Great Promises of God: Salvation Prefigured

Num. 21:4-9

John 3:14-21

The Bronze Serpent, Aubin Vouet, ca. 1630

 It is not a well-known story. The Israelites were embarked on their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. Aaron, the brother of Moses, had recently died, and as we pick up our story this morning, they had just finished destroying the towns of the Canaanites in the surrounding area. No sooner were they finished with this early military skirmish than they looked around and noticed an unfortunate dearth of fresh water and food. Life for the Israelites was, to say the least, not good. They feared for their safety, welfare, and livelihoods in a war-torn time. They immediately began to speak against God and Moses, saying, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, only to let us die in the wilderness? There’s no water anywhere, and we hate this food!”  

No sooner were the words out of their mouths than a brood of poisonous snakes came among the people. A number of the people were bitten, and many Israelites died. Then the people turned to Moses and said, “We have sinned by complaining against the LORD and against you; please pray for us.” So, Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD replied, saying, “Make a poisonous snake and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” Moses, ever the obedient prophet, made a snake out of bronze and hoisted it up on a pole for everyone in the camp to see. Those who had been bitten by the poisonous snakes looked upon this bronze serpent, and they survived.

It is not a well-known story. It’s only one paragraph, tucked away in the middle of the book of Numbers, somewhere between pages upon pages of who begat whom, and laws pertaining to the promised land they hadn’t yet entered. And yet, of all the analogies or symbols that Jesus could have chosen to describe himself and his mission in the Gospel according to John, he chose this little, paragraph-long episode of Moses and the so-called plague of snakes.

So what was Jesus getting at? Well, here’s the easy answer: Jesus was saying that, like the bronze serpent in the desert, Jesus would be lifted up on a pole, that whosoever looks upon him and believes in the LORD will live. End of sermon; thanks for reading. Amen.

Yeah right. You didn’t think it would come and go that quickly, did you? No, surely there must be something more to the analogy and symbolism that Jesus chose. We all know John 3:16, and know that it’s one of the best-known, most oft-inscribed verses in the end zones of professional football games in the entire New Testament. But we usually startwith 3:16, and usually don’t catch the verses before it. What is the significance of the serpent that Moses raised up in the desert of the book of Numbers? 

Commentators are remarkably unhelpful. Insight on John 3:14 is as rare as water in the wilderness of the Sinai. Everyone apparently came to the simple conclusion I’ve already outlined: Jesus was comparing himself to the bronze serpent, because like those who looked with faith upon the serpent, those who looked upon the crucified and exalted Christ would be saved from their affliction. End of commentary; thanks for reading. Amen.

I am reminded of a conversation I had several years ago with one of the members of my senior high youth group in new Jersey. Having been raised in the Catholic Church while also attending the Presbyterian Church, she’d had occasion to reflect on the aspects of both faiths that she enjoyed, and the reasons why she felt comfortable—indeed, enriched—by having experienced both. While talking over a glass of iced tea, I said, “I’ve always wondered if Catholics feel more guilty than their protestant brothers and sisters. After all, they enter their churches and are immediately confronted with the image of Jesus hanging, tortured and dead, on the cross. The message it seems to send is, ‘Jesus is dead, and it your fault.’” I thought I would feel like a bad person—like nothing I did was ever good enough, because after all, my sins killed God Incarnate.

At Sinai, God had said to Moses, “I will be what I will be,” which could mean, in essence, “you will know that I am God when you see what I do for the people of Israel.” But things didn’t go well in the wilderness of Sinai. The people were obstinate and complained constantly; they violated the Covenant regularly. More than once, God considered giving up on them altogether. Still, they did eventually reach the Promised Land, and became a great and powerful nation. Still, their lack of trust in God led to their exile. By the time of the latest writings of the Old Testament, Israel had been owned and operated by the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Macedonians.

As the New Testament begins, God has yet to fulfill his promise to Israel that they would dwell secure in their land and that through them all the nations of the world would be blessed. God has not saved them from their oppressors, and they still waited for their promised Messiah to come. 

John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and that this Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John deliberately starts with the words, “In the beginning,” forcing us to hearken back to the first words of the Hebrew Scriptures. “In the beginning,” God’s Word was. Now, God’s Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John then tells us why in chapter one, verse ten: “Because the world did not know him.”

We must assume, throughout our reading of the Gospel of John, that Jesus—God Incarnate—knows that he is God, and that he always has his mission in mind. John makes that abundantly clear in a way that the other three gospels don’t. For instance, John doesn’t have a prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which Jesus cries, “take this cup away from me,” because for John, if Jesus didn’t come to die for humanity, he didn’t come for any reason at all.  

What is Jesus really saying when he compares himself to the bronze serpent in the wilderness? To answer this question, we must first answer another: what did the Israelites really see when they looked upon the bronze serpent? Looking upon the bronze serpent saved them from their snake bites, and yet—at least according to their interpretation of events—it was God, and not the serpents, who had been prepared to kill them for something as trivial as complaining about the food they’d been eating day in and day out for decades. The snakes were not the cause of their dying; the LORD was the cause. And yet, what is shown in the bronze serpent is the instrument of God’s judgment.

I wonder, then, if Jesus isn’t suggesting that humanity will see, in his crucifixion, not only God’s cure for the distress of the human condition, but also the instrument of their distress: no less than humanity itself? We are our own worst enemies, and our sinfulness is at the root of the world’s affliction. Jesus suggests that God, in the crucified Christ, is sacrificing Godself. Does God feel so guilty for giving all of humanity the death penalty for the fruit-picking incident, that God has now become a human himself, with the intent of suffering the death sentence with which he had previously afflicted us? Not exactly; rather, in Jesus Christ, God takes God’s own judgment upon Godself, sparing us the ultimate penalty for our sin. John 3:17 states that “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” The condemnation is over. God, in, through, and as Jesus Christ, was doing a newthing: choosing to be, in the words of the 20^th century theologian, Karl Barth, “The Judge judged in our place.”

From the moment we are born, until the moment we die, we subsist in a barren wilderness, beautiful at times, but never more than a mere shadow of the life God had intended for us. “You are dust,” said God, “and to dust you shall return.” And perhaps God regretted these words the instant they left God’s lips. After all, God has never desired anything more than to live in communion with humanity, whom God created in God’s own image for that very purpose. And although God provides for us everything that we need in order to fulfill our purpose in the world, we behave as though we have all manner of things to complain about. The economy’s in the tank, we have friends and loved ones with terminal illnesses, we haven’t felt safe gathering as a congregation in a year, and—for crying out Lord, God!—would it kill you to scrape up a few jobs for those among us who don’t have one?

So much to complain about, even though God provides us with everything sufficient for our mission in the world. So many worries, even though our future is in the Lord’s hands. So many people questioning, “Why?” when the reason for our problems often may be found staring back at us in the mirror. When we look upon the cross of Jesus, we are seeing two things simultaneously, because Jesus Christ is two things simultaneously. Jesus is both truly human—and a perfect, sinless one at that—and truly God. So when we look upon the cross of Jesus, we are looking upon both the instrument of our separation from God (that is, an illustration we are our own worst enemies), and God’s chosen method of reconciling us to him.

If I ever again have occasion to reflect with my young “Roman Cathobyterian” friend about the nature of the crucifix, maybe I’ll tell her that “when I survey the wondrous cross,” I don’t dwell on how guilty it makes me feel, but remember, instead, that Christ, lifted up on a pole like Moses’ bronze serpent, saves me from the poisonous venom of sin and death. God, having chosen to wander along the road through the wilderness of human existence with us, has taken God’s own judgment upon Godself. What wondrous love is this, O my soul, that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the heavy cross for my soul? 

In the end, Jesus’ analogy remains true: like those who looked with faith upon the serpent, those who look upon the crucified and exalted Christ and believe are saved from their affliction. End of sermon. Thanks for reading. Amen.

Great Promises of God: Moses

Exodus 20:1-17

Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law, Rembrandt, 1659

If you happen to remember my installation service some five years ago, you may recall my friend, Dr. Colleen Molinaro, telling the story of a carter who was walking along the road, pulling behind him an empty cart, when he encountered Jesus. Jesus said to the man, “Brother, would you please carry this small stone with you to the top of the mountain you’re about to climb?” And the carter, seeing that the stone was so small that he could almost have stuffed it into his pocket, gladly accepted the Lord’s request, and tossed the stone into his otherwise empty cart.

As the carter journeyed toward the mountain, he met another man walking along the road, and struggling to carry a very large stone. The man said, “Sir, can you help me with this rock?” The carter replied, “Place it in my cart, and I will deliver it for you.” 

Some time later, the carter encountered a woman who was doubled over with the travail of carrying a large sack of rocks on her back. Her arms trembled and her brow dripped with sweat. “Sir,” she said, “Please help me with this sack!” The carter had compassion for the woman and said, “I will help you with your burden.” The woman gladly placed her sack of rocks into the man’s cart and waved gratefully as he moved on.

When the man reached the mountain, the road became rough, the weather turned foul, and he found it increasingly difficult to pull the heavy cart uphill on a road that had largely turned to mud. Finally, before the man reached his destination, the cart lurched over a stone in the road and its axle was broken. Frustrated and despondent, he cried out to God, “O Lord, why have you so encumbered me? I haven’t the strength to carry the burden any farther!”

Immediately, Jesus stood by his side. “My brother,” he said, “I only asked you to carry one small stone. How, then, did you come to have such a heavy burden in your cart?”

It may seem odd to you that in this third installment of a sermon series on God’s great Biblical promises I should preach on the Ten Commandments. After all, these Commandments, which serve collectively as a kind of constitution for God’s covenant community, are usually thought of by today’s Christian not as a promise of God, but as “rules to live by,” that is, as what we promise to do. “In the popular religious consciousness, the Ten Commandments have somehow become burdens, weights and heavy obligations. For many, the commandments are encumbrances placed on personal behavior.”^[1] But this is a misunderstanding of what is going on, both in the commandments themselves, and in Exodus’ portrayal of the still evolving relationship between God and humanity.

Previously, God had created the world and declared it good, only to find later that humans were, in fact, a supreme disappointment. God had created them in God’s own image, so that God could dwell in mutually loving community with them, but they loved only themselves and lived only for their own fulfillment. So sorry was God that he had created us that God resolved to rid the world of the scourge of humankind. Choosing a righteous man with whom God could start over, God allowed the waters of chaos to unmake what God had made. In the end, though, God realized that humanity—even righteous Noah and his family—would never love God as God loved them. Therefore God promised, out of love for humanity, never to attempt to destroy creation again.

Then, in order to repair God’s broken relationship with humanity, God called upon Abram and his family, and promised that through his many descendants, all the peoples of the world would be blessed. Abram’s descendants grew very numerous indeed. As a consequence of famine, however, they were forced to move to Egypt, where food was more plentiful. There, they grew so numerous that they became an internal threat to the Egyptians, and so they were forced into slavery.

But God remembered God’s promise to Abram, called upon Moses to serve as a prophet to Pharaoh, and liberated the descendants of Abram from bondage. Now, in this morning’s reading, we find this people—not yet a nation—huddled at the base of Mount Sinai. Moses has ascended the mountain to confer with the Lord, and this morning’s reading records the first words out of the Lord’s mouth at the beginning of that very long conference.

And his very first words were not, “Thou shalt not.” They were, “I am YHWH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” I am the God who has promised the world a blessing through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I have rescued you from your enemies; I have liberated you from slavery and tyranny. If God has personally achieved the freedom of his covenant people from slavery and tyranny, then why would we think that God’s intention was to enslave us to God instead? God is no slave driver, and God is no tyrant! You’ll notice that the Ten Commandments do not begin with an “If/Then” statement: If you obey these Ten Commandments, then I will love you. Instead, God begins with the “I love you” statement: I have rescued you from slavery and tyranny, because I love you.

We’ll probably always call these the “Ten Commandments,” but it is also appropriate to think of them as something like “Ten Ascriptions of Life with God.” In the same way that the Rule of Saint Benedict has been the ordering document that describes the proper way of life for dedicated monks of the church for many centuries, so the Ten Commandments might be thought of as a “Rule of Life.” This “Rule” is not defined as a law that must be obeyed, but as a God-given design for our relationships with one another and with God. In that way, they are not an oppressive or burdensome law. Instead, they constitute both a gift to us from God and a means of showing our gratitude to the God who has liberated us from slavery.

And from what kind of slavery have we been rescued? From slavery to sin and death, of course—for that is what it means to be saved by Christ’s faithfulness to the law on our behalf, even unto death. God shows us, in the Ten Commandments, a way of life that ensures our continued freedom—not ten demands that must be met in order to be loved or accepted, but ten ways to ensure the continued freedom of ourselves, our neighbors, and our whole society. 

If we live our lives in accordance with the Ten Commandments, then we will no longer be slaves to worldly concerns such as money, power, or prestige. 

We’ll be free of idols that distract our attention from the very God who has died for our salvation, demanding our loyalty and the devotion of our time, energy, and resources even though they have nothing eternal to offer us. 

We’ll be free from the manipulations of those who use God’s name, the trappings of the church, or lip service to regressive values to advance their agendas; those who use the label “Christian” in order to convince us that they’re right when they’re not, or to sell us a bill of goods that do not glorify God.

We’ll be free of the cultural virtues of overwork and exhaustion and over-productivity, because we’ll remember the gift of Sabbath day, and God’s intention that we experience wholeness and not merely “success.”  

We’ll no longer be slaves to the lie that each of us is self-made, because we’ll honor our fathers, mothers, and others on whose shoulders we climbed to achieve success. 

We’ll be free of fear, hatred, vengeance, and unjust retribution. 

We’ll no longer be slaves to lust, and in freedom, discipline ourselves not to be enticed by hyper-sexualized marketing and entertainment. 

We’ll be free from the violation of personal property, and free to respect the property of others. 

We’ll be free from lies and half-truths bandied about as though they might be true; free from gossip, talking, and jokes that disparage others; and live in a just society where no one is privileged by virtue of their social status, wealth, or power, but where all people are acknowledged as created equal.

We’ll be free from the covetousness that drives us deeper and deeper into debt in order to keep up with the Joneses, and have the latest and greatest gadgets simply because a commercial tells us we should, or because a new model has come out in the six months since we bought ours.

Can you imagine what society would be like if everyone ordered their lives according to these ten guiding principles—not in order to restrict our personal freedoms, and not because we hope that we’ll win God’s favor by doing so—but because this rule for life is a gift from God? God has handed us a way to order and structure our society so that we can be free to love one another and, thereby, to glorify God.

The promise of God that was given to Moses is a two-parter. First, God points out that God loved us before God ever gave us these ten guiding principles for life together, and we know that God will continue to love us whether we faithfully uphold these principles or not (because God loves us, and there’s nothing we can do about it). Second, if we take the eschatological view—that is, if we look ahead to the coming of Christ’s kingdom, as the Christian tradition does—then God has made a promise, in the Ten Commandments, to order God’s kingdom in precisely this way. God has offered us freedom now; and God has promised us freedom in the Kingdom of Christ.

Robert Wuthnow, a professor at Princeton University, once conducted some research about why some people are generous and compassionate, while others are not. He found out that for many compassionate people something had happened to them. Someone had acted with compassion toward them, and this experience had transformed their lives. For example, Wuthnow tells the story of Jack Casey, a rescue squad worker, who had little reason to be a Good Samaritan. Casey was raised in a tough home, the child of an alcoholic father. He once said, “All my father ever taught me is that I didn’t want to grow up to be like him.”

But something happened to Jack when he was a child that changed his life, changed his heart. He was having surgery one day, and he was frightened. He remembers the surgical nurse standing there and compassionately reassuring him. “Don’t worry,” she said to Jack. “I’ll be here right beside you no matter what happens.” And when Jack woke up again, she was true to her word and still there.

Years later, Jack Casey, now a paramedic, was sent to the scene of a highway accident. A man was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and as Jack was trying to get him out of the wreckage, gasoline was dripping down on both of them. The rescuers were using power tools to cut the metal, so one spark could have caused everything to go up in flames. The driver was frightened, crying out how scared he was of dying. Jack remembered what had happened to him long ago on the operating table, how that nurse had spoken tenderly to him and stayed with him, and he said and did the same thing for the truck driver, “Look, don’t worry,” he said, “I’m right here with you, I’m not going anywhere.” When I said that, Jack remembered later, I was reminded of how that nurse had said the same thing and she never left me. Days later, the rescued truck driver said to Jack, “You know, you were an idiot, the thing could have exploded and we’d both have been burned up!”

“I just couldn’t leave you,” Jack said.^[2]

That’s the way the commandments work. First comes the experience of being cared for, the experience of being set free. Then, there follows the life that has been shaped by that profound story of love and freedom. A nurse saying “I’ll be right here beside you” becomes the action of a man risking his life for a stranger, because he knows in his bones that he just can’t leave him. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of slavery,” prompts us to live lives shaped by the freedom created for us by God.

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^[1] Thomas G. Long, “Dancing the Decalogue” The Christian Century, (March 7, 2006), p. 17.

^[2] Thomas G. Long, “Meeting the Good Samaritan,” day1.org, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2002663/meeting_the_good_samaritan (accessed 3/3/21).

Great Promises of God: Abraham

Gen. 17:1-8, 15-16

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

On this second Sunday in Lent, we continue what I have designed to be a sermon series on the great Biblical promises of God. Last week, we considered God’s covenant with Noah, his family, and all of creation, never again to allow God’s well-ordered creation to be unmade by the waters of chaos. By this promise, God chose to limit God’s own power to create and destroy for the sake of humanity, a choice that foreshadowed God’s condescension to becoming fully human and taking God’s own wrath upon Godself for our sake in Jesus Christ.

This morning, we read about the second great promise of God in scripture: God’s covenant with Abram. Actually, if one were reading through the book of Genesis, by the time one reached chapter 17 and this morning’s reading, one might already be tired of hearing about God’s covenant with Abram. This is by no means the first time it’s come up. God also makes promises to Abram in chapters 12, 13, 15, and 16. They’re all either about land or about progeny, and both cause Abram and his offspring considerable trouble!

When God first came to Abram in the land of Haran, he was already 75 years old. Asking Abram to leave his homeland and his family and set off—without GPS—toward a far country that he had never seen was a tall order indeed. Leaving Haran meant leaving behind not only his country and his family, but also the gods that protected them—and all in response to what might have been nothing more than a voice he heard in his head.

And yet Abram went, and his faithfulness set the stage for God’s grace to repair the broken relationship between God and humanity. That took place in chapter 12. The promise was repeated at the end of chapter 13, when Abram and his nephew, Lot, went their separate ways and began to populate the area in and around Canaan. In chapter 15, God reiterated his promise that Abram would have many descendants, after Abram points out that to that point, God had not deigned to give him a child at all and that one of his house servants was his closest heir. “No one but your very own issue shall be your heir,” God assured Abram, and he took him outside, showed him the stars in the sky, and said, “So shall your descendants be.”

In chapter 16, God made a different sort of promise. Hagar conceived, which, although orchestrated by Sarai, nonetheless made her jealous of Hagar. So Sarai expelled Hagar from Abram’s camp, leaving her to wander alone in the wilderness. But the Lord promised to Hagar, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” Not long after, Ishmael was born when Abram was 86 years old, and Abram named him Ishmael, as the Lord commanded.

Now, we often disparage Sarai for the goings-on of chapter 16, and yet she really can’t be faulted for what happened. God promised Abram children, but Sarai—it is supposed—was barren. It was within Sarai’s rights to give Hagar to Abram as a proxy for her barren womb. It’s easy to condemn Sarai and Abram for quote-unquote “not trusting the Lord’s promise,” but it could be argued that they were simply seeking a level-headed solution to their difficulty conceiving. Remember, prior to this story God never promised that Sarai would bear children. God only promised that Abram would have descendants. So it was reasonable for Sarai and Abram to seek a solution to their fertility problems, and their actions frankly had nothing to do with God’s promise. In fact, so faithful was God that even though Ishmael was not the progeny that God had in mind for the covenant, God blessed him nevertheless, promising that God would make a great nation of him, too.

Which brings us to this morning’s scripture reading. 13 years have passed. When we read Genesis, this is often lost on us, even though the author points it out. When Ishmael was born, Abram was 86. In the very next sentence, Abram is 99—so 13 years have passed; Ishmael is 13 years old. Abram, Sarai, and Hagar have had 13 years to get used to the idea that Ishmael was both the product and the heir of God’s promise. Surely Ishmael must have been the heir of the promise! They had no reason to believe otherwise! Moreover, Abram hadn’t heard a word from God in those 13 years. It would appear that the promise had been fulfilled: Abram was living in Canaan and had a son who would become the patriarch of a great nation.

Then, shockingly, God showed back up and revealed quite a bit more of his will. “I am El Shaddai,” God said. That is, I am the God of the mountains. Traditionally, we translate this as “God Almighty.” This is not God’s proper name—we know this, because we know that God’s proper name will be given to Moses, many generations later. But “Almighty God” or “God of the Mountains” is more like a title or a résumé: I made the mountains, I made you, I’m going to make a nation out of you, and I’m the only God that matters.

“As for me,” God said—just as he said to Noah last week, because when you’re making a covenant with someone, this is apparently what you say—“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. In fact, you will no longer be known as ‘Exalted Father,’ but as ‘Father of Many.’ I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and you will father nations and kings! And my covenant with you will pass down through the generations to all of your offspring, for an everlasting covenant. I will give them the land where you now reside as a non-citizen, and I will be their God.”

Then, according to our lectionary reading, God did something completely new with this covenant (which, while more detailed than in previous chapters, is still mostly more of the same thing): this time, he included Sarai in the promise! Previously, God had promised Abram children, but not Sarai (which is what led to the Hagar and Ishmael fiasco in the first place). This time, God says, “You shall no longer call her your princess, because she will become a true princess—the matriarch of nations, kings, and peoples—because I will give you a son by her.”

Abram—sorry, Abraham—was incredulous, and who could blame him? He had a son: Ishmael, now thirteen years old. And was Sarai—sorry, Sarah— supposed to conceive a child at the age of ninety? Abraham fell on his face and laughed at this divine silliness. “Tell you what, God Almighty, how about you pass your covenant on to Ishmael? He’s my first-born son, and besides, he’s actually alive here and now—a 13-year-old young man!”

“Nope,” said God. “It’s going to be Sarah’s kid. As for Ishmael, though, I hear you. Don’t worry, he’ll also be blessed, and will be the patriarch of a great nation with twelve princes; but my covenant will be with Sarah’s child, not Hagar’s.”

Now, the lectionary skipped over some verses, as the lectionary has been known to do, perhaps because it thinks it’s sparing pastors the embarrassment of talking about circumcision. But now that I’ve said the word anyway, I guess we might as well talk about it, right? It’s perplexing to me that the lectionary would leave the verses on circumcision out, because it is this ancient rite of middle eastern cultures that becomes analogous to Christian baptism. Chapter 17 of Genesis shows that this seemingly odd ceremonial rite, which marks a child as a member of the covenant community, is not a condition of God’s covenant, but a response to God’s faithfulness. So, too, do we Presbyterians believe that baptism does not reconcile a person to God; rather, it acknowledges that God has reconciled them to Godself already. “As for me,” said God, “I will give you land, give you offspring, and I’ll be their God forever.” This is God’s eternal covenant with the children of Abraham. “As for you,” God went on, “every male among you shall be circumcised.” Circumcision marks one as a child of the Abrahamic covenant, just as baptism marks one as a child of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. Circumcision, like baptism, is sacramental: an outward sign of the inward grace that God is working out in the life of the people of the covenant. It’s not a condition of God’s covenant; it is a sign of one’s faith in God’s faithfulness.

Faith in God’s faithfulness: that is the proper human response to the great promises of God in scripture, like the covenant between God and Abraham’s offspring. As 2 Peter tells us, “[Christ’s] divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and great promises, so that through them… you may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:3-4). Just as God promised protection and constant love to creation in his covenant with Noah, and just has God promised a blessing to all humanity through Abraham’s family, so too, in Jesus Christ, has God made a new covenant with humankind. When we gather around the Lord’s table, it is to celebrate another sacrament: another outward sign of the inward grace that God is working in the lives of his covenant people. In Jesus Christ, whose broken body and shed blood are the signs of God’s New Covenant with humanity, we partake of and celebrate God’s great promise of reconciliation.

And then, as with baptism, our response to God’s faithfulness is mindful adherence to the Way of Jesus Christ. Our faith in God’s faithfulness is expressed in the way we love one another as God first loved us; the way we love our neighbors in the same way that we love ourselves; the way that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. As Lent carries on, I encourage you to consider—and pray about—how your interactions with others reflects your faith in God’s faithfulness. And where you notice that your interactions fall short of what Jesus would want you to do, be gentle with yourself (as Christ is gentle) and then steel your resolve to do and to be better. God has promised that God’s love for us is eternal and unshakable. Thanks be to God!

Great Promises of God: Noah

Gen. 9:8-17

A rainbow appearing over Chester, WV.

The photo above is of one of the brightest, most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen, arching over the town of Chester, WV. It happened on a Wednesday evening, and our Bible study group got a late start that night, because we all stood outside marveling at how bright and distinct it was. When you see something so bright and beautiful, it gets you wondering what it would be like to bring that rainbow inside the house with us. How could any house ever contain the dazzling light or the blaze of colors?

Imagine what it would be like to have a rainbow in our church—a real, honest-to-goodness rainbow—just flashing on the walls, and shooting through the windows, and blowing open the doors, and arching over the communion table. Everything awash in colored light! What would a church look like—what would the body of Christ be like—if it shined as brightly as the dazzling colors of the rainbow?

This morning’s reading is not really about the flood, is it? Because the flood is over at this point, Noah and his family and all the animals have already disembarked. But we know this because we know the story of the flood. We know that with the flood, God un-creates the world. He reverses what he had accomplished in the creation, allowing the waters of chaos, which he had subjected to his will, to roar back over his creation, destroying everything that had the breath of life. In this morning’s reading, the narrative ends with God uttering the first covenant we find in scripture.Prior to the flood, humanity had run rough-shod over the boundaries established by God. A downward spiral of violence and idolatry led to the total corruption of God’s “very good” creation, and an increase in the very chaos that God had once brought to order. Grieving over the ruined creation, God resolved to destroy the destroyers—to drown the earth and all that breathed upon it, except one tiny remnant. God remembered and rescued a tiny, chosen few, preserved in the ark, and hoped that they would represent a clean slate.

But after the floods had receded, and the ark had landed on Ararat, and the remnant clambered out of the ark, God came to a realization: the flood hadn’t really changed anything. Chapter 8 says, “The Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done’” (8:21).

And so God made a covenant with Noah, his family, and all of creation. And one of the distinctive features of this covenant is that it is completely one-sided. God asks nothing of humanity; God asks nothing of his creation. Instead, God limits his own power for the sake of the world. God commits to a new, post-flood relationship with all animate life, wherein God would become the sworn protector of creation, even from his own wrath! Neither the flood nor God’s promise changed the world—the world had become corrupt before the flood, and it continued to be corrupt after the flood. What changed was God.

Divine retribution didn’t solve God’s problem. God’s heart was still broken, and humanity was still corrupt. But if God wanted to stay in relationship with creation—and especially with humankind, those creatures who had been created in his image—then God was the one who would have to change. I know we like to say that God is unchanging, but the only think about God that never changes is his steadfast refusal to give up on us! God’s love for humanity—that’s what never changes. Aside from that, God will do anything for the sake of his relationship with us. Anything. Therefore, God repents, turns from his wrath and chooses forgiveness, patience, and steadfast love for humanity even though he knew we would never change!

God chose to limit God’s own power for the sake of humanity. “As for me,” he said, “I will never do this again. I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And just to remind God of his own covenant, he took his war bow and placed in the clouds, aimed not at the earth, but away from it. “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” We don’t need the reminder (and we wouldn’t care if we had one)—God needed the reminder. And why? Because humanity would continue to do the wrong thing. Humanity would continue in its violence and its idolatry. But no matter how tempted God might be to wipe the slate clean, God has promised Godself and us that divine power to destroy the world would never be used again. God chose to limit God’s own power for the sake of humanity.

Is it any wonder that we read this story on the first Sunday of Lent? As we begin to contemplate Christ’s journey to the cross, we’re given an example—from the very earliest days of human existence—of God already limiting God’s own power for the sake of humanity. Philippians reminds us that “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). In Jesus Christ, God limited God’s own power for the sake of humanity, taking the form of a slave, making our sinfulness God’s problem, and suffering grief for the sake of maintaining relationship with sinful humanity.

With his unilateral covenant, God permanently binds Godself to humanity. God is no longer just our creator, but also our protector, committed to protecting us from God’s righteous wrath. By binding Godself to the fate of humanity, God became inherently invested in the fate of humanity, leaving God vulnerable (because humanity was never going to come through for God; God was never going to win this bet!). And so God, who could not simply sit back and wait for humanity to get its act together, instead had to take God’s own righteous wrath upon Godself. In a very real sense, the story of Jesus Christ’s ministry—his death, his resurrection, and his ascension—began with this first covenant between God and the world. “This is the kind of God I am,” God was proclaiming to Noah. “I am willing to limit myself, even unto death, for the sake of my love for you.”

Even the ancient Hebrews perceived that God was inherently self-giving, willing to enter into a relationship with humanity that put limits on God’s own prerogatives. That is, when it comes right down to it, the very nature of any relationship built upon genuine love, isn’t it? Parents bound in love to their children make all kinds of sacrifices for their sakes. Spouses make sacrifices for the sake of each other. Genuine friends give selflessly of themselves for the good of another.

Lent is the Church’s way of giving each of us, and all of us, an opportunity to ask ourselves whether we will repent and stop grappling for control over our own lives, or whether we will allow the cycle of violence and idolatry to continue. God was willing to sacrifice God’s freedom for us—not just on the cross, but even as far back as the covenant with Noah (though that willingness reaches its climax on Good Friday). If God, who alone has the right to despair over what humanity has become and what humanity has done to ravage God’s creation, who alone has the right to judge, the right to destroy, and yet has surrendered that divine prerogative out of a covenantal love for humanity, then might not we who have tasted this mercy look upon all people as worthwhile? Are not all people declared worthy in God’s universal covenant with creation in this morning’s passage?

Noah’s Ark is one of our favorite children’s stories in the Church, isn’t it? With the menagerie of animals, and all the colors of the rainbow, we can teach our kids so many things. Most important of all, though, is that big, beautiful rainbow—God’s promise to all of creation that God’s love for all of it, all of us, will never be shaken. What would be the harm in letting the rainbow out of our children’s Sunday School rooms and allowing it to flash down the halls, shoot through the windows, blow open the doors, and arch over the communion table?

The sixth Great End of the Church is “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” What could be a greater exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven than taking God’s promise of eternal love for creation so seriously that we can’t help but love creation as much as God does? What would be more transformative of the church or the world than to allow the celebration of God’s promise to remake our hearts in the image of God’s heart, or to allow our hearts to be broken wide open with grief over our own hard-heartedness and the hard-heartedness of the world and its chaos? It’s when our hearts are broken like God’s heart was broken over the sinfulness of humanity, that we become able to participate in God’s redemptive ministry of reconciliation in the world: forgiving, loving, and restoring.

God chose to limit God’s own power for the sake of humanity, being born in human likeness, humbling himself and becoming obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Let us take the great promise of God’s eternal love to heart during this Lenten season and let us bring that rainbow inside our homes and inside the house of God with us!

Now Appearing

Heb. 9:24–28

One of the reasons I so enjoy spending time in my study is that I am surrounded by my theology books. There are a lot of them. One of the shelves includes a number of books on Christology and atonement theory. They include books like On the Nature of the Atonement, by John McLeod Campbell; Exploring Christology and Atonement, by Andrew Purves; Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, by T.F. Torrance; and the only volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics that was required reading during my years of seminary, Volume Four, Section One, which is entitled “The Doctrine of Reconciliation.” Behind—or perhaps undergirding— all of these is this morning’s scripture reading from the Epistle of Hebrews which is one of the single greatest scriptural statements about Christology and atonement.

One of the reasons for my choosing to bring this up is that I was approached by a member of my congregation who found my most recent sermon on the book of Hebrews  distressing. All that talk about blood sacrifice, found in the book of Hebrews, seemed out-of-step with the God of grace revealed to us in, through, and as Jesus Christ. I, too, find talk of blood sacrifices distasteful—as I noted in that sermon—and also agree with her that if we really believe that his bloody death was the reason for Christ’s coming, we’ve missed the point of the incarnation. I decided that more should be said, and so here we are.

Professor Andrew Purves has noted that one cannot talk theologically about Jesus Christ without also talking about the ministry of atonement, and one cannot talk about atonement without talking about Jesus Christ. They are of a piece. As far as the Christian is concerned, they are one and the same. Just three years ago, I went to Pittsburgh Seminary to hear Dr. Purves’ final public lecture before he retired. He began this lecture with what may seem to be surprising words: “It is not the cross that saves us; it is Jesus Christ who saves us.” Odd-sounding words, perhaps, but only because we have too often allowed ourselves to think the wrong thing about Jesus Christ and his ministry of atonement—which I more often call his ministry of reconciliation. You see, the atonement is not about the amelioration of broken laws; it is a restoration of a broken relationship.

What does that mean? Quite simply, it means that Jesus did not die in order to appease an angry ogre of a God; rather, in Jesus Christ God set aside human sin, replacing it with his own holiness.

As Dr. Purves illustrated, no man or woman is able perfectly to be in right relationship with God or her neighbor. We can live a life of righteousness, work for justice, and seek reconciliation in all that we do, but we can’t be flawless about it. Insofar as our flawed efforts at communion with God and one another are an offense to God’s perfect holiness, we are, as John Calvin famously puts it, totally depraved—completely unable to bridge the gap between ourselves and our creator. But it’s Jesus who rescues us from our depravity, lovingly shoving us aside and standing in our place.

As John McLeod Campbell would put it, it is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ that saves us, not the cross, because in Jesus Christ God reveals himself to be a God of love, compassion, and grace. Jesus stands in for us, his perfect humanity replacing our sinful humanity. As this morning’s reading puts it, “For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb. 9:24).

The author is comparing Jesus’ ministry to the ministry of temple priests. And in doing so, he makes it very clear that there is no comparison. He demonstrates the superiority of Jesus’ ministry in no less than four distinct ways.

First, the priests and Levites of Israel ministered either in the Tabernacle, during the years of desert wandering, or in the Jerusalem temple. Both of these structures—even though one was a more permanent structure than the other—were mere facsimiles of the true sanctuary of God in the heavenly plane of existence where God dwells. The priests would enter into the holy sanctuary of the tabernacle or the Temple and do their thing. But Jesus—the author points out—entered into heaven itself and entered into the very presence of Almighty God.

Second, the author alludes to the kinds of liturgies that the priests and Levites presided over, particularly on Yom Kippur (or the Day of Atonement; see how this is all about atonement?). As I noted last week, on the Day of Atonement the priest would first make sacrifices to atone for his own sins, and then offer sacrifices on behalf of the rest of the Israelites, seeking atonement for their sins. But, says the author of Hebrews, because Jesus was sinless, he is able to minister solely “on our behalf.”

Third, the author needn’t point out to his original readers that Yom Kippur happens annually. Each year, in the fall, the priest would purify himself, and then make atoning sacrifices on behalf of the people. Jesus’ ministry, by contrast, has “permanent efficacy,” or as the author of Hebrews puts it, “[Jesus] appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26).

Finally, the Levitical priests offered sacrifices; but Jesus is himself the sacrifice. But more than this, I believe that Jesus also radically transforms the very meaning of the word “sacrifice,” at least as it’s used in the Bible. As lamented last week by a member of our congregation, it has been common in Western Christianity to think of the sacrifice of Jesus in terms of what is called penal substitutionary satisfaction. That is, human sin is an affront to God’s holiness; the only way to satisfy God’s righteous wrath is to offer him a blood sacrifice. But this “theory of atonement” was first articulated by Anselm of Canterbury more than 1000 years after Christ’s incarnation. Such a theory ignores other language—not only in Hebrews, but elsewhere in scripture—describing Christ’s ministry as a victory over the power of sin and death, a theory called, in Latin, Christus Victor. In chapter two, the author of Hebrews says that Jesus’ death destroys “the one who has the power of death” and frees those “held in slavery by the fear of death” (2:14–15). This was the church’s best way of understanding the meaning of Christ’s death for the first thousand years of church history, it is still, as I understand it, the preferred theory of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and it is making a rip-roaring comeback amongst Western theologians as well.

Furthermore, the seeds of a third theory of atonement may also be found in Hebrews: the “moral influence” theory, which states that Jesus’ death was an act of obedience and loving faithfulness in the face of suffering, and that we are called to respond in gratitude. This is my favorite theory as a foundation for what I think it all means to me, and what it all means I should do about it. It’s the reason why I tell people, “God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about; so what are you going to do about it?” Right? In the end, if we understand nothing else about all these so-called “theories of atonement,” we should understand this: none of them is sufficient all by itself to fully encapsulate exactly how Jesus ministry “saves” us, or even what it saves us from.

But then there’s what Doctor Purves calls the vicarious agency of Christ—the stunningly beautiful assertion that in Jesus’ pushing us aside and standing in for us, his humanity (for he was in every respect as human as we are, yet without sin) his humanity replaces ours in the eyes of God. When we are weak, he is strong. When we fail, he succeeds. When we don’t believe, he has faith for us. When we act wrongly, he has already acted rightly. When we cannot pray, he prays for us. When we cannot worship, he is our worship, because he sacrificed who he is so that we might be like him.

You see, the whole meaning of “sacrifice” is different than many Christians suppose. It’s not Jesus bleeding out and dying on Good Friday that frees us from sin and death. It’s not the cross that saves us. It’s the incarnation and self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ that saves us, in that what it reveals is a God willing to lay aside what is his by right: dignity, majesty, omnipotence; for the sake of his creation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God sacrificed himself by laying aside that which was his by right out of love for creation. In so doing, he illustrates for us precisely what the Christian life—what truehumanity—really is: the sacrifice of ourselves for the sake of God and neighbor.

“Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, and now appears in the presence of God on our behalf.” That is all the reason any Christian needs to gladly share this good news with the world, participating in Christ’s ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:11–21).

Operating System Update Required

James 3:13–4:8a
Mark 9:30–37

Commentator Rick Morely wrote that our scripture reading from the Epistle of James reminded him of the story of Steve Jobs visiting the Xerox corporation back in the early 1980s. Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple Incorporated, once visited the headquarters of Xerox, and there he saw something that Xerox had been toying with at the time: a graphical user interface.

Some of you are probably familiar with personal computers and their history. As a child, I can remember my father buying a Tandy 1000 computer from Radio Shack, making me one of the only students in my fourth and fifth grade classes to have a personal computer in my home (which we bought, in part, because my mom was a court reporter, and used the computer to transcribe depositions).

This Tandy 1000 was known as an “IBM clone,” meaning that it ran a Microsoft operating system that required the user to have some understanding of a computer language called BASIC in order to use it. You’d get a little command prompt on the screen, and you had to know how to type out the right kind of command in order to get the computer to do what you wanted it to do. This was, perhaps, why computers did not exactly fly off the shelves back in the early 1980s.
But Xerox was fooling around with a different user interface that put little icons on the screen that people could point to and click using a new input device that no one had ever seen before, called a “mouse.”

Steve Jobs filed this away in his mind, went home, and changed the world of computing forever when his company released the Macintosh computer—the first mass-marketed personal computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse. Jobs was so obsessed with user interface, he once famously said that he “wanted icons to be so beautiful that people would want to lick them.” And even decades later, some of his final projects—the iPhone and the iPad—were still about user interface. The iPhone not only changed the way people interacted with and used their phone, but also took the graphical user interface of the Macintosh computer to the next level: it eliminated the mouse and made touching the information with your own finger the way to interact with it. Today, we take for granted the idea that you can slide your finger across a screen to swipe from one photo to the next, or pinch a picture to zoom in and out, almost like we’re touching the picture itself. These revolutionary ideas have changed the world in remarkable ways.

But for most of us, our relationship with electronic devices of all kinds ends with the user interface. We care about what it looks like and we need to understand how to interact with it in order to make it do what we intend. But the user interface is, in fact, really, really fancy window-dressing. What really happens when you tap an icon to “open an app” is the result of millions of lines of computer code—meaningless to you or I—that actually does the stuff we need it to do. This is called the Operating System, or “OS.” “It’s the operating system which provides the core functionality that allows us to interact with it. Most of us don’t see the OS itself, we just see the different ways that we can use it and manipulate it,” thanks to the wizards who provide us with that beautiful user interface.

Rick Morely went on to point out that much of what occupies our time and energy in the church today concerns user interface. All over the internet, conversations abound about how to make the church “relevant” to today’s world, or how to make it more appealing to younger generations. Churches tinker with bulletins, change their worship style, update their websites, etc. But all they’re doing is redesigning the user interface, while the Operating System remains the same.

But at our core, it’s our Operating System that makes is tick. It’s the OS that actually makes things happen. In his letter, James, the brother of Jesus, lifts the veil of the Church’s user interface to show us the code that actually makes the Church function: wisdom. “Are any of you wise and understanding? Show that your actions are good with a humility (or “gentleness,” as it is rendered in some translations) born of wisdom.” James was writing to a church familiar with conflict—and according to the book of Acts, James was sometimes called upon to adjudicate such conflict. But James wants his readers to see past the surface of the conflict to what is at its core. “You’re fighting about the user interface,” he might say today, “when the problem is with your operating system.”

It has often been argued by biblical commentators that James offers one side of a dichotomy (and Paul is often credited with offering the other side) between Works and Faith, James coming down squarely on the side of Works. “Faith without works is dead,” he said. But in reality, James and Paul actually saw eye-to-eye on this and were not opposed to one another. James, in fact, doesn’t write about Works so much as he writes about wisdom. Wisdom isn’t about knowledge (which is often mislabeled “faith”), nor is it about practice (another word for “works”). Wisdom is about the integration of both. Our thought, our will, and our actions must be wisely integrated into a coherent whole, or else there’s something fundamentally wrong with the product.

And so, James pointed out to his readers that there are two operating systems to choose from—“worldly wisdom,” and “wisdom from above.” They’re not just different-but-equally-viable alternatives—they are diametrically opposed to each other, and James pointed out how. The worldly operating system is called “Ambition;” the operating system that comes down from above, “Humility.”

In order for the reader to understand what’s wrong with the Ambition OS, and why it should be replaced with the Humility OS, James asks a series of questions. First, “Are any of you wise and understanding?” We would probably answer this question, at the very least, by saying, “Yes, there are several of us who are wise and understanding. That’s what we have Elders for; that’s what we have pastors for; that’s what we have scholars and professors for. That’s how they came to be elders and pastors and scholars and professors in the first place, right? Because they’re wise and understanding?” James also tells us what wisdom and understanding look like in an individual: they are pure, peaceful, gentle (or humble), willing to yield, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy (3:17). “Those who make peace,” James declares, “sow the seeds of justice by their peacefulness.” The Ambition operating system on which the world runs encourages ego-driven actions, the grasping for and wielding of power in order to execute one’s agenda. But the Humility OS, prescribed by James for the Church and its members, outline traits that are not ego-driven, not envious, not ambitious, not grasping for power.

To make the case for why one operating system is superior to the other, James asks a second question: “What is the source of your disputes?” He points out that they come from our own personal cravings and selfish desires. We want what we want—whether what we want is wise, advisable, or in the best interest of the Body of Christ or not. Those who have worked with me on a church Session for any length of time know that I have a very particular understanding of what being an Elder in the church is all about. On the one hand, I believe that elders have a very robust role to play in the life of the church—a great deal of the Church’s life is in the hands of its elders, and I prefer a Session possessed of both strength and competence. However, I also believe that the mark of a competent elder is spiritual humility. When the Session gathers, we gather not to push our personal agendas, but to prayerfully seek God’s will for the congregation. I have said many times to elders in various churches that at Session I am not concerned about what they want; I am concerned about what God wants. In other words, the church doesn’t need elders who are running the Ambition operating system; it needs elders who are running Humility software. That is the mark of true wisdom from above.

Because the alternative is that the elders would argue their cases—demand what they want—even if it’s not at all what’s best for the congregation, or in keeping with God’s will. I’ve watched leaders form voting blocks and encourage “get out the vote” campaigns for congregational meetings. I’ve seen what vote-counting does to Sessions and congregations and let me tell you: the result isn’t church. Those sorts of political power plays are the opposite of the way James is advising the Church to function as a community.

Finally, James asks his readers the very question I ask the Session, “What does God want?” More precisely, James asks a rhetorical question, “Doesn’t God long for our faithfulness?” God wants us to be faithful—which is what James has been saying all along. God wants us to live faithfully, to be obedient, to be humble, to be willing to yield our will to God’s will.

James’ brother, Jesus (maybe you’ve heard of him), described to his disciples the kind of humiliating end he anticipated for himself, but they weren’t able to wrap their heads around it. And this is, at least in part, because their concept of the Messiah was caught up in worldly understandings of leadership. And worldly leadership is about power, and ambition, and posturing. Jesus, however, had a different read on the Messiah. They expected someone who would throw off tyrannical Roman rule and restore Israel to its independent glory. But Jesus was more likely to point to the words of the prophet Isaiah, who described a suffering servant in this way:

It was certainly our sickness that he carried, and our sufferings that he bore,
but we thought him afflicted, struck down by God and tormented.
He was pierced because of our rebellions and crushed because of our crimes.
He bore the punishment that made us whole; by his wounds we are healed.
Like sheep we had all wandered away, each going its own way,
but the Lord let fall on him all our crimes.
He was oppressed and tormented, but didn’t open his mouth.
Like a lamb being brought to slaughter, like a ewe silent before her shearers,
he didn’t open his mouth.
Due to an unjust ruling he was taken away, and his fate—who will think about it?
He was eliminated from the land of the living,
struck dead because of my people’s rebellion.
His grave was among the wicked, his tomb with evildoers, though he had done no violence, and had spoken nothing false.
But the Lord wanted to crush him and to make him suffer.
If his life is offered as restitution, he will see his offspring; he will enjoy long life.
The Lord’s plans will come to fruition through him.
After his deep anguish he will see light, and he will be satisfied.
Through his knowledge, the righteous one, my servant, will make many righteous, and will bear their guilt.
Therefore, I will give him a share with the great, and he will divide the spoil with the strong, in return for exposing his life to death and being numbered with rebels, though he carried the sin of many and pleaded on behalf of those who rebelled (Isa 53:4–12, CEB).

And so he described his impending death to his disciples, but his disciples didn’t understand where he was coming from in the slightest. In fact, as they walked along, the disciples argued among themselves about the very subject of who among them was the greatest. And so he sat down right there, and said, “Whoever wants to be first must be least of all and servant of all.” And then he offered them an illustration, pulling little child to his side, and saying, “Whoever welcomes a child like this welcomes me—and whoever welcomes me isn’t actually welcoming me, but rather the one who sent me.”

See, Jesus reached for the most vulnerable person he could think of—a child, who in his society wasn’t even considered a person yet, but merely the property of his father—and said, “Here’s who you should care about. Not the high and mighty. Not the powerful and ambitious. Not the rich and influential. This little one; who’s probably been taught to speak only when spoken to; who’s not strong enough to defend himself, or educated enough to advocate for himself, or wealthy enough to provide for himself. The world doesn’t care about this child. The rich and powerful don’t even know he exists, and they don’t care one whit how their decisions affect him. But you welcome him. You care for him. If you welcome the powerless and the disenfranchised, the weak and the marginalized, then you welcome me—because I’m powerless and disenfranchised; I’m weak and marginalized. I’m no king; I’m a servant.”

Jesus’ operating system—the one that comes down from above—is called Humility. Its competitor, Ambition, is so full of malware and corrupted files, it shouldn’t be used by anyone. Are any of you wise and understanding? Then submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will run away from you. Come near to God, and he will come near to you.

So You Think You Can Dance?

2 Sam. 6:1–5, 9–19

Mark 6:14–29

This week the lectionary has given us the gift of two strange, strange stories, the only obvious connection between them being dancing (and, perhaps, the embarrassing antics of kings). In second Samuel, King David dances before the Ark of the Covenant in a display of immodesty and intemperance that his wife finds lewd and embarrassing. In the Gospel of Mark, we read an even more bizarre tale about how the dancing of a young girl incites a drunk and foolish king to kill a prophet of God.

Mark must consider this story important, because it’s the longest single story in Mark’s Gospel, even though it is also the only story in which Jesus does not appear. In fact, John the Baptist himself doesn’t appear in this story—he is only talked about, while remaining off-screen. So this story has no protagonists. There are no good guys. Only a roomful of bad actors: Herod the King, the king’s daughter, Herodias (the king’s wife), and a banquet hall full of high-ranking nobility in whose eyes Herod is loathe to lose face. To make the prominence of this story even more odd, Mark presents it as a flashback. John the Baptist was arrested in chapter one, and presumably killed shortly thereafter. Mark is only telling us about it in chapter 6, because Herod has now grown concerned that Jesus might be the resurrected John, come back to haunt him.

The tragedy of John’s death is that it didn’t have to be this way. Even after lusting after his niece’s dancing, and swearing a foolish, drunken oath, Herod could have changed his mind. He could have said, “I know I said ‘anything,’ but I’m not going to behead an innocent, righteous man.” But like so many politicians with great power, who fail to do the right thing not because they don’t know what the right thing is, but because they’re too proud to lose face in the eyes of their constituents (or in the eyes of their billionaire donors), Herod chose to do the wrong thing. Concern over the opinions of others isn’t always wrong: sometimes the popular sentiment really is the right thing to do. In fact, our Presbyterian form of government uses a system of councils like the Session, the Presbytery, the Synod, and the General Assembly, in part to ensure that decisions are made by many people, rather than few. As Herod makes plain, leaving decisions of conscience to a single person can be dangerous when he is motivated less by questions of right and wrong, and more by questions of personal gain or popular esteem.

And then there was David.

After its construction in the book of Exodus, the Israelites believed that as long as they carried the Ark into battle with them, they couldn’t lose—that is, until they did. The Philistines captured the Ark and carried it away. But soon after, they concluded that the Ark was causing mysterious sickness amongst the Philistines, so they sent it back. No longer having much love or respect for the Ark that had disappointed them, the Israelites mothballed it in a warehouse somewhere to collect dust, and demanded that the prophet Samuel anoint a king. Saul was anointed the first king of Israel, but he succumbed to paranoid delusions and was deposed by God in favor of David.

Now, David sought to consolidate his power. He captured the city of Jerusalem and declared it his new capital. But in order to make this decision truly meaningful, he decided that the Ark of the Covenant should be removed from its mothballs. He realized that he could use the Ark as a unifying symbol; but he didn’t know the first thing about its history, or how properly to handle it. He built an ox cart to transport it, even though Exodus demanded that it be carried on poles by anointed priests. When the cart almost overturned, and Uzzah died trying to save the Ark from falling, David, who didn’t understand that the whole event was really his fault, blamed God for Uzzah’s sudden death. The Ark was left to languish in someone’s home for a further three months as David fretted over the power of God’s mysterious presence. Clearly, he hadn’t understood what he was messing with when he chose the Ark as the centerpiece of his public relations campaign.

Apparently, he spent those three months doing some research. When he returned to the Ark and continued its relocation, he began to get the details right: the text speaks of men “bearing” the Ark, instead of using a cart. David dons the ephod, or ceremonial vest, of a priest, and makes burnt sacrifices to God every time the procession advanced as much as six paces. Clearly, David now understood the awesome power of God’s presence, and was determined to honor and acknowledge it.

Nonetheless, while David certainly had more reverence for the Ark and the God it represented in the second leg of its transport than he had in the first, this parade is still troubling. David, not being a Levite priest, really had no business wearing a priestly vest (and more troubling, he was seemingly only wearing a priestly vest). The text said David offered the many, many sacrifices himself, which is problematic since—again—he was not an ordained priest. Most strikingly, David danced before the Lord with all his strength. Danced so fervently, in fact, that his wife Michal, who was watching from a window, lost all respect for him.

I’ll say this for David: unlike Herod, who ordered the death of an innocent prophet of God to save face in front of his bourgeois guests, David didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of him… even when some people thought that perhaps he should have. He certainly took our modern aphorism, “Dance like no one’s watching” to heart!

And this got me thinking. It’s surely true that we could all think of examples of when we’ve made a poor choice—or flat-out done the wrong thing—because we were concerned about the opinion of others, or about losing face and feeling ashamed if we did the right thing. And I am reminded of the wise words of Professor Albus Dumbledore, who once warned Harry Potter, “Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is right and what is easy.”

But David’s example is different. He didn’t stop to think about what people would think of him as he danced before the Ark—he simply felt compelled to worship that way, and he did it. It didn’t matter to him that the Law of Moses declared him ineligible for the priests’ vestments—he wore them anyway. It didn’t matter to him that Scripture had prescribed times, places, and personnel for making sacrifices to God—he made them anyway. The entry of the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem was not a solemn occasion, but an occasion for joy, for celebration, and for holy acts of worship. Just as Philip realized when he was speaking to the Ethiopian eunuch, David understood that sometimes the right thing to do is not found in scripture; it is found in the heart. David danced like no one was watching because joyful worship and celebration were the right things to do. Sometimes we Presbyterians take ourselves, our traditions, and our obsession with decency and order so seriously that we become a caricature—the “frozen chosen”!

To illustrate my thoughts, I want to invite you to take a moment to watch a video a solemn, worshipful occasion gone horribly, horribly wrong:

 

Click Here for the Video!

 

So you think you can dance? Which wedding would you rather attend? That cellist’s dream is my dream—for my life, for the life of the church, and for the life of the world. Much more importantly, it’s God’s dream for the world as well. And we can decide that that’s what our lives, our church’s life, and the world’s life is going to be!

Written on a wall in Mother Theresa’s home for children in Calcutta, India, are these words:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you.

Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.

Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten.

Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.

Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

To those words I add these: If your whole life becomes a dance before the presence of the Lord, the Michals of the world will scorn you.

Dance anyway.

Whose Conversion?

 

1 John 4:7–21; Acts 8:26–40

I was examined for membership in the Upper Ohio Valley Presbytery back in 2009 at a specially called meeting that took place in Wheeling, WV. I no longer remember who it was, but someone asked me what I thought of as a classic “Ordination Exam” question, like I might have had to answer in essay form before graduating from seminary and being ordained as a pastor. The question was this: A member of your church comes to you on Friday afternoon and says, “My daughter is going to be in town this weekend, visiting from California. We were hoping that you could baptize her new baby while she’s in town so that the whole family can be there.” Do you baptize that baby on Sunday morning, or not?

I smiled. I smiled because I recognized that this was, simultaneously, a “gotcha question” and a grace-filled gift from the person asking. And so I said, “There are two answers to that question: the correct answer, and my answer.” There were glances around the room—I’d like to think they were “knowing looks,” but who’s to say? I continued, saying, “The correct answer would be to tell this church member that I cannot baptize her grandchild, because baptisms must be approved by the Session, whose approval I could not reasonably get on such short notice. My answer is that I would speak to the baby’s mother about the meaning of baptism, baptize that baby, and then ask the Session for forgiveness after the fact. After all,” I reasoned, “was Philip constrained by the Book of Order when he baptized the Ethiopian eunuch on a moment’s notice, or did he follow the leading of the Holy Spirit?”

I don’t know if that was the right answer, but they approved my membership.

We’ve been returning to John’s first epistle for the last few weeks now, and for John, the subject seems always to be love. Previously, John pointed out, in essence, that love is a verb, and therefore requires action in order for it to be evident or even true. Today’s first scripture reading, also from this epistle, is a treatise on what love itself is and isn’t. Love is from God because God is love; and we love only because God first loved us. And if God can love us, sinners that we are, then surely we can love each other.

John notes that “No one has ever seen God,” which seems like a weird thing to say in this context, but I take it to mean two things. First, John follows this phrase by saying, “If we love one another, God lives in us.” In other words, though no one has ever seen God, evidence of God is seen in our love for one another, since we could not do so without God.

Second, by “No one has ever seen God,” I would suggest that John also means that no one can claim to be more holy or more righteous in God’s sight than any other: that is—all else being equal—no one can lay a more special claim on God’s affection or on knowing God’s mind than anyone else. Therefore, we are no in position to exclude whom God wills to include.

Enter the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.

Now, the fact that the eunuch is Ethiopian is not what makes this story interesting. This is not a story about race. Racism, as we have known it and experienced it, is primarily a problem of modernity, and not of the ancient world, the Roman Empire being a much more openly diverse society than ours. This man was powerful enough to travel by chariot; learnèd enough to read a Greek scroll of scripture; and wealthy enough to own such a scroll in the first place. He was also, apparently, a God-fearer. That is, he worshiped the God of Israel, though he may not actually have been a Jew.

Luke, who is the author of Acts, makes it clear what makes this person interesting: he uses the word “eunuch” every time he refers to him. Clearly, this is what Luke believes it is important to know and understand about this man. A eunuch, of course, is a man who has been neutered, usually before they reach puberty. This makes them suitable, trusted servants in the courts of queens and princesses, or in the harems of powerful men. As it turns out, this particular eunuch was in the employ of an Ethiopian queen.

Being a God-fearer, this man would also have known that being a eunuch meant he was not welcome in the sacred assemblies of the Temple. The book of Deuteronomy makes it plain that no one who is sexually mutilated “shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord” (Deut. 23:1). Now, the eunuch is not reading Deuteronomy, of course, but it is reasonable enough to assume that he knew his own status in the eyes of the very religion to which he adhered. Perhaps you can imagine—or then again, perhaps you can’t, but you should—perhaps you can imagine growing up going to church your entire life, knowing that there was something about you—something over which you had no control, something that marked you and identified you, even if only privately—which caused your congregation to exclude you. And that even though you had been baptized by this congregation, and they had promised on that day to love and encourage you in the way of Christ, they now refused to allow you to partake in holy communion, denying you fellowship with them in Christ, denying you communion with the Lord and Savior you emphatically confess and follow. Perhaps you can imagine that. And if so, then you have some idea of what this faithful eunuch experienced, as his status as a sexual minority caused God’s people to reject him.

Philip, one of the first Deacons of the church, was traveling through Samaria on an impressively successful evangelism tour, when a messenger of God said to him, “Hang a left over there and head south toward Gaza.” And without batting an eye, Philip did as instructed. Without further ado, he came upon the Ethiopian eunuch, who was traveling home after coming to Jerusalem to worship, and he overheard the eunuch reading from the scroll of Isaiah. Now, the scroll of Isaiah would have been one that early Christians knew well, and particularly the passage that the eunuch happened to be reading. Isaiah has a number of passages called the “songs of the suffering servant,” and this was one of those passages. From the earliest of times, followers of Christ interpreted those passages to be referring to Jesus. Jesus was known to read and preach from Isaiah himself, and to read himself into that prophet’s scrolls.

Perhaps we should pause to note—as Luke did in writing this story—the passage in question. The eunuch, who had been dragged off in early childhood and mutilated against his will in such a way that made him ineligible for admittance to the holy assembly of God’s people, even though he’d had no say in the matter, was reading this:

“Like a sheep… he was led to the slaughter.

And like a lamb before its shearer is silent,

so he didn’t open his mouth.

In his humiliation, justice was taken away from him.

Who can tell the story of his descendants,

because his life was taken from the earth?”

 

Surely… surely, for the eunuch, that passage hit close to home. He knew that he was like a sheep led to the slaughter. He knew that in his humiliation, he’d been denied justice. He knew that none would tell the story of his descendants, because in his mutilated state, he could never have any.

Philip asked the eunuch, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” There is one sense in which the eunuch understood that passage far better than Philip ever could.

Nonetheless, he said to Philip, “Without someone to guide me, how could I? Tell me, who is Isaiah talking about here? Is he talking about himself, or is he talking about someone else?” We all ask this question every time we open our Bibles, don’t we? We ask ourselves, “Is this only about these people who lived thousands of years ago, or is this somehow also about us? Is this a word from God for some other person in some other time, or is this God’s word for me, today?”

Philip, starting with that passage, and then also pointing out others, began to tell the eunuch the good news about Jesus. Isaiah may have been talking about himself. He may have been talking about the whole nation of Israel. He may have been talking about the Ethiopian eunuch. After all, our world is filled with such injustice. Filled with it. The good news of Jesus is that, as the Word made flesh, as God incarnate, as God’s only begotten, Jesus had suffered that very injustice. The good news is that ours is a God who is acquainted with our grief, who knows what it is to be led like a lamb to the slaughter, to suffer the humiliation of human injustice, and to be cut off… from the world he loves.

This was indeed good news to the eunuch. Not only does God know the eunuch’s experience of being mutilated, humiliated, and cut off religiously, but God had experienced that humiliation for himself.

The eunuch heard the good news about Jesus—God’s Messiah, who was acquainted with the eunuch’s grief and who had experienced his humiliation and rejection—and knew that this was his Messiah; his Lord. Overcome by this realization, he said to Philip, “What’s to stop me from being baptized right here and now?”

His question, like the question asked of me when I was being examined by Upper Ohio Valley Presbytery, had a correct answer. That correct answer was, “Actually, Sir, there are any number of things that prevent you from being baptized. Let’s start with your sexual condition, which prevents you from being in communion with your fellow disciples.” To this day, the church tells people that all the time. “You’re not welcome, because the Bible says.”

But that’s not the answer Philip gave. He didn’t give the correct answer; led by the Spirit, he gave a better answer. “What’s to stop me from being baptized right here and now?” the eunuch had asked, and Philip heard the Spirit reply, “Absolutely nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”

Deacon Philip, led by the Spirit, ignored what Scripture said, and baptized the eunuch right then and there, sending him home rejoicing in Christ. Philip discerned that it doesn’t matter what Deuteronomy says, it doesn’t matter what Leviticus says. God’s will, in Christ and by the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, is, as it is explained in the book of Ephesians, “to gather up all things in him: things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10). The precedent for ignoring the “rules” of scripture in order to welcome one called by Christ… is in scripture.

The one who was converted in this story was not the eunuch, who already believed, but who was nonetheless excluded from the assembly; it was Philip, who had to overcome the prejudices inherent in his religious traditions and recognize that some rules—regardless of where they’re written—are an impediment to the gospel. The Church has a long and terrible history of using the Bible as a litmus test of the holiness of people not like us, while ignoring what scripture says about our own sinfulness. Our task is not to guard the door of the church, as though we were protecting some inner sanctum from those who would defile it with their brokenness. We’re doing a fine enough job of defiling God’s house already. Ours is the privilege to fling wide the doors of God’s kingdom, welcoming all whom Christ has called, even as we have been welcomed.

I imagine that the eunuch went on reading as he continued on his journey back to Ethiopia. I mean, once a book changes your life this drastically, don’t you want to read the rest of it? And so it wouldn’t have been long before he got to Isaiah, chapter 56, which reads in part, “The Lord says to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, choose what I desire, and remain loyal to my covenant: in my temple and courts, I will give them a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them an enduring name that won’t be removed… My house will be known as a house of prayer for all peoples, says the Lord God” (Isa. 56:4-5, 7b-8a).

I pray that we will follow Philip’s example, obeying without question the Spirit of God when he urges us to acts of mercy and grace, bringing the good news about Jesus to people—whoever they are, and whatever their situation may be—knowing that God’s Messiah, though innocent as a lamb, is acquainted with our hardship, having known the humiliation of injustice.

Facing Giants

 

1 Sam. 17:1-49

David and Goliath is one of those stories that are so archetypal, that they grip our imaginations in ways that lesser, derivative stories never could. From early rabbinic sages, to today’s Vacation Bible School curricula, the theme of the victorious underdog profoundly resonates with people across cultures.[1] In fantasy literature, Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings, Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper from Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and even Star Wars’Luke Skywalker himself come to mind as well-known examples. Of course, we also commonly identify this archetypal story whenever we see a Truman defeat a Dewey, or a Buster Douglas defeat a Mike Tyson.

But the story of David and Goliath is not just a little-guy-beats-big-guy story. There is more to pay attention to than just the statures and relative physical strengths of the main characters. Goliath was a Philistine—a nation of marauders who swept to shore from the Aegean Sea to wreak havoc from Egypt to Syria. They were major disruptors of Late Bronze Age civilizations of the fertile crescent; outsiders who took everyone by surprise. The Philistine armies were primarily mercenaries, and Goliath was their largest and mightiest soldier of fortune. He would have been formidable just to look at, covered in armor and ready for both melee combat by sword and ranged fighting with his mighty spear. He was an experienced warrior, and regardless of his size, you can assume that he would have been quick and nimble—what bronze-age warrior would have survived, if not?

Against this jacked and armored human meat shield stood David, called a boy by both his own king and by his enemy across the field. David had never lifted a finger in war. He was small and weak enough that he couldn’t even move in proper soldier’s armor. He bore no sword or shield or spear. All he had was the sling that he kept with him to scare predators from his flock of sheep.

And that’s not nothing, so it warrants acknowledgement: David probably had to square off with the occasional wolf, or bear, or lion. But it’s not like he fought the wild beasts— David was not stronger than the wolves or bears or lions—he simply hurled enough rocks at them to make them decide that his sheep weren’t worth the trouble. But the lifestyle of a shepherd helped shape David to focus on God.

That’s what David had. His formation made him formidable.

The strength and confidence of David was not his own strength. It didn’t come from him. Neither did he first exhibit strength and courage on the field of battle between the armies of Israel and Philistia. The real story of David’s strength in confronting Goliath began an undetermined time earlier. David, Jesse’s youngest son, was not a warrior, but a shepherd; not a soldier, but a poet. David’s strength was not, necessarily, strength of body, but strength of spirit. And so, if one were to imagine that we were watching a movie about the life of David, we should expect to see not a training montage wherein David runs through the snow, boxes with frozen sides of beef, and dashes up the steps of a courthouse in Philadelphia; but rather one of David sitting in repose in the wilderness, watching over his flocks, reflecting upon how his care for the sheep is similar to God’s care for his people, praying deeply and fervently, and writing psalms of praise as well as lament. In short, his training is not physical strength training but, rather, spiritual strength training. The scene to which we are made privy by the author of Samuel, cinematic and imagination-stimulating as it is, is not one in which the underdog David physically overpowers the greatest warrior of his time, or even one in which he uses quick wits or superior speed to skirt his enemy’s defenses, but one in which Goliath dares to insult the creator of heaven and earth, who subsequently fells the giant with a single stone and the meager strength of a young man. It could be argued that the underdog is not David, but Goliath.

I imagine that the story of David and Goliath appeals to so many of us because so many of us find ourselves feeling like the little guy confronted by larger-than-life challenges. But summoning the courage of David is not a simple matter of standing firm and facing our problems with guile and a pocketful of rocks. Following the example of David begins before the giants show up in our lives. The shepherding life is a crucial step in the process of formation. We might begin by reflecting upon those times in the past when we have seen or felt God’s gracious provision and protection in our lives in the past. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” we remind ourselves, “I lack for nothing.” And then when we face our giants, whether sickness, divorce, job loss, addiction, or the deep grief of loss, the same God who we know to protect and provide will do again what we have come to expect of our Good Shepherd.

This week, I had the good fortune to bear witness to one instance after another of our denomination facing giants with the courage that comes with formation. With prayer and worship, study and deliberation, commissioners from across the country tackled diverse and challenging issues in ways that bear witness to the fact that the Lord of Hosts will not be belittled by the giants we face as a society. The faced the giant of environmental degradation by voting to engage more forcefully the fossil fuel industry, noting that as shareholders in the industry, we have already had measurable success in influencing their policies regarding extraction and the effect of industrialization and environmental degradation on the world’s poorest peoples.

They voted to repudiate the so-called “Discovery Doctrine.” This doctrine “originated as a papal teaching that European countries used to justify their colonization of other parts of the world. It also played a role in the westward expansion of the United States, and large numbers of Native Americans lost their land, and their lives, as a result.” Voting to repudiate this historical but heretical doctrine acknowledges the role that the Church of Jesus Christ has played in genocides and racist policies all over the planet, including right here in North America.

They voted to affirm the gifts of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and transgendered Presbyterians, acknowledging that their gifts and talents are a blessing to our communities of faith.

They voted to condemn the government’s policy of separating children from their parents and detaining families in prison-like conditions, calling “for an immediate end to the government’s zero-tolerance policy toward families illegally entering the United States. The resolution also called for federal authorities to promptly reunite parents and children who have been separated and to place families ‘under the care of the community,’ rather than in detention.” It also condemned the president’s recent executive order to end the “zero-tolerance” policy, because it does nothing specific to reunite the 2,300 families already separated, and because it risks further criminalizing immigration through the expansion of the detention of immigrant families at military facilities and other government properties.

They acknowledged that our denomination needs to get its own house in order as well, overwhelmingly approving a reorganization of the PC(USA)’s corporate entities in an effort to share resources and save money, while at the same time creating a new commission that will continue to recommend systemic changes to further streamline our denominational offices and make other course corrections between this assembly and the next.

They addressed the violence so common in the middle east, including the war in Syria; and stated unqualified support for the human rights of Palestinians living in hopeless conditions in Israeli-occupied territories.

They took important steps to acknowledge and address the church’s complicity in sexual assault and harassment, and further steps to strengthen the voices of those who have been victims of sexual violence in the church.

Facing these giants—having the moral courage to address important social issues as well as the ways in which the church has perpetuated sinful systems—was undergirded and therefore made possible by the worship, Bible study, and prayer that accompanied the proceedings throughout each day. It was the General Assembly’s formation that made it formidable. With hundreds of pastors and elders prayerfully seeking God’s will, they took good ideas and made them better, wrestling until they had expressed the best of Presbyterian, Biblical theology.

In what was perhaps a defining moment, hundreds of Presbyterians took to the streets of St. Louis, having gathered up $47,000 in an offering, and marched it to the city jail, where they used the money to pay the bonds that were keeping non-violent offenders imprisoned for no reason other than that they couldn’t afford the price of bail. Carrying a banner that read, “Freedom Should Be Free,” the Presbyterian Church (USA) brought good news to captives and those imprisoned that day, and we were approached throughout the week by people who expressed gratitude and no small amount of wonder at our willingness to show compassion and love to those who are oppressed by the justice system.

The challenges faced by the General Assembly really are larger-than-life. They’re larger than the denomination itself and larger than the resources seemingly at its disposal. And yet those giants of oppression and injustice and social upheaval are no match for a people who knows that we take the field of battle in the name of the Lord of Hosts.

Do you wonder why your pastor cares so much about divine encounter—spiritual formation? It’s because if we don’t seek divine encounter through Christ, we have no real hope of discipleship to Christ, reconciliation in Christ, or generosity with Christ. In order for our lives to be transformed in such a way that God can use us to overcome the giants that stalk the earth, we must first encounter the living Christ. It is true, as the General Assembly demonstrated, for all of us as the corporate Body of Christ taking aim at social and systemic giants in the world. It is also true for each of us personally, as we learn to put our faith and trust in a God whose aim is true, whose love and grace are sufficient, whose compassion for his children is complete such that, with God’s help, we, too, can overcome the giants that seem ever to be stalking us.

You have the same resources (and more) that David had, and God’s grace is sufficient for you. Seek God in the living Christ, and such formation will make you formidable.

[1]Some turns of phrase, like this one, are borrowed from Roger Nam, “Commentary on 1 Samuel 17:[1a, 4-11, 19-23] 32-49,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2474 (Accessed June 12, 2018).

 

How We Know Love

 

1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Some years ago, I was reading the twenty-third psalm and found myself meditating on the phrase, “your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” The reason this phrase leaped from the gilt-edged page is that I was, at that time, undergoing a personal transformation in my spiritual life. I had come to realize that my spiritual life was haphazard and undisciplined. Perhaps you would describe your spiritual life as haphazard and undisciplined, too. Maybe prayer isn’t something you actually set aside time for; it happens occasionally when it occurs to you. Or when there’s a crisis. And maybe when you realize it’s been a while since you’d last had a conversation with God, you feel rather guilty about it.

That’s where I had been, and so I had begun a spiritual “training” regimen. I felt as though God was disciplining me in his love for me, wanting to train me to be more responsible for the quality of our relationship. In the New Testament, we read in the book of Hebrews, “For the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts” (Heb. 12:6). My response to this was to begin a daily regimen that included waking up extra early each morning for prayer and meditation on scripture. This discipline led to an intimacy with the Holy Spirit that began to heighten my awareness of God’s leading and to inform my preaching in powerful ways. It prepared me to lead processes of discernment with my congregation and others and enabled me to be a more intentional disciple of Jesus Christ.

The prophet Isaiah says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on his servant the sins of us all” (Isa. 53:6). In chapters 8 and 9 of Matthew, several miracles are grouped together, and at the end of this section on miracles of healing, Jesus stands before a group of people who still were sick, who still were poor, maimed, blind and lame. “When he saw the crowds,” Matthew states, “he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).

If we look at the world around us, we will find similar flocks of maimed, blind, starving sheep roaming the countryside, continuing to do so without a shepherd. Life is fragile, and we often feel vulnerable in an uncertain world. Jesus said in this morning’s reading from John that the hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolves coming and runs away. The hired hand does this because he doesn’t care for the sheep.

The book of Acts describes the early Church—the Church before the word “Christian” had even been invented yet, by saying, “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all, because there was not a needy person among them. For as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:33-35). These early Christians were determined not to be the hired hand who ran away and left the poor and vulnerable to the wolves, but rather to follow in their Shepherd’s footsteps and, as Jesus had exhorted Peter, to “feed [his] sheep” (John 21).

In this sense, we are disciplined, convicted, as Peter was, by Jesus’ words, every time we dare to lift our eyes and see the plight of the poor and oppressed in the world. Imagine, if you will, the Good Shepherd reaching out with his rod of discipline to smack us—lovingly—on the back of the head. “You’re not feeding my sheep,” he says. “You’re like a hired hand who is only in this for the payoff. You don’t care about my sheep—you’re only a Christian for what’s in it for you!”

Christianity has precious little to do with coming to church on Sunday morning and being fed spiritually—however invaluable that may be to achieving our ends. If that’s what being a Christian means to us—that we’re giving God what we owe Him by showing up to listen to someone like me blather on each week—then we are just hired hands. And that’s a hard thing for me to say because I rather like blathering!

Just prior to the verse about the Lord’s rod and staff that was the object of my meditation, we find these words: “even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” Many of us grew up learning the old King James (or at least the Revised Standard Version) which reads “the valley of the shadow of death.” We read Psalm 23 at funerals all the time, because the deceased is walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and it reminds us that we will, too, someday. But the more modern translation “even though I walk through the darkest valley,” is, to my ears, even more beautiful, because it acknowledges that death is not the only thing we fear. Life is filled with travails that might be called dark valleys. We lose our jobs; we lose our health. We lose our friends; we lose our spouses. And through it all, we need fear no evil, for the Good Shepherd is always with us.

Which leads to a rather curious notion: If sheep follow the sound of their shepherd’s voice, that means that when we find ourselves in dark valleys, it may be because the Good Shepherd led us there! Would a good shepherd do such a thing? I believe he would, if, on the other side of that dark valley, there were green pastures and still waters where he could restore our souls! After my undisciplined spiritual life led to spiritual burn-out and a premature end to my first pastorate, Diane and I spent four years living with my parents, enduring heartache and discouragement. And I have come to believe that this was because God was disciplining me—not punishing me, but training me—to become the pastor He had preordained me to be. I wasn’t who or where God wanted me to be, and the only way to prepare me for the difficult pastoral work that would come next—the only way to discipline me for the work ahead—was to lead me through a dark valley, which, when I look back on it now, I often call my “wilderness period.”

One of the most important aspects of my next call as a pastor was group discernment—something for which I was woefully unprepared before my wilderness period and the spiritual discipline that I learned through it. At the same time that I was helping three church Sessions to discern God’s call to merge their congregations, the Upper Ohio Valley Presbytery found itself in need of discernment. (These days, our entire denomination is undergoing a years-long discernment process with an eye toward serious reformation of the way it functions faithfully.)

In comparing the presbytery’s discerning body to my parish’s Sessions, I came away with a sense of pride. See, the presbytery’s task force addressed the issue early on by saying at a presbytery meeting, “The presbytery is financially insolvent, so we need to change the way we do things so that we can have a balanced budget.” They weren’t wrong, of course, but that was no way to discern God’s will!

My congregation’s Parish Council, on the other hand, engaged in wonderful, faithful, theological wrestling! They struggled with questions of who Jesus is, what the Church is meant to be, and how our understanding of God’s grace affects the way we participate in mission and community outreach. And the reason we approached our discernment process this way was that we knew that our future lay not in “saving our bacon” financially speaking, but in being faithful to who and what God created us to be.

One of the central tensions experienced by churches, by presbyteries, and currently by our denomination, is the tension between what we call the “Great Ends of the Church,” and the notion that “stewardship” is to be equated with “good business practices.” The Great Ends of the Church state that we exist to be “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” And yet many churches, presbyteries, and denominations instead employ the so-called “best practices” of the very world that they are called to correct!

The Book of Order further notes that the Church is to undertake its mission “even at the risk of losing its life.” The Church will be following the voice of the Good Shepherd when it stops thinking of itself as an institution (because institutions exist to protect and perpetuate themselves) and revives its ancient self-understanding—that of a community—existing not for its own sake, but for the sake of others, to the glory of God. Jesus didn’t protect himself; he exhibited the kingdom of heaven to the world, even at the risk of losing his life—he laid down his life for his sheep. The first epistle of John reminds us that “This is how we know love: Jesus laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. But if a person has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need and that person doesn’t care—how can the love of God remain in him” (1 John 3:16-17)?

Imagine if our attitude was such that when someone asked us, “What time does your church’s service start?” our answer was not “10:30,” but rather, “At 11:45, when worship is over and the congregation leaves. That’s when the service begins.” If what takes place on Sunday morning is a “service,” then either singing a couple of hymns and listening to a sermon counts as service to God, and one’s obligation to God for a whole week is fulfilled after just one hour, or worship leaders are rendering some sort of “service” to those in attendance. What the church does together on Sunday mornings is not a service. I don’t “render services.” The service starts when we leave the church, putting into practice the discipline to which God is calling us.

It is time for us to hear the sound of our Shepherd’s voice and follow him, even into the dark valleys—perhaps especially there. It’s time for us to stop being hired hands who don’t care about our Lord’s sheep because we don’t think they’re a part of “our flock,” as we’re reminded that we are not a Christian nonprofit organization, but a Christian community.

The lost sheep of the world—sheep that, for all their waywardness, the Lord still calls his own—can’t sing the 23^rd Psalm, and that should make our souls ache. They don’t follow the sound of the Shepherd’s voice, and that should make our hearts break. It should make us want to follow the Good Shepherd into the dark valleys to help lead these sheep into the fold. If we don’t care, if our souls don’t ache, if our hearts don’t break, if we don’t reach out as apprentice shepherds to welcome these lost sheep into the fold—even at the risk of losing our own life—then we’re just hired hands, and not disciples at all.