12-13)</div><div>12Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.</div><div>We have a role to play in the growth of salvation in our lives, but it is never an original role; it never starts with us. Our role can only ever be a parasitic response to the original grace of God in our lives “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” That is why Paul is eager to consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord, for whose sake he has lost all things, because his freedom, his righteousness, his salvation is found in Christ Jesus, not in his religious heritage, not in his obedience, and not in his orthodox beliefs. (We could go into some detail here about how some of what passes for evangelical orthodoxy owes more to Greek philosophy and it’s development into the Cartesian rationalism of the “cogito, ergo sum” than it does to a robust Judeo-Christian understanding of Scripture, but the restless shifting and the glazed eyes tell me this is not the time or the place.)</div><div>Paul’s driving desire is to know Christ because it is knowing Christ that imbues his life with a character of integrity that a religious expression can only imitate weakly, and usually attempts to circumscribe. Religious expressions are often implicated in twisted attempts to make life look better than it really is. Paul wants to know Christ without regard for where it takes him, and this is a powerful indicator of how knowing Christ eclipses everything else in his life. Paul says</div><div>3:10,11</div><div>“10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”</div><div>Paul begins with sentiments that we can all echo whole heartedly. We all want to know Christ, we all want to know the power of his resurrection. Of course, that’s a no-brainer. But Paul knows that resurrection presupposes death. There can be no resurrection without a prior death. If we want to know the power of his resurrection, we will have to share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Precisely what that means Paul seems not to be entirely certain saying “and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” We could talk about that for a while, but ultimately I believe this is something which we work out in life as we follow Christ’s example day by day. To know Christ is, ultimately, to live the life of Christ in our own time. We cannot understand the meaning of sharing in his death or resurrection unless we live that meaning. It is in some sense as we die to ourselves and all the markers of our religious expressions, and it is as we learn what it means to live to God alone, which can never be done as something distinguished from our mundane life, that we find ourselves truly alive for the first time. That in itself becomes a kind of resurrection.</div><div>And so our choice is clear, but that does not make the choice easy. We can choose life, the life we have come to appreciate, the life in which we are comfortable and satisfied, a religion that works for us, or we can choose resurrection life, which will inevitably mean death. This is why it is so important for Paul to know Christ. As long as you choose the life you know, death will hold a terror for you because you cannot escape the knowledge that at some point your choice for life will be rendered moot. Only when you choose Christ over life can death’s terror be mitigated, because only Christ is larger than life and death. Hence the passion to know Christ beyond any religious understanding and commitment and excessively simplistic obedience becomes the only real choice for life, for life lived in the ordinary, employing and appreciating all that is good in life, including one’s heritage, one’s religion, and one’s theology, but always remembering that these good things are stepping stones only as long as they remain utterly dispensable in the overarching quest to know Christ.</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-51916543662720123242010-02-22T17:52:00.000-06:002010-08-12T17:55:15.495-05:00Disappointment with the Kingdom<div>How do we respond when our dreams for God’s kingdom don’t work out? What does the kingdom look like? What does kingdom building look like? Should we be concerned with building the kingdom or should we concentrate on keeping ourselves out of the way so God can build his kingdom? “Participate in what God is already doing” What should we think when our plans and efforts towards kingdom building fall apart, when our dreams for God’s kingdom are dashed? What do you do when Canada has 2 of 5 skaters in the gold medal race and they take 4th and 5th? Mt 11 deals with precisely the sort of questions that arise when one is disappointed with the kingdom of God.</div><div>In this text the kingdom builder himself says “blessed is he who does not fall away on account of me.” Don’t let disappointment with the kingdom turn you off of the kingdom. Your disappointment is almost certainly rooted in a misunderstanding of what the kingdom is about, rather than any deficiency with the kingdom itself. Let your disappointment be a beacon that alerts you to a new vision for the kingdom, a vision for the kingdom God is already building, rather than the kingdom you think should be built.</div><div>The kingdom of heaven is not primarily about the right theology or religion, the right evangelistic tool or the correct biblical structure for church governance. The kingdom of heaven is healing for the sick, sight for the blind, hearing for the deaf, and life for the dead. It is good news preached to the poor. The kingdom is not only about making our world a better place, though it should seem a better place with all of the foregoing. Primarily the kingdom of God is about recognizing and proclaiming and endorsing God’s saving, healing, life-giving activity that is already at work in our world, because without that work our world could not be. The kingdom of heaven is God’s kingdom, and it is God’s work, a work in which we are privileged to participate, but it is never ours to circumscribe. In fact, it may well be that disappointment with the kingdom is far less injurious to our experience of the kingdom than is a facile satisfaction that has us fooled into thinking that the kingdoms we build are adequate representations of the kingdom of heaven. Let’s celebrate God’s kingdom. Let us not be weary by reason of our disappointments with the kingdom, and by all means, let’s continue to be surprised by unexpected encounters with the kingdom of heaven that is so near.</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-51698991835572308202010-01-09T17:36:00.000-06:002010-08-12T18:11:18.774-05:00Book review: Engaging Anabaptism<div><i>Engaging Anabaptism </i>John D. Roth, editor Scottdale, PA/Waterloo, ON: 2001</div><div>Engaging Anabaptism provides a perspective on Anabaptist theology in the words of thinkers from a variety of traditions. Almost universally the conversation with the Anabaptist tradition was couched in terms of interaction with John Howard Yoder, who is credited with re-introducing the Anabaptist voice to the current theological conversation. McClendon describes his experience of reading Yoder’s Politics of Jesus as a second conversion (21). Variations on this sentiment was echoed by other conversation partners. While the emphasis on Yoder’s work is understandable, it does mitigate the value of this book as a conversation with this radical tradition. Whatever one’s evaluation of Yoder’s representation of Anabaptist values, this radical tradition consists of more voices than only Yoder.</div><div>The well known emphasis on community and an integrated care for the poor and powerless are prominent themes. The peace stance linked to a concern for justice was a frequent point of entry into Anabaptist thought for the contributors (76f). Most noteworthy, however, is the recognition that ultimately Anabaptist thought is persuasive not primarily of the basis of convincing argumentation, but on the strength of a deep resonance with the biblical text (33, 77).</div><div>What I take to be the most decisive factor in Anabaptist thought, the hermeneutic which takes the life and teachings of Jesus to be the primary lens for understanding all of scripture, is contrasted with the comparatively weak centrality of Christ operative in much of Christian theology. Marshall notes that “all Christian traditions are Christocentric, which is what makes them Christian in the first place,” but “it is Anabaptism’s central commitment to the paradigmatic significance of Jesus’ life and teachings that offers the soundest basis for genuine integration to occur” (46f). Murray cites the difference in the hermeneutic as Christocentric rather than Christological (98). Whereas Christological methods interpret scripture with references to doctrines about Jesus, the Christocentric approach recognizes Jesus as God Incarnate, and reads all of scripture in consideration of the life and teachings of the God we see in Jesus.</div><div>This book is a worthwhile read for those who are interested in how theologians from other streams view the Anabaptist tradition. The caliber of contributions in this volume range from fairly short testimonials to more extended interactions and critiques. They also range from fuzzy feel good affirmations to strong endorsements to maintain our eminently biblical commitments because we supply a voice that the broader Christian community needs to hear.</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-90266062682986617502009-12-07T12:48:00.001-06:002009-12-27T12:53:20.050-06:002nd Sunday of Advent 2009<div>THE PROMISE OF THE MESSIAH</div><div>HISTORY IRRUPTS INTO OUR STORY</div><div><br /></div><div>NIV</div><div>Malachi 3</div><div>1 "See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.</div><div>2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luke 1</div><div>68"Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>because he has come and has redeemed his people. </div><div>69He has raised up a horn[a] of salvation for us </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>in the house of his servant David </div><div>70(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), </div><div>71salvation from our enemies </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and from the hand of all who hate us— </div><div>72to show mercy to our fathers </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and to remember his holy covenant, </div><div>73the oath he swore to our father Abraham: </div><div>74to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and to enable us to serve him without fear </div><div>75in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. </div><div>76And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, </div><div>77to give his people the knowledge of salvation </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>through the forgiveness of their sins, </div><div>78because of the tender mercy of our God, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven </div><div>79to shine on those living in darkness </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and in the shadow of death, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>to guide our feet into the path of peace."</div><div><br /></div><div>Philippians 1</div><div>3I thank my God every time I remember you. 4In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.</div><div>7It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. 8God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.</div><div><br /></div><div>9And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luke 3</div><div>1In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— 2during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert. 3He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4As is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: </div><div>"A voice of one calling in the desert, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>'Prepare the way for the Lord, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>make straight paths for him. </div><div>5Every valley shall be filled in, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>every mountain and hill made low. </div><div>The crooked roads shall become straight, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>the rough ways smooth. </div><div>6And all mankind will see God's salvation.' "</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Before the days of cameras and camcorders, camera phones and the internet, before the days of books and even before the days of written communication, God created the heavens and the earth, the sun, moon, and stars and all the planets, the plants and animals, all things that are, and God created humankind in the image of God, male and female God created us. In that beginning, we are told, God used to come walk with us in the cool of the evening, talking with us, presumably about the things we had seen and done that day, communicating and being in relation with us, and all was well in all God’s green earth.</div><div>But then –and those are never good words to hear after the creation of an idyllic scene– but then we decided we wished to be more than we understood ourselves to be. We wanted to be like God ourselves. However, it is always and inevitably the case that when the mirror wishes to be the image it reflects, disappointment is the only possible outcome, and the broken shards that result from those shattered expectations, fantasies, and desires quickly become life threatening.</div><div>For a time we wandered, we thought alone, and as we became increasingly infatuated with ourselves, our predicament grew ever more intolerable and our existence and our relationships became ever more fractured. We experienced the Flood that washed our world but could not cleanse our hearts. Because we still wished to be gods unto ourselves we built a city that became a Babel that only exacerbated our alienation from God and each other.</div><div>All the while, unbeknownst to us, God was working for us, and the frustrations we experienced were an integral part of God working out a salvation for us, because when the mirror wishes to be the image it reflects, that fantasy must be shattered in order for the dream of a mirror that truly, though never flawlessly, reflects the beauty of the creator, to have a prayer.</div><div>God called Abraham and promised him a family, descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky. This was in the time when large families were equated with more wealth, and wealth was a matter of survival rather than a vain and tawdry status symbol in the rat race to keep up with the Joneses. God had to intervene to prevent Abraham’s slaughter of the only child through whom Abraham hoped to realize this Promise. In spite of Abraham, the family grew to become a nation, and always this family/nation halted between seasons of worshiping God, peace and prosperity, and times of selfish idolatry that justice could only answer with judgement on them and their families.</div><div>And so for thousands of years people have been looking for God in all the wrong places. For generations people have looked for peace and justice, for prosperity and love, and almost invariably found themselves at odds with each other and God regarding what constituted peace and justice. Their legitimate desire for God morphed into a perverted quest to install themselves as God, and the result was intractable struggle and fractious contention that revealed the depravity of their souls as they, lacking the understanding that they were mirrors who were to reflect God in their lives and in themselves, tried to make themselves gods, a project which could only result in broken mirrors, broken dreams, and broken lives.</div><div>Prophets have come and prophets have gone. Along with the prophets who spoke God’s word were myriads of prophets who spoke words that the people wanted to hear, rather than the words they needed to hear. By Malachi’s time most of those voices had been silenced. The most active period of prophecy according to the written record had occurred some 200 years earlier, and by Malachi’s time the silence had been deafening for generations. In Malachi’s time there is a short period of renewed hope as Ezra and Nehemiah prod the people to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. Even that hope, however is bittersweet, as those old enough to recall the magnificance of Solomon’s gold plated temple see the meager results of the current effort to rebuild the monument of Israel’s hope that is taken to be the House of Yahweh, their God.</div><div>It is into this context that Malachi’s words come, both as a Promise and a warning. The Messenger whom you seek will come, but who will be able to stand when He comes? He will come with refining fire, and even the Levites, the only one of the twelve tribes who could enter the inner sanctum of the temple to intercede before Yahweh for the people, even the Levites would require excruciating refinement. There are in Malachi’s words both the promise of hope, and the dire warning of judgement that no one could hope to survive and yet, the end result will be people who once again will bring offerings of righteousness. In the end we will not only survive, but we will once again see the best of the good old days. We will be restored to the relationship we enjoyed in the Garden, the relationship for which we were created and without which we cannot survive and, even if we could survive without the relationship, such survival would be worse than extinction.</div><div>Then we read the words in which Luke records Zechariah’s prophecy of the Promise fulfilled. Malachi’s hope is realized! The Messiah is here! The Lord has come and has redeemed His people! The One we desire has come and He will bring salvation! And it is because of the tender mercy of God that the rising sun comes from heaven and shines on us who live in darkness, on us who live with the shadow of death looming over us, and He guides our feet along the path of peace! The fire that consumes is the fire that gives life. And all of this has happened. Our salvation has appeared and the Messiah is here! Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel!</div><div>As we move to Paul’s words in Philippians we encounter another subtle shift in tone. Paul is excited about partnership of the Philippians in the gospel. Paul is confident that the One who began the good work of salvation in the lives of the Philippians will continue to work out that salvation “until the day of Christ Jesus.” Wait a minute! Hasn’t He been and gone? Didn’t Zechariah say that our salvation had come and that the Jesus who was here and is now gone would bring salvation for us all? Then what’s this about the good work being completed in the day of Christ Jesus as a future thing? Paul’s understanding is quite clearly that we are all in this together and that we are still looking forward to a future realization of hope and consummation of a good work begun and, what’s more, that the Philippians, and presumably we, have a role to play in this good work. What is our role in this “partnership in the gospel?” In the context of Philippians 1 Paul is consumed with spreading the gospel. Even though Paul is in chains, he is excited that the gospel is being preached, whether from good motives or bad does not matter to him, as long as the good news of the grace of God, which is the gift of God, is spread to all peoples.</div><div>Luke fills us in on the context of John the Baptist’s partnership in the gospel. First he pays attention to the people and the times of John’s ministry. He tells us where John preached (in the country around the Jordan) and what he preached (a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins). What has not changed is that the good news includes warning. The good news does not, and cannot, gloss over what needs to change.</div><div>However, if we keep Paul’s words in mind we must recognize that this partnership in the gospel begins with us as “our love abounds more and more in knowledge and depth of insight” and we are “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.” Our partnership in the gospel is a radical life change (repentance) that is the salvation that has come. Our very lives are the proclamation of the gospel. It is our lives lived in the mundane context of our existence implicated in political, geographical, meterological, social, religious concerns that bears witness to the salvation that has come, is coming, and, we hope against all odds, will come.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The Message</div><div>Malachi 3:1-4</div><div>1 "Look! I'm sending my messenger on ahead to clear the way for me. Suddenly, out of the blue, the Leader you've been looking for will enter his Temple—yes, the Messenger of the Covenant, the one you've been waiting for. Look! He's on his way!" A Message from the mouth of God-of-the-Angel-Armies.</div><div>2-4But who will be able to stand up to that coming? Who can survive his appearance?</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>He'll be like white-hot fire from the smelter's furnace. He'll be like the strongest lye soap at the laundry. He'll take his place as a refiner of silver, as a cleanser of dirty clothes. He'll scrub the Levite priests clean, refine them like gold and silver, until they're fit for God, fit to present offerings of righteousness. Then, and only then, will Judah and Jerusalem be fit and pleasing to God, as they used to be in the years long ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luke 1:67-79</div><div>Then Zachariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, </div><div>Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>he came and set his people free. </div><div>He set the power of salvation in the center of our lives, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and in the very house of David his servant, </div><div>Just as he promised long ago </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>through the preaching of his holy prophets: </div><div>Deliverance from our enemies </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and every hateful hand;</div><div>Mercy to our fathers, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>as he remembers to do what he said he'd do, </div><div>What he swore to our father Abraham— </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>a clean rescue from the enemy camp, </div><div>So we can worship him without a care in the world, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>made holy before him as long as we live. </div><div><br /></div><div>And you, my child, "Prophet of the Highest," </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>will go ahead of the Master to prepare his ways, </div><div>Present the offer of salvation to his people, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>the forgiveness of their sins. </div><div>Through the heartfelt mercies of our God, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>God's Sunrise will break in upon us, </div><div>Shining on those in the darkness, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>those sitting in the shadow of death, </div><div>Then showing us the way, one foot at a time, </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>down the path of peace.</div><div><br /></div><div>Philippians 1:3-11</div><div>3-6Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God's Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.</div><div>7-8It's not at all fanciful for me to think this way about you. My prayers and hopes have deep roots in reality. You have, after all, stuck with me all the way from the time I was thrown in jail, put on trial, and came out of it in one piece. All along you have experienced with me the most generous help from God. He knows how much I love and miss you these days. Sometimes I think I feel as strongly about you as Christ does!</div><div><br /></div><div>9-11So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover's life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luke 1</div><div>1-6 In the fifteenth year of the rule of Caesar Tiberius—it was while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea; Herod, ruler of Galilee; his brother Philip, ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis; Lysanias, ruler of Abilene; during the Chief-Priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas—John, Zachariah's son, out in the desert at the time, received a message from God. He went all through the country around the Jordan River preaching a baptism of life-change leading to forgiveness of sins, as described in the words of Isaiah the prophet: </div><div><br /></div><div>The Message Revised Contextualized Version</div><div> 1-6 In the fourth year of the rule of Stephen Harper—it was while Greg Selinger was premier of Manitoba; Harold Foster, reeve of Bifrost; Randy Sigurdson, Mayor of Arborg; during the Papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, and Richard Klassen was Moderator of the EMC—a small and unremarkable group of people, out in the desert at the time, far to the north of where any habitation should be found, were listening intently for a message from God, as others were doing, and as has been done since the dawn of time, even before the world began. They went all through the country around the Icelandic River preaching a baptism of life-change leading to forgiveness of sins, as described in the words of Isaiah the prophet: </div><div><br /></div><div>Thunder in the wilderness! </div><div>"Prepare God's arrival! </div><div>Make the road smooth and straight! </div><div>Every ditch will be filled in, </div><div>Every bump smoothed out, </div><div>The detours straightened out, </div><div>All the ruts paved over. </div><div>Everyone will be there to see </div><div>The parade of God's salvation."</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-91342581320498181342009-10-06T20:22:00.002-05:002009-10-06T20:23:13.041-05:00You're gonna have to serve somebody<div>In Romans 6 Paul makes clear that we must choose whom we will serve. We can serve good or evil, sin or grace, life or death, God or the devil, but we’re “gonna have to serve somebody.”</div><div>Last time we were listening to Paul in Romans 5 he was waxing superlative and doxological about the incredible grace of God that brings a salvation that exceeds the devastation wrought by sin. If the many are condemned by their sin, by their propensity to choose for themselves rather than for God, how much more will these many be blessed by God’s stubborn choice for them at God’s own expense. Even the law comes as a blessing as it is intended to highlight our sinfulness and bring it into stark relief against the holiness of God. Because of the law our sinfulness becomes painfully evident, our desperate need for grace is shown to be even more than exponentially greater than we could have understood, and yet, even as the enormity of our sin blots out every glimmer of hope that we can do something to improve our hopeless lot, God’s grace reaches in and does for us far more than we could ever do for ourselves, far more even than our sin can undo for us. 5:20 “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more!”</div><div>This is fantastic news but, knowing the human condition and our inclination to take advantage of every opportunity to relax our discipline if an easier way is available, Paul anticipates our lazy opportunistic question: If our sinfulness is always exceeded by grace, then why don’t we sin extravagantly, so that God’s grace increases even more extravagantly? “Because” says Paul (6:2) “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” This grace that brings salvation brings us salvation from our sin, not merely in our sin. “We died to sin” This great salvation includes our own death to sin as partners with Christ in his death for sin. A dead man has no appetite. Regardless of the chocoholic cravings you experience in life, at your funeral you will have no reaction whatsoever to whatever decadent chocolaty treats your family elects to serve up. If some pervert decides to heap chocolates around your face in your coffin you won’t so much as twitch a muscle, you won’t even have an involuntary reaction of salivary gland production.</div><div>A dead man has no inclination to sin, and our new life in Christ is predicated on our having died with Christ first. 6:4 “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” This salvation does not just cover our sin; it does away with our sin. Being baptized into Christ Jesus is not an easy escape from our sin. Being baptized into Christ is being baptized into his death so that, just as Christ was ultimately raised from the dead, so we too are raised to live a new life, the indestructible life of the resurrected Christ in us.</div><div><br /></div><div>But here is a strange thing. Our experience of reality is that death follows life. In this text Paul turns it around and tells us that in fact life follows death! 6:5 “If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.” The way to life passes through death. Jesus said “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39) If we wish to live the new life of Christ we must die to sin. If we desire to know who we are in Christ, we must die to ourselves in sin. This death is a release from bondage into the freedom of resurrection life beyond everything that binds us here. 6:6 “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with,[a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” We are no longer slaves to sin because death has freed us from sin. Christ’s death on the cross broke the power of sin in the world, our death with Christ ends the rule of sin in our own lives. Death to sin is our freedom from sin.</div><div><br /></div><div>Paul expresses supreme confidence in this, saying 6:8 “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” Death is decisive but it is not final. Death is an insurmountable and uncircumventable limit only as long as we think we live. The mastery of death is over the instant we are raised to resurrection life with Christ. “since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.”</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a key factor in our own experience of salvation. Christ’s death and resurrection has decisively terminated the rule of sin and death, but our celebration of the victory is related to our participation in the death that is the price of our sin. We are not translated into the new life without also participating in death. Hence, Paul’s earlier doxological euphoria at the superlative impact of Christ’s obedience in comparison to Adam’s sin (which is our sin) notwithstanding, we must recognize our complicity with Adam, choose to participate with Christ, and consider ourselves dead. 6:11 “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Only as we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ can we hope to live God’s life rather than dying Adam’s death, which is our death. This is a deliberate choice we make, and it is a choice we must live. 12 “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.” ‘Reign’ connotes more than simply a choice. Reign indicates a sustained regimen. To “consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God” is more than a choice of direction, it is a commitment to an allegiance that carries monumental implications for our ongoing life. Paul goes on 13 “Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.” We have a choice, and we must exercise that choice if we are to experience salvation. It’s like Bob Dylan sings:</div><div> “You're gonna have to serve somebody,</div><div>Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord</div><div>But you're gonna have to serve somebody.”</div><div>Paul adjures us to count ourselves dead to sin and offer ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness because 6:14 “sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.” Freedom is not characterized by the absence of any master, but by allegiance to the proper master. Sin is a master of abject slavery and death, whereas grace is a master of freedom and life!</div><div><br /></div><div>Grace, however, continues to be misunderstood. 6:15 “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” Why not? For several reasons. For one, sin is a cruel master whose end is death 6:16 “Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or....” On the other hand, offering ourselves as obedient slaves to the Creator of all that is, which leads to righteousness and life. In fact, offering ourselves as slaves to righteousness is the purest form of freedom 6:18 “You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Even though Paul is convinced that Christ’s death and resurrection on our behalf is eminently sufficient for our life, he issues this plea for God’s children to consider themselves dead to sin because he knows what we are, he is all too aware of our weakness in our natural selves. For that reason it is imperative that we practice the disciplines of the holy life; the life set apart for God. It is not an automatic result of Christ’s work even though Christ’s work is the only sufficient remedy for our sin, and the only hope for our holiness. We can never hope to save ourselves, but if we wish to be saved we must consider ourselves dead to sin, and walk in the obedience that leads to holiness, which results in eternal life. In Paul’s words 19 “I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. 20When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[b] Christ Jesus our Lord.”</div><div>Thanks be to God!</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-49424863264989054282009-08-21T21:45:00.002-05:002009-08-26T21:47:49.696-05:00Anabaptist Hermeneutic III Salvation Against All Odds<div>Over the last several weeks we have spent some time looking at revelation in the spoken word, the written word, the primordial word of creation, and the Word made Flesh. We have talked about how the Word of God is always more than information, be it regarding how to live or how to think of God. We have seen how the words of scripture indicate that its own authority is relative to the authority of the Author who became Flesh and made His dwelling among us. The written words of the prophets and messengers are always subject to the Living Word made Flesh who is the Son of God, who is the One and Only God.</div><div>Tonight I want to trace the implications of this truth for how we read and understand scripture. Why did God begin his interactions with creation in what appears to have been daily visits in the Garden, walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day? Why was this pattern interrupted by the Fall and become occasional visits, mostly through the words of messengers, sometimes in theophanies, and finally the Incarnation?</div><div>If you will accept for the moment that Garden represents an ideal that is interrupted by the Fall, then we can begin tonight by looking at how the post-fall interaction of God with people is geared towards rekindling the relationship that was broken by the Fall. The written Word was never intended to be only a set of instructions for how to live before God. It includes such information but that is not primarily the purpose of the text we call scripture. My thesis is that scripture should be seen as a record of God’s mission throughout history to re-establish the relationship with his children that was broken when those children chose their own way of independence rather than God’s way of relationship.</div><div>The story of Creation posits humanity as the pinnacle of God’s Creation. It is humanity, male and female, that bears the image of the Creator (Genesis 1:27). Humans are capable of a special relationship with the Creator. This relationship is broken when humans choose to be like God rather than to be with God. Humanity does not sufficiently learn the folly of this aspiration when they are banished from the Garden, and must be scattered again when they build the Tower of Babel that is supposed to reach into the heavens where the gods reside. To the extent that humanity realizes the dream to exist apart from God, their aspirations of divinity turn quickly into the nightmares of hell, for the definition of hell is separation from God. To the extent that we realize our dream of independence from God we experience the nightmare of hell. Thus it is an act of salvation when those dreams are frustrated. God will not allow those dreams to materialize because those dreams will be the death of us. God desires relationship with us, and is not willing to leave us entirely to our own aspirations which inevitably will be our destruction.</div><div>And so, many years after the Fall and after Babel, God calls Abraham and offers him a magnificent opportunity in a partnership in which Abraham’s family will be blessed, and the means of blessing for all the earth. Genesis 12:</div><div>2 “I will make you into a great nation</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and I will bless you;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I will make your name great,</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and you will be a blessing.</div><div>3 I will bless those who bless you,</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and whoever curses you I will curse;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>and all peoples on earth</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>will be blessed through you.”</div><div>This Promise is ultimately realized in Jesus Christ but, as we will see later, it is realized in spite of everything Abraham and his family can do to frustrate that Promise. In Genesis 15 the covenant with Abraham is ratified, but instead of participating in the ratification ceremonies as would have been expected in the Near East customs of the time, Abraham sleeps. Abraham, and Israel, are invited to participate in God’s redemption of the world but ultimately that redemption proceeds on the strength of God’s commitment, in the face of strenuous opposition born in the Garden but continued throughout time.</div><div>We will return for a closer look at Abraham’s story in a minute but for now let’s continue the whirlwind tour of the history of Israel’s relationship with the God who called them. When God delivers Israel out of Egypt he is rewarded with bitter complaints and ingratitude while the deliverance is still in progress, during the exodus, and upon the entry into the Promised Land. You might say that Israel does not have a clue regarding their responsibility in making this relationship work. They want what God can give and complain liked spoiled children when they do not get what they want. These times of complaint are interspersed with times of repentance and return to live in relationship with God, but the good times never last. After several futile cycles of relationship and rebellion in the Promised Land the chosen children are eventually banished into exile and only a remnant returns to rebuild the ruins of their former glory.</div><div>In the end there is a magnificent blessing to the world that comes through Abraham’s family, but it is hardly with the cooperation of the family. By all human appearances the blessing comes through by the barest of threads, only on the strength of God’s commitment to be in relation with his Creation. When all of the promises are despised, and many of the prophets are disparaged and killed, and it seems that God’s words are seen as burdensome rules that the keepers of the law cannot be bothered to uphold even while they lay that heavy burden on those who must listen, then God, who still has not given up on his dream of a relationship with his children, God himself takes on human flesh, moves into the neighborhood and pitches his tent with us, because He desires to be in relation with us.</div><div>But we must return to see how well Abraham and Israel heard God’s call, God’s invitation to participate in blessing all nations, God’s invitation to relation. We have already noted that God’s plan was to bless Abraham, and to bless the world through Abraham. How well did Abraham understand this invitation? How faithfully did Abraham live out his part of the invitation to be a blessing to the world? How well did Abraham live in a relationship of blessing to God’s world? How well did Israel live in a relationship of blessing to God’s world? And as we look as the example of Abraham and Israel we must be mindful of the ways in which their stories are mirrored in our own lives.</div><div>Abraham’s first challenge follows very closely on the heels of the exhilarating call of Genesis 12:2-3. In the verses immediately following the call Abraham does leave his father’s country and goes to the land God shows him. When God tells him “This is the land I will give to you and your descendants” Abraham builds an altar (12:7), and promptly moves on (12:8). He winds up in Egypt where he is concerned his life may be in danger on account of the beauty of his wife, so he tells her to stretch the truth and advise the lechers that she is his sister, so that he will be treated with greater respect on the merits of his beautiful sister. Is that living in an honorable relationship? So far Abraham has not learned to cherish his relations and is not very concerned about living in ways that bring blessing to those relations.</div><div>In the next chapter Lot and Abraham’s herdsmen are quarreling over limited resources and again Abraham’s reaction is avoidance and separation rather than working out an amicable solution that would allow Abraham and Lot to live in a proximity that fosters relationship. Abraham chooses peace, but at the expense of relationship rather than peace in relationship.</div><div>In Genesis 16 Abraham and Sara grow tired of waiting for God’s promise of a son so Abraham has relations with Sara’s handmaid that soon result in a pregnancy. Hagar, knowing how long Abraham and Sara have desired offspring develops an attitude that Sara finds reprehensible. Sara complains to Abraham and, being a typical man, Abraham turns pale, turns tail, and runs from relational conflict. “Do with her what you want” he says, knowing full well that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Hagar is in for a rough time in Sara’s hands. Abraham has not yet tuned in to the value of relationship, and has no real care for God’s blessing on his family, much less God’s blessing on the world. He is not even fulfilling the minimal requirements of decency in his relations, much less bringing blessing to those relations.</div><div>But in Genesis 18 we see a glimmer of hope. Abraham is sitting at the entrance to his tent when he spies three strangers passing by. He invites them in for a meal, he washes their feet, and engages them in conversation. In the course of the visit the promise of a son is repeated, which causes Sara to laugh hysterically, and then Abraham finds out that Sodom and Gomorrah are about to be destroyed because of their great wickedness. And Abraham, this man’s man who to this point has run from every relational conflict with admirable dedication to self-preservation, intercedes for the unknown inhabitants of this pair of cities slated for destruction. Not only does he intercede, but gaining a reprieve for cities based on the presence of 50 righteous people, he further bargains for a reprieve based on the presence of an ever diminishing number of righteous souls until he thinks “Surely, two cities of this size must have at least 10 righteous individuals” and leaves the strangers to go about their business, relatively certain he has saved these cities from destruction. I can’t help but wonder what Abraham knew about Sodom and Gomorrah that compelled him to persist until only 10 righteous souls would safeguard the cities. In any case, it appears there is finally a spark of humanity in Abraham that glows for the welfare of someone other than himself. Is he finally getting that the covenant is one of relationship? A covenant of relationship between God and Abraham that is a blessing to Abraham, his family, and the nations? It looks hopeful!</div><div>Unfortunately, this hope is quickly dashed. Soon after this Abraham again portrays Sara as his sister rather than his wife and allows Abimelech to take her. Again Abraham avoids risk and betrays relationships rather than embracing relation.</div><div>Soon after this Isaac is born, conflict develops between Ishmael and Isaac and, rather than work to bring relational peace in his family Abraham again abdicates his responsibilities and unjustly allows Hagar and his son to be banished into the desert to almost certain death. He is all for the absence of conflict, but the hard work of bringing peace in relations is too much for him.</div><div>Now, it seems, God has had it. Now God decides it is time to test Abraham. Does Abraham “get” the covenant? Does Abraham get that he is to be a blessing to his family, and his family to the nations? It is time to find out. Genesis 22 “Abraham” God says. “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”</div><div>Why does God have to remind Abraham of his love for his son? “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love” It seems that God is giving Abraham every excuse, every encouragement, to resist the request. What will Abraham do? Will Abraham remember how much he loves his son? Will Abraham give even a thought to how much God loves his son? Will Abraham recall that the terms of the covenant included a family, a great family, that would bring blessing to the nations? Will Abraham care enough about the covenant to challenge God as he did when the Lord announced plans for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities totally unrelated to the covenant? Or would Abraham once again capitulate and run from the hard work of nurturing relationships and being a blessing to his family?</div><div>“Early next morning” 22:3 says, Abraham ran. Abraham saddled up his donkey and rode his ass out of the land of the Philistines. He didn’t talk to Sara, he lied to his son, and he came within a whisker of slaughtering God’s promise on the altar of his own myopia. God never spoke to Abraham again. When Abraham’s arm is outstretched with his knife in hand, God himself does not intervene. It is an angel who calls a halt to Abraham’s foolishness, and Abraham, who was supposedly so devoted to God that he would do anything he commanded, now is all too willing to listen to an angel who contravenes God’s command. Having just flagrantly indicated his utterly careless disregard for God’s covenant Abraham is not repentant but merely sacrifices a ram in what has been characterized as a grotesque pretense of worship. He and his servants return to Beersheba, far from Sara. We don’t know where Isaac is, and we can only surmise where a son who has just by the barest of margins escaped a sacrificial slaughter by his own father would be. That is not the sort of wound from which a relationship would quickly or easily recover. Abraham’s opportunity to be a blessing to his family, to say nothing of the nations, has been all but irrevocably compromised. As far as we know Sara and Abraham never talk to each other again either. When Sara dies Abraham comes from a distance to grieve her passing and facilitate her burial. Next time Isaac lays eyes on Abraham is when he comes to participate, with Ishmael, in the burial of his father. It seems that in death Abraham managed to bring about a peace between the brothers that he could never achieve in his lifetime, a peace that has rarely been realized since.</div><div>What could have been if Abraham had taken his own responsibilities in the covenant seriously? What could have been if Abraham had challenged God regarding the sacrifice of his son, the son whom God saw necessary to remind him he loved, as Abraham had challenged God for the lives of those he did not know in Sodom and Gomorrah?</div><div>Why was Abraham’s family eventually known by the name of the one who did wrestle with God rather than Abraham’s own name? Genesis 32:22ff When Jacob spends a whole night wrestling with God, he has his name changed in the morning from Jacob “he deceives”, to Israel “he struggles with God”, and Israel is the name by which the family is known to this day.</div><div>When God declared his intention to wipe out the Israelites Moses challenged the decision by appealing to God’s reputation and character Exodus 32. Again God honors the challenge and relents from destroying Israel.</div><div>What would have happened if Israel had been led into the Promised Land by a Moses who dared to challenge God when instructed to kill the Canaanites, every man, woman, and child? How would Israel’s story, and the history of the Middle East be different if a Moses had reminded God that according to the covenant with Abraham Israel was to bring a blessing to the nations rather than a wholesale slaughter?</div><div>But all of this is still pointing fingers when we must recognize our own reflections in these stories. What might be if we really believed that God’s primary desire for us was to be in relationship? What if we really believed that all of the information in scripture is given not primarily so that we can know and believe the right things, and do the right things, but so that we could learn to value our relationship with God, and live in a relationship of blessing to each other, in our communities, to the nations, and to God? What could be if we once caught a vision, and learned to live by the vision of what it means for a creature to bless the Creator and partner in blessing creation?</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7504661869146318227.post-13413171621632916142009-08-14T21:42:00.000-05:002009-08-26T21:44:28.120-05:00Anabaptist Hermeneutic II Scripture and the Author<div>In order to set the stage for today’s look at how we read scripture I want to do a short review of our discussion several weeks ago, looking at the function of words and the Word in the OT. We read Genesis 1 and noted how Creation happened when God said “Let there be... And it was...” God’s word is the creative force by which everything was made that was made.</div><div>Then we read Psalm 19 in which</div><div>1 The heavens declare the glory of God; </div><div> the skies proclaim the work of his hands.</div><div>2 Day after day they pour forth speech; </div><div> night after night they display knowledge.</div><div>3 There is no speech or language </div><div> where their voice is not heard.</div><div>4 Their voice goes out into all the earth, </div><div> their words to the ends of the world. </div><div>God’s spoken word that created everything, is a communication through creation that is the proto-type for language: “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.” We think of words as the means of communication, but communication experts tell us that the actual words we use are only 7% of what we communicate.</div><div>God speaks and things happen. Things that never enunciate any words speak with a voice far more forceful than anything we understand as spoken words. Therefore we need to be aware that “word” and “words” are used to indicate communication in a much broader sense than only the words we use when we speak or write.</div><div>In Jeremiah we listened as Jeremiah repeatedly invoked divine authority for his words “the word of the Lord came to me... The Lord said to me... This is what the Lord says... Hear the word of the Lord”. Then in chapter 23, after a lengthy lament regarding the spurious injunctions of false prophets, decrying the facile way in which everybody is always claiming to speak God’s word for him, Jeremiah has God telling the people to quit all such talk. No more claiming visions, dreams, and words from God. In a play on words, the people’s response to those who claim to have a burden from God to lay on His people is to be “You are the burden.” There is to be no more simple acceptance of claims to speak in God’s name. All such claims are to be vetted in a communal conversation in which the words of purported prophets are diligently compared with previously known words from God. It is not just words that matter, but the substance of those words. As if to highlight the point, in the very next chapter Jeremiah claims more visions from God, and again introduces his words as words that came from the Lord. What’s going on here? This prophet has always claimed to speak the words of God, but has just issued an unequivocal edict against claims to speak of words and dreams that come from God. How can he now continue in the same vein? Does he not listen to himself?</div><div>Rather than answer all the questions raised in these readings I want to recapitulate the questions as a means of providing a context for the readings we do today in the NT. These questions will highlight some of the issues that we encounter as we read scripture, and they will provide the groundwork for the hermeneutic by which we learn to live the truth of scripture in our homes, at our jobs, and in our community. Here are the questions:</div><div>What is a word?</div><div>What is communication?</div><div>How do we hear God speak?</div><div>How do we learn to recognize God’s word in the plethora of words purported to be from God?</div><div><br /></div><div>Hold these questions in mind as we read several additional passages.</div><div>John 1:1-18</div><div>The Word Became Flesh</div><div>1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.</div><div>3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.</div><div>10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.</div><div>14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.</div><div><br /></div><div>The word by which God created in Genesis 1 is now the Word that becomes flesh. The Word that becomes flesh is none other than the God who created in Genesis 1. The Word become flesh is God the One and Only God. This is the God that all of history has been about. This is the God who created all that is, who called Abraham to a Promised Land, the God who called his children out of bondage in Egypt back to the Promised Land, the God who called his people, delivered His people, bought them back out of prostitution time and again, this God whom Israel had alternately desired and spurned, worshiped and despised, this God is now here in the flesh, the Author of scripture is here to show us what it is that He has been trying to tell us all along. The Author is here to fulfill the meaning of the text. The Author is here to show us how to read his message.</div><div><br /></div><div>For that we go to Matthew 5:</div><div>The Fulfillment of the Law</div><div>17"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Pharisees and teachers of the law had 613 addendums to the law to help ensure that the law was kept. Unfortunately, that keeping the letter of the law was often in violation of the spirit of the law. Their focus on keeping the letter of the law set the bar too low. Jesus’ example of keeping the spirit of the law would look like a violation of the law to many people who knew only the letter, but as the Giver of the law his example was a recovery of what the law really meant. It was not just about the words, but about the communication.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let’s listen as the Author speaks, and I will highlight only those citations that are drawn from the Hebrew scriptures, our OT:</div><div>Murder</div><div>21"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.</div><div>27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.</div><div>38"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' 39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person.</div><div>43"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,</div><div><br /></div><div>It’s like Jesus is saying “Don’t get stuck in the text! Listen to the Spirit of my Word! What I was trying to tell you was much more than just the words!” In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul is talking about the church’s role as the minister of a new covenant, and he says the letter kills but the Spirit gives life! We are competent, Paul says, not on our own merit but because God has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, with letters written not in ink on tablets of stone, but by the Spirit on tablets of human hearts. And, says Paul, if the ministry that brought death, the ministry that was engraved in letters on stone, was of such glory that the Israelites could not look at the face of Moses, how much more magnificent is the ministry that brings righteousness, the letter written in human hearts, the word of God in the flesh!</div><div>Jesus and Paul are in full agreement that the message inscripted, be it on stone, paper, or memory, is never sufficient. The pivotal message is the one written on our hearts. The relative authority of text and Person is perhaps most clearly indicated in Hebrews 1:</div><div><br /></div><div>1In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. 3The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. 4So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.</div><div>Angel - Messenger - used for John the Baptist “I will send my m ahead of you...” Should ‘angels’ in Hebrews 1 be ‘messengers’?</div><div><br /></div><div>The earlier word spoken through the prophets at many times and in various ways is hugely significant and always to be dearly cherished, but never at the expense of the Word made flesh. If the word spoken in Creation, and through the prophets, is holy, how much more the Word made Flesh that is very God! Where ever and when ever you see a picture of God that does not look like Jesus, look again. All the stories and pictures and words in scripture are there to show us who God is and what God is like, but only in Jesus do we see God. All the stories of God’s word to his people are instructive for us, but those words, even though dispatched through chosen messengers and angels, should never be allowed to obscure, much less trump, the Word of God in Person.</div><div><br /></div><div>Colossians 1:15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.</div>Snowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13250939032917645247noreply@blogger.com0