The Problems of Christian Witness

The Problems of Christian Witness

I have a membership to the local YMCA, though I don't take advantage of it as often as I should.  In the cardio room, there are two of the machine that I tend to prefer, one of them I choose if it happens to be open.  There are times when it is in use by a particular man, whom I do not know in any way other than in this capacity, who clearly shares my preference for that machine over the other (though I don't mind using the other one).  The way the machines are angled in the room, the preferred machine is in "front" which means, when I am on the other machine, whoever is using the first machine is clearly visible to me.
Now, this man who I have referred to has something about him that sets him apart as unique among the people I see during my workouts.  He seems to always have a Bible with him, open, on his machine.  Presumably, he does this so that, while he is working out, he can read from it.  It is a good way to redeem the time when you would otherwise be doing nothing.  Speaking personally, I tend to prefer to listen to books (even the Bible) on my iPod, but more power to him, right?
And yet, there is something odd about the situation.  He tends to do longer workouts than I do, so there may be times when this is not the case, but I have noticed the last several times that he never once turns a page.  That means, as is often the case, he has his Bible open to a page when I come in and then I complete my workout (over a half an hour later) and, at the end of my workout, as I leave, he is still on the same page.  Also, the Bible is absolutely immaculate.  The pages are unruffled and perfect, the cover is pristine, and there is nary a mark on a page from a pen or a highlighter.
I have been absolutely baffled by this.  Why would someone bring a Bible, place it on their machine, clearly in their line of sight, and then not read it?  Perhaps I am being too hard on him.  Maybe he does not read well and it takes him well over a half hour to read two pages (one on the left-hand side and one on the right).  However, I have met people who are particularly bad at reading (by their own admission) and, if they were in a situation like this, would simply never bring a book in the first place, rather than try to multitask.
So what is the story?  I do not know and so I am in no position to judge, but I have spent a fair amount of time reflecting on what my actions may communicate to an outside observer, so here are some thoughts, regardless of whether they are right, wrong or indifferent.
It might be that this man sincerely wants to spend his workout time reading his Bible.  Surely this is not a bad goal.  However, how many times does one need to take their Bible with the intention to read it and not doing so before they change their mind about it being a good plan?
How about this?  Not everyone in the world, when they are reading a book in public, reads the Bible and many who do are not particularly open about it.  I have seen people who have Bibles on their tables in coffee shops or places like Panera who carefully place their Bible under other books.  Perhaps this man is using his time at the Y to be a kind of witness, where he boldly and unashamedly places his Bible in public view, declaring to all, "I am a Christian, I care about God's word!"
I do not know this man at all.  I do not know his name, I do not know his church, I know nothing about him other than he likes the same machine at the Y as I do.  I cannot judge his heart, but this is what I infer from his behavior.  I own it may be unjust, but it is a reminder to me about how little things speak loudly, whether we want them to or not.
Here are my conclusion based nothing but observation.  I could probably get more information by talking to him and, if he were a member of my church I would do so.   However, the point is that most people do not do the courtesy to investigate beyond appearances.  Here is a man who cares more about appearing to be Christian than being Christian.  He wants people to think that he is committed to studying the scripture, so committed that he can't even break away from it for an hour or so in order to do his workout.  However, the context stands against this intended appearance.  His Bible is not worn (and is not brand new, as it has been the same Bible for months), which means that it does not accompany him throughout his life.  Even a Bible that leaves home only weekly Bible studies shows signs of wear fairly quickly, much more a Bible that is handled daily.
He wears headphones while he works out and reads.  This, again, is not conclusive, since I would find it easier to read if I were listening to (instrumental) music than just listening to the sounds of the machines (or the TVs when people do not adhere to the requirement to keep the sound off).  However, the strongest evidence is that, in spite of the fact that the Bible is on his machine where it is right in front of his eyes; in spite of the fact that he has to look under it to see the machine's feedback, his eyes seldom land on the pages.  They are glued to the television.  In spite of any intention or even any real priority in his heart, his behavior communicates to me that football, basketball and Fox News are more important to this man.
The irony is that, if he never brought the Bible out, I would have had absolutely none of these thoughts.  If someone simply comes in and works out and watches TV with headphones on, I would not give it a second thought.  It is because he goes out of his way to place his ostentatious Bible on display (even drawing attention to it by thumping it down on his gym bag when he is finished with his workout), because he is making it clear to all in the room that he is a Christian (the Bible is invariably opened to the New Testament) that I pay attention to him.
It raises the question of our witness as Christians.  I am reminded of a gas station where one could nearly always find a Chick tract in the men's bathroom.  No name, no church information, just a tract that can, in all honesty, come across as quite heavy handed.  Do we conceive our witness as nothing more than making an appearance, as nothing more than showing off?  Does Paul mean nothing more when he says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel" than "I am willing to be seen in public with my Bible?"
Like the well-meaning person who puts a Jesus fish on their car but then forgets about it when they cut people off or are otherwise discourteous; like the student who wears his Christian themed T-shirt to school and then bullies others; like, the public figure who claims to take a stand for God and then finds themselves guilty of what they crusade against, our attempts to witness in these ways often do more harm than good.
What is a real Christian witness?  A life of service, of going out of our way to treat others as human beings rather than as mere objects, a life of listening more than speaking, and a life lived, trusting that our deeds of Christian love to the least of these will not go unnoticed by the One who matters.  If we are careless or we focus more on being seen and recognized for our faith than living it, we are no better off than the one who proclaimed loudly in the streets of Philippi, "These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation."

"What Is Our Best Sacrifice" (Abraham and Isaac)

            11/25/12                     Genesis 22:1-19                    Grace UMC

We have just celebrated Thanksgiving as a nation.  It is a time of year when, as we think of things we are thankful for, we often think of sacrifice.  We remember that there have been countless people who have sacrificed their lives so that we might be free in this country.  We also remember that our parents sacrificed and did without so that we might not have to.  As Christians, we often think about sacrifice in terms of what Christ did for us.  In Christ, we see that we do not only have other human beings who have sacrificed for us, but that even the God of the universe has allowed himself to be sacrificed for our sakes.  It is a sacrifice that does not only free us on the outside but brings us freedom in the depths of our humanity.

One of the most fascinating stories in the whole Bible to me is the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham is called to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the land of Moriah.  This story has been the focus of significant attention by those outside of the church in recent years.  Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist and committed atheist had the following to say, referring to the story of Abraham and Isaac.  "And not scorning the three delightful children who result— who are everything to me and who are my only chance of a human glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, I’ll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, “Yes, I’ll [kill] my kid to show my love of God,” I’d say, “No, f[orget] you.”"  Actually, his language is somewhat stronger than that.

This is not a recent concern.  Going all the way back to the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, the profoundly significant philosopher who casts a shadow even over our lives today, said this. "Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from visible heaven."  What is certain for Kant is the moral code.  It is higher than God and is able to stand in judgment over what God may or may not say or do.

Another interesting point of view surrounding this passage comes from Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and committed Christian.  He was deeply aware of the fact that, even though we consider Abraham a hero of the faith, if anyone else were to do what Abraham was prepared to do, we would not consider them a hero of the faith but a murderer.  What Kierkegaard wanted to know is why we don't think of Abraham as a murderer.  This is, of course what Hitchens and Kant were getting at in their own way, but whereas they came to the conclusion that, in fact, we ought to think of Abraham, as well as the God who set all this into motion, as murderers, Kierkegaard was gripped by faith in a way that would not allow him to rest content with that conclusion but wanted to press deeper.

So the first thing I want to do is to make it clear that if you have ever read the story of Abraham and Isaac with fear and trembling (the name of Kierkegaard's book on the passage) or with disgust or dismay, you are not alone.  There have been many who have found it to be profoundly disturbing.  If you have never read the passage and wondered whether that says some things about God that we might not want to hear, at the very least you should be aware of the fact that others have thought so and it is passages like this that those outside of the church often turn to in order to make Christians look foolish because, at least if looked at from the right angle, it can certainly seem that God is somewhat barbaric.

Now, I have never met a Christian who believed that this is the best way to read the passage.  In spite of all the barbarism that seems to be there, we are too strongly persuaded by Christ to believe that God is truly bloodthirsty and wanting child sacrifice.  But if that is the case, how should we read the passage?

By far, the most common way the story of Abraham and Isaac is talked about in the church is to say that the real point is not that God wants child sacrifice, since looking at the whole of the biblical tradition makes it clear that he doesn't, but that Abraham was prepared to give up the best that he had for God so we also should be prepared to give our best to God.  It is a common interpretation, but is that really what the story is about?

Kierkegaard uses the story of the rich young ruler that Jesus told to give up all he had in order to follow him to shed light on this kind of interpretation.  He argues that the rich young ruler would not have become like Abraham, even if he gave up the best that he had.  He says, "What is left out...is the anguish: for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations.  Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they [still] want to talk about Abraham.  So they talk and in the course of conversation they interchange the words 'Isaac' and 'best.'  Everything goes excellently.  Should someone in the audience be suffering from insomnia [that is, actually awake and listening attentively to the sermon], however, there is likely to be the most appalling, most profound, tragic-comic misunderstanding.  He goes home, he wants to do just like Abraham; for the son is certainly the best thing he has.  Should that [preacher] hear word of this, he might go to the man, summon all his clerical authority, and shout:  ‘Loathsome man, dregs of society, what devil has so possessed you that you wanted to murder your own son?’  And this [preacher], who had felt no signs of heat or perspiration while preaching about Abraham, would be surprised at the righteous wrath with which he fulminates against that poor man; he would be pleased with himself, for never had he spoken with such pungency and fervor before…If the same [preacher] had some slight excess of wit to spare he would surely lose it were the sinner to reply coolly and with dignity:  ‘It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday.’  How could a [preacher] get such an idea into his head?  And yet he did so, and the mistake was only that he hadn’t known what he was saying.”

If we read the story of Abraham and Isaac and say, "Abraham was willing to give up the best he had, Isaac, and so we should be willing to give up the best that we have," how can we possibly avoid the implication that we ought to be willing to give up our children, since that is the example?  If that conclusion disturbs us we must either reject God, reject the passage, or push deeper to see if it is possible that we have misunderstood the text.  Given those three options, I think it is best to choose to push deeper.

This is all the more clearly the right choice when we remember that God is consistently telling his people that he absolutely does not want child sacrifice.  The issue is deeper than we might think, but I believe that it will become clear that the God portrayed in this story is not bloodthirsty but is better and more gracious than we ever dreamed.

The question we have to ask is why Abraham was willing to do this at all?  Perhaps it is nothing more than what the writer of Hebrews says, "By faith, Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.  He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.’  He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead – and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”  It may have been that, but I think that it there is more to it.  Though this story is the closest Israel ever got to affirming child sacrifice, it was a common practice elsewhere in the Ancient Near East.  The followers of the Ammonite god, Molech, for example, practiced child sacrifice regularly, precisely because it was an offering of the best that they had.  Ancient tribes in South America played games not altogether unlike our modern game of basketball and sacrificed, not the losing but the winning team, again precisely because it was an offering of their best.

There is a certain logic to these practices that horrify us today.  If God demands from us total commitment, does that not trump even our commitments to our family?  In spite of the fact that this way of reasoning has been so common throughout history, it has been conspicuously absent in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Why is that?  The reason is that the obligation for total obedience to God does not just mean that we need to surrender our devotion to everything else when compared to our devotion to God.  It also means that we need to surrender the right to decide for ourselves what the best that we have to offer is.  We don't get to decide for ourselves what God wants, but we need to listen to him to hear what he has to say about the matter.

As frightening as the whole story can be and as often as God and Abraham get criticized for doing what they do, we must never forget one absolutely crucial point:  Isaac is not actually killed.  He survives the whole situation.  If the interpretation that says that Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac was nothing more than a willingness to offer his best is correct, can we not assume that the conclusion of the story tells us that that willingness is enough, that God will never actually require our best from us?  If that is so, then we can make a show about our willingness to give everything up while comforted by the fact that God will never actually demand it of us.  However, I don't think this is the case, I think there is something much more profound at work here.

Even though he was tied down to the wood and the knife was raised, Isaac did not die, but something did.  Blood was shed and something was offered to God, but it was not Isaac, the beloved child of Abraham.  It was a ram whose horns were caught in the thicket.  What do we read actually happened?  "Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.  So Abraham called that place 'The Lord will provide.'"  The sacrifice of the ram is incredibly significant, above and beyond what a sacrifice of a ram would have meant in any other context.  The ram was not just offered, but was offered instead of Isaac, it was offered in his place.

This is where the interpretation of Isaac as Abraham's best has something to contribute.  At the end of the day, what was the sacrifice that God wanted?  Abraham was willing to offer what he would call his best.  His son was bound and he had lifted the knife to kill him, but God would not allow it.  Instead of allowing Abraham to follow through, he gave him a substitute.  That means that God in a very real sense did not want Abraham's best; in point of fact, God wanted a sacrifice that was better than Abraham's best.

Now, you might be wondering, "How is a ram a better sacrifice than Isaac?  After all, Abraham probably owned many rams, but only had one beloved son."  And yet, God didn't tell Abraham to stop, go back home, get one of his rams, and then bring it back.  Instead, God provided his own lamb.  Even if we might think that a ram is insignificant compared to a human child, the reason why it was a better sacrifice is not because of the value in the eyes of Abraham or any other human being.  It was a better sacrifice because it came from God.

I wonder if, sometimes, we think about sacrifice the way we often do because we like it.  If we either choose or are forced to make a significant sacrifice, there is that bit inside of us that feels pretty good about it in the sense that we feel that nobody can ever say to us, "You never had to sacrifice."  When we sacrifice, we can prove to ourselves that our devotion isn't just made up of words, but that it makes some kind of difference in our lives.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is extremely offensive, but not because of how we would ordinarily think.  It is not offensive because a bloodthirsty God commanded a man to sacrifice his beloved child.  It is offensive because, at the end of the day, God does not accept it, but provides a sacrifice in his place.  God knows that Abraham will go through with the sacrifice; after all, in any other culture at the time, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  But right when he is about to follow through, God stops him.  This is an act of mercy, but it is more than that.  It is a declaration that God doesn't want child sacrifice, doesn't want Abraham to give what he thinks is his best.  It is a sacrifice unwanted by God and so, in point of fact, it is not the best Abraham has to offer, regardless of what he might think.  The best sacrifice is the one that God gives in place of what we think is our best.

It is an offensive story because it makes it seem that God's ways are cheap, that it is too easy to be one of God's people.  This should come as no surprise to us, since that is precisely what people have said, both in the early days of the church and today, but is it really true?  Is it too easy?  It means a wholesale renunciation of doing things our own way, of admitting that sin impacts everything we do, everything we are, and everything we think, including our notion of what are the best things to offer as a sacrifice to God.  To follow God means to allow our own sense of justice and righteousness to be challenged and realize that the ways of God are not just different than ours, but deeper, richer, and fundamentally better than our ways.  It means that we need to give up our right to judge, not only the actions of others but even our own actions, and allow God to have his way.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is also tremendously humbling.  It tells us that we cannot make an appropriate sacrifice on our own terms.  We must open our hands in faith, emptied of all our supposed righteousness and goodness, and receive the sacrifice that God has to give in place of the best that we could ever give.  It is scandalous, it is an attack on humanity because it says that God is justified in insisting on what he gives instead of what we give, but it is oh so very liberating, because God has already made the sacrifice.  He has given us his Son.  It is a sacrifice that is absolutely free because it offered without price but it is desperately costly because it calls us into question to the roots of our being.  We cannot accept the sacrifice without it challenging us to our core, but it is a challenge to be freed from sin, to be empowered by the Spirit and live in a better way than our world has to offer.  It is a sacrifice that changes everything and it is better than any sacrifice we could ever have dreamed up.  Rejoice, for God is not waiting until you make the perfect sacrifice, only for you to trust in the one he has made on your behalf and in your place.  Let us pray.

AMEN

The Elijah Syndrome

          10/28/12                "The Elijah Syndrome"           Grace UMC

One of the narratives in the Bible that has always fascinated me is the account of Elijah up on the mountain with the still, small voice.  The attitude we see in Elijah seems to me to be so incredibly common, not least in myself, that I have started to call a particular habit of speaking and thinking, "The Elijah Syndrome."  But before we can spell out what that looks like, we have to understand the narrative as it stands and within its context.

Elijah was a mighty man of God.  He had performed many miracles before this and would perform many more after it.  Recently, there had been a three-year drought that had devastated the entire Northern Kingdom of Israel because King Ahab so stalwartly refused to listen to the God of his ancestors.  Elijah was the one who said the drought would come and had become almost synonymous with the right hand of God, bringing divine judgment down on the nation.  He was a man who was greatly respected and feared.

Eventually, when the time came for the drought to end, Elijah came to Jezreel, the capital city, and challenged the King and Queen along with their pagan prophets that they paid to keep in court.  He said to the people, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?  If The Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."  He took, depending on how you count it, either 450 or 850 pagan prophets up onto Mount Carmel and set up a test.  Whichever god responded by sending fire was the true God.  After the pagan prophets cried out for hours, wailing and ritually cutting themselves, Elijah simply prayed and God sent a fire that was amazing in its intensity.  After that, the drought ended and the people put the pagan prophets to death.

But as you might imagine, royalty do not take kindly to the overturning of their authority.  When Queen Jezebel found out about this, she dedicated herself to hunting down and killing Elijah, if it was the last thing she did.  This is where we pick up our text for this morning.  In spite of the fact that Elijah has just been part of a mighty victory, he is running for his life.  He ran so long and so far that he went from Jezreel, which is firmly in the Northern portion of Israel, all the way down to Mount Horeb, the mountain where Moses saw the burning bush which is just across the Red Sea from Egypt.  That night, Elijah stays in a cave in the mountain.

While he was there, God spoke to Elijah, saying, "What are you doing here Elijah?"  Clearly, the God of the universe is not suffering from misunderstanding, he is not simply seeking facts.  We might paraphrase that into a more modern idiom by saying, "Why in the world are you here, Elijah?" or "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  Elijah's response is heartfelt.  "I have been very zealous for The Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."  Basically, Elijah is saying that he feels all alone.  Nobody seems to want to listen to God; so much so that they are killing the prophets and Elijah is the only one left who cares about God.

It is after that answer that God sends the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, none of which brought with them the presence of God, and finally calls Elijah out by a still small voice, or the sound of sheer silence.  Elijah, presumably in awe, makes his way to the entrance of his cave and listens to what he is sure will be a profound message from God.  Amazingly, it turns out to be the exact same question he had been asked, not long ago.  "What are you doing here Elijah?"  For whatever reason, Elijah thinks that the best answer he can give to this repetition of the question is a repetition of his answer.  "I have been very zealous for The Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."

I don't know why Elijah gives the same answer a second time.  Maybe he was confused, maybe he thought God hadn't heard him the first time, maybe he thought it was a test to see if he would be consistent.  Regardless of the reasons he may or may not have had, it seems to me that God was looking for something else altogether.  After God gets the pity speech for the second time, he takes a very different approach.  Paraphrasing somewhat, it is as if the conversation goes something like this.  "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  Dramatic displays of power and gentleness.  "Let's try this again.  Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  (With a big sigh) "Alright Elijah, this is what you are going to do.  You are going to get up and head back North.  Anoint this person as king over Aram, anoint that person as king over Israel, and anoint that other person as your successor.  Oh, and by the way, there are over seven thousand people who have never bowed down to the false gods that you seem to have no idea about."

In the chapter just before our text for this morning, we read about Elijah coming to meet with Ahab.  On his way, he meets with a man named Obadiah that he uses to send his message.  Now Obadiah was not a prophet like Elijah.  He did not stand in front of mighty men and women and declare the word of the Lord to them.  Compared to Elijah's deeds of power, Obadiah would seem incredibly unimpressive.  However, he occupied a high position in Ahab's court and, when persecution was about to break out against the prophets of God, Obadiah managed to hide them in caves and gave them food to eat and water to drink.  His faithfulness wasn't showy.  It couldn't be or else people would have died.  And yet, I can't help but think that he is precisely one of those seven thousand people who have never bowed their knee to a false god.  It is not just that Elijah has never met the faithful people in Israel, but he might very well know them and yet not recognize them as faithful people.  And yet, they might actually be doing, in a sense, more than Elijah himself.

This is what I have called "The Elijah Syndrome," a conviction that I am all alone, that I am the only one who feels the way I do, that I am the only one who really takes God seriously.  The Elijah Syndrome can sometimes manifest itself in terms of pity, like Elijah seems to be doing primarily.  "My life is really hard because nobody else around me seems to understand God.  God tells me that his good news is for everyone, but people just don't seem to want to listen."  It can also be manifested in judgment.  "None of you poor souls really understand God like I understand God.  My relationship to God is special.  We are connected in a way that you do not share and you cannot share in it or have any kind of real spiritual depth unless you live out your faith like I do."

A bit of the problem with the Elijah Syndrome is that it is so defensive and isolating and yet, at the very same time, so offensive.  How can anyone respond to a statement like that?  If I am suffering from the Elijah Syndrome, I have a tendency, everywhere I go to be saying to anyone I meet, "Nobody really understands like I do.  People just can't seem to see the God who is right in front of them."  Of course, if I say that to you, I am implying that you are also one of those people who don't understand and who can't see God.  Not only am I saying that you don't understand, I am basically saying that you can't understand, since I have special insight that is not shared by the common person.

What can you say to me if I have that attitude?  I can always dismiss any input you have to offer by saying, "You haven't thought about this like I have.  You can only see it as an outsider."  You are just one of the poor fools that is, at best, ignorant of the truth, or at worst, out to get me as the one faithful person left.  The Elijah Syndrome cuts off all help from our brothers and sisters in Christ and isolates the person in a cave of self-pity and self-righteousness.

The Elijah Syndrome is not something I read about in a book, though I have read many books.  It is not something that is merely an academic issue for me.  I came to understand the Elijah Syndrome through experience, and not, primarily, experiencing other people who had it.  I learned about it so clearly and completely because it is something that I myself have experienced.  Every criticism I can launch against the Elijah Syndrome is one that has cut me first and foremost.

There was a time in college where I had what can best be described as a brush with Fundamentalism.  I had just started reading the Bible with some seriousness for the first time and I became aware that the scriptures had a lot to say about a wide variety of topics.  I was increasingly interested, not just in what the Bible said, but the ways it said it.  I looked around and I noticed that many people that I knew, friends included, simply weren't interested in the Bible like I had become.  In particular, I became fascinated with the Old Testament.  There was so much there that I had never heard before.  However, there were not only stories that shaped my understanding of the history of Israel, there was book after book of judgment on the people of God for not taking him seriously.  I should point out that the problems that I had were not with the judgment itself, but because I did not adequately understand the context of the judgment.

All of these things combined together to set the stage for a perfect storm.  I began to be judgmental of those who smugly dismissed Christian faith.  I may have said, and I certainly thought, that those people were in significant danger of hell.  But my real judgment was reserved for the Christians I knew.  These were people who, it seemed to me, ought to know better.  I could see no reason why the things that seemed to me to be so incredibly important should not seem equally important to everyone else who called themselves a Christian.  I looked around at my group of friends and thought that nobody really cared about God but me.  I looked around at the campus ministries at UNI and even around the United Methodist Church and felt that, if people could just do more of the things that I was doing, the church would be renewed.

A clear example of this kind of thinking came to me through my good friend.  He was having some conflict with someone who was significantly pro-life and who was expressing his displeasure that his home church didn't seem to get as excited as he did about the issue of abortion.  While everyone has their own strong feelings about the issue of abortion, my friend responded like this.  "You can't expect everyone to have the same passions that you do.  Everyone can't focus on the same thing.  Not only would that define what Christians should be about in an incredibly narrow way, it would also leave a lot of important things undone.  For example, the campus ministry I am in leadership with is very much concerned with interracial and global justice.  That is no less Christian and no less of a need."

As has been so often the case in my life, I needed to be able to see my own problems in someone else before I could realize how deep they were in myself.  The next time I read the story of Elijah, I was amazed that I so often do the same thing that he was doing.  I took myself as the standard of what a Christian should be doing, a dangerous thing to be sure, and then, since other people didn't share the same gifts, graces and passions as I did, I assumed they were not Christians or at least that they were sub-Christian.  I never once asked God what he thought.  I simply assumed.

It is so easy to do this.  It is so easy to get caught up in the things that we are passionate about; after all, we are passionate about them. We think they are important, perhaps the most important things in the world and we can't imagine why other people wouldn't see them the same way; and if our passions are even remotely close to things we could make an argument are related to the Christian life, such as reading the Scriptures in my case, then it doesn't take much to be like Elijah and cry out to God that we are all alone, that nobody else understands God like we do, that we are even being persecuted for our devotion.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes what I have come to understand as one of the single most ignored passages in the whole Bible.  This is what he says.  "Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.  Some believe in eating anything while the weak eat only vegetables.  Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them.  Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?  It is before their own lord that they stand or fall.  And they will be upheld, for The Lord is able to make them stand."

This was Elijah's problem.  He was a particularly prominent man of God.  He had done amazing things.  If you judge every Israelite by whether they have performed as many miracles as Elijah you aren't going to have many "real" people of God before long.  What Elijah had to learn was that God is not interested in the yardsticks that we use to judge ourselves and others.  He simply doesn't ask us whether someone is faithful or not, which is a good thing since we all fall short and might find ourselves on the wrong side of the dividing line if he did.  God is more graceful than humans are, than we are, and that is good news.

There are times when we feel tremendously lonely, that we are the only ones who do what we do.  Whether we never even dream of saying it out loud, even just to God, or whether we have alienated those we love by our declarations that nobody else understands or that nobody else is faithful, it is easy to get caught up in the Elijah Syndrome.  If you have the Elijah Syndrome today, know that the God who has worked mightily in you is working mightily in others, even if it doesn't look like you think it should.  If you have loved ones who seem to have it, remember that when God shook Elijah out of his attitude, it was not in the wind, earthquake or fire, but in the still, small voice, in the place of intimacy and trust.  It was the gentleness of God that opened Elijah's eyes.

You are not alone, even when you feel alone.  The Lord is with you and so are your brothers and sisters in Christ.  If you can't see God's work in them, go looking for it.  It is there, and it is every bit as glorious as the work of God in you.  Let us pray.

AMEN

The Greatest of These (9/23/12)

          09/23/12                  The Greatest of These               Grace UMC

When I was in seminary, I had to try to find my way through the difficult tangle of mass that has come to be known as "modern theology."  Since the late eighteenth century, trying to understand every new movement that came along and the changes that took place in thinking is a cause for headache in even the most brilliant people I have ever met.  Don't get me wrong, not all modern academic theologians are bad.  In fact, some of the best theologians in the history of the church have lived within the last hundred years, but the mainstream of thought took a frightening turn by the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Every once in a while, my classmates and I, who are a fairly traditional bunch who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, God in flesh, that he was born of the Virgin Mary, that he died, was raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven, would find a thinker that didn't seem to be too bad.  Whenever this happened, a student would invariably raise their hand and say, "Dr. Colyer [our theology professor], I think this person makes a lot of sense.  I think they are saying the same thing that I believe."

I will never forget the advice that our professor would give in response to these kinds of comments.  "When reading modern theology, you need to always remember to not just look at the vocabulary, but to look at the dictionary."  What he was trying to point out is that words don't have fixed, unchanging meanings but mean what they mean because of how someone uses them.  Sometimes, you will find that you will hear someone use a familiar term in an entirely unfamiliar way.  Without going any further, our American political season seems to be full of this, where both parties use the same words but mean very different things.

What we find is that this observation is extremely relevant to the church and to Christian faith.  It is true that Christians use different terms than everyone else does, because we speak of incarnation, atonement, salvation, regeneration, and resurrection, but we also use a lot of the same terms that the rest of the world uses.  We speak of churches being successful or unsuccessful, but we do not mean the same thing as the business world does when it uses those terms.  Churches are successful or unsuccessful, not based on how many people come to worship on Sunday morning, not because of money in the bank, and not because they have cool programs that attract people.  The success of a church is determined by whether people are being transformed by the Spirit.  It is something that you simply can't represent on paper.  Church success is not, at the end of the day, something that you can see, but something that you can feel.

If we wanted to, we could make a list as long as you like of terms that Christians and the church use that look and sound like terms that other people use but are significantly different, but that would get boring before too long.  I want to focus more intentionally on the idea of love, because we can hardly find a place where the church and the rest of the world are more different than in our understanding of love.

Over a year ago, having been newly appointed to Grace United Methodist Church, I preached a sermon that used the same text from the first letter of John to explore the concept of "grace."  We have just heard the text again but for a very different reason.  I want to point out that, not only do words mean different things based on how they are used, they also take on different meanings, or at least might mean more, when they are spoken by particular people.

For example, Tertullian was a significant leader in the church in North Africa in the second and third century.  He has gained the reputation of being an extremely strict moralist, that is, he felt that people needed to live morally and that was the most important thing.  Eventually, toward the end of his life, he left the mainstream of Christian faith and joined a heretical group called the Montanists because they were, in his eyes, far more morally rigorous than the rest of the church.  It wasn't too long before he became convinced that the Montanists weren't being moral enough, so he made his own group that was supposed to be even more strict.  The point is that there are lots of times where Tertullian criticizes groups of people for being morally lazy.  That is, of course, a serious charge, but when someone like Tertullian makes it, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because nobody is good enough for him.  However, when he says, "People take this issue far too seriously," and he does say that from time to time, it means a lot.

Here is John, the son of Zebedee, who is writing to the church and talking about love.  What makes his words so interesting is not just that the Bible says it, but that it is John who says it.  Before he was transformed by the power of God through Christ and in the Spirit, John was a harsh person.  In Mark chapter nine, we read, "John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us."  In Luke nine, we read, "When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.  And he sent messengers ahead of him.  On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.  When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?'"

Perhaps most interesting is a story toward the end of Mark's gospel.  "James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, 'Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.'  And he said to them, 'What is it you want me to do for you?'  And they said to him, 'Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.'"  My point is that this is a man who was ready to stop anyone who wasn't part of his own group from ministering to others, who was ready to call down fire from heaven to punish those who did not yet understand, and wanted to sit on a great seat of power and was willing to boldly ask for it.

The story in the early church was that, toward the end of his life, and John was one of the very few apostles who died a natural death, he no longer had the strength to preach like he once did.  He would be assisted in front of the congregation and simply say four words:  children, love one another.  A sermon of four words, but they are not just four words.  They are four words that are bolstered by the entire life that was transformed.  When John speaks of love, they are the words of a man who has known what it is like to be decidedly un-loving, who has wanted power, who has wanted to strike down his fellow human beings.  They are, by their very nature, words of repentance.  They are not naïve words, words that he says just because it sounds like the right thing to say, but words that come out of a long history of having old habits burned out of him and replaced with love.

I want to turn now to the words of Christ that we heard a few minutes ago.  "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."  It is fascinating to me that when Jesus tells us what to do, it is to love one another, but, as I said earlier, we cannot assume, when Jesus says to love one another, that he means exactly the same thing as the rest of the world does when they say it.

How does our society talk about love?  On one level, we speak of love as an emotion that comes and goes; that we do not just fall in love, but that we fall out of love as well.  We talk about love as if it means that to love someone is to make them happy at all times and never seriously challenge them or stand against them or something they do.  We have a thriving sub-genre of literature today that seems to be dead-set on promoting an image of what a romantic, loving relationship can and should be that is nothing less than shocking and abusive.  Sometimes, when we say the word "love," we speak of enduring commitment, even when times get tough.  Other times, when we use it, we talk about how much we love pizza.

The question is, what does Jesus mean when he tells us to love one another, and he tells us right here.  He says, "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."  Now how has Jesus loved us?  He has existed for all eternity, in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Spirit and then willingly came and joined us in our world of space and time with all the hardship that entails.  Paul expresses this well in his letter to the Philippians.  "Let the same mind be in you that was in 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."
That is the kind of love that Jesus calls us to have.  It is not a love that counts the cost of what is needed before it acts.  It is a love, as the famous passage reads, that is patient, kind, not envious or rude.  "It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  Perhaps most importantly, it is not a love that waits for the the one it loves to get everything right, or indeed anything right but takes the initiative.  Again, as Paul points out so powerfully, "For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.  Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might dare to die.  But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

Here is a fact for you that, while it might not agree with what we might be naturally inclined to think and it might not agree with insights from the business world or other organizations, nevertheless is true to the gospel.  The single most important thing that will convince people of the truth of the gospel and transform the world is not preaching, it is not church music, it is not Christian programming, and it is not voting Christian values into law.  It is the witness of the people of God who have been transformed by the love and grace of God and then who have lives that share this love and grace with others.  There is no substitute for love.  To again cite that famous passage on love, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

If you wonder why the gospel doesn't seem to have the impact that it should in the world today, the first thing you should do is look at yourself and ask yourself a question and, for your own sake, do not assume you already know the answer.  Are you living as a witness to the transforming love and grace of God?  If not, that is your first step.  Pray that God would so transform your life that you cannot help but bear witness to God's grace and love.  Pray for the Spirit to move both in your life and in the lives of others so that real transformation might happen.  Do not give up and do not rest until God gives what he has promised.  I don't mean that if you aren't perfect or if you still have problems that God can't use you, but there is no limit to the deliverance and joy that God can give you if you will allow him to.

If so; if your life is marked, every day, by love, if you can look over your life and give thanks to God that, even if you aren't where you want to be, you are no longer where you have been, ask yourself how you can go out and share that with others so that they too can become such witnesses.  Every once in a while, you will hear someone say, in an election season like this one, that if you do not vote, you cannot complain.  You were given a chance for your voice to be heard, even if it is a small one and you didn't take it.  If we aren't being faithful in what God has called us to be about, we have lost all right to complain.  If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.

What is the first thing that people would notice when they enter this place?  Is it that the people love each other more than themselves?  Is it that it is clear that God is present in this place, that this is a gathering of people whose lives are marked by grace and in the process of being transformed?  Is it that, even if we can't quite put our finger on it, something significant is happening and we want to be a part of it?  If it isn't, we need to ask ourselves what we can do.

If you look in the New Testament, you will never find a single passage where the church is commanded to put on a well-crafted, professional quality worship service.  There is simply no place that describes the secret to the spread of the gospel as the development of clever church programs.  Nowhere will you uncover a hint that the best thing to do is to look at what seems successful to the outside observer and use that to develop ministries that may or may not resonate with the people who actually do them.  There are only two commands.  The first is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.

This command to love is absolutely central.  We are not told that people will know that we are God's people because of our big buildings, or that we have great social services, or that we have captivating preachers, or world-class musicians.  We are not told that the best way to find out if someone belongs to God is by what they affirm as a statement of faith.  We are given one and only one distinctive mark: love. We might wish that we were given something else to do since the idea that we should love one another sounds so much like what we hear in our world today.  In fact, love is actually the hardest thing we could be asked to do since the love with which we are called to love one another, real love, love like Christ's, is not only difficult but impossible.  It is a love that is so completely other than what the world is capable of that a person, a community that loves like Christ loves sticks out like a sore thumb.  They cannot be hidden, like a lamp on a lampstand or a city on a hill.  This is our calling and this is our promise, that we be people who love like Jesus loved because we are the ones in whom the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells.  Divine love and a transformed world are the inheritance promised to us.  Let us go and not just do nice things, Christian things, but go and be the people of God who love one another like Christ loved us so that all will know that we are disciples of Christ and that the world might yearn to join us.

Let us pray   AMEN

1 Corinthians 15:12-19 (What the Resurrection Tells Us)

04/29/12 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 Grace UMC

When I was a kid, I remember always being confused by the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Christmas, after all, is only one day. It might be the case that we spend a few weeks building up to it, but it is just one day; that's it. Sometimes, we will speak of there being a "Christmas Season" but what do we mean when we say that? We mean the season of Advent. If you were to look at the church calendar, you would find that there actually is a Christmas season, and it is after Advent; in fact, you will find that the twelve days of Christmas are twelve days of celebration starting on Christmas and going until Epiphany. We might not always pay very much attention to it, but there is a whole season dedicated to celebrating Christmas, but what often happens? We tend to talk about Jesus coming into the world during Advent and then stop thinking about it altogether once the presents are opened.

The reason why I bring this up at the end of April is because there is an Easter season, too, and it isn't just the season of Lent. There are six Sundays between Easter and Pentecost, which is just enough time to forget about one and how it connects to the other. Well, I want to do my part to try to make this an Easter season and spend some time talking about the resurrection of Christ, but not so much the Easter story as such but what the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead in glory has to tell us about you and me and this life that we live in this world of ours.

It should come as no surprise that there are a lot of people who are not all that interested in taking the resurrection of Christ seriously. After all, do you know anyone who has been raised from the dead like Jesus was, in glory and never to die again? In the modern era, there has been some concern about whether the church should really be proclaiming such a gospel that includes a physical resurrection since it is so foreign to our experience. In the last few hundred years, there has been a significant reinterpretation of the story of Easter. The whole mainstream of what we call today "modern" theology has tended to say that the story of Easter is far less a story of what actually happened to Jesus in a tomb that morning and far more a story of the experience of the disciples that same day. That is to say, when we say that Christ was raised from the dead, we don't mean, according to this view, that a dead body spontaneously returned to life, got up and walked out of a tomb; we mean that the disciples had a profound encounter with the spirit of Jesus that was so strong that it was as if he was raised from the dead.

Now, what is the problem with that? If you look at it from a particular point of view, it doesn't seem all that bad. After all, if we imagine that Jesus' ministry was primarily, if not exclusively, about telling us how to be good and how to live in harmony with everyone else, what difference does it make whether he was physically raised or not? Not a whole lot. What it means to be a so-called "good person" doesn't fundamentally change if a particular person is alive or dead. In fact, given that we can all agree that we ought to love one another, like Jesus said, and resurrections are hard to believe, maybe we should spend our time talking about the former and kind of ignore the latter, perhaps hoping that it will go away and we won't have to deal with it.

As it turns out, the question as to whether Jesus was literally, physically raised from the dead is extremely important. According to Paul, it is something upon which the whole gospel stands or falls, which is not something he says about just anything. In his first letter to the Corinthians, which we just heard, he lays out an argument that goes something like this. "Now guys, I hear that some of you are saying that there is no such thing as people being raised from the dead, that dead is dead and that is the end of it. Now, if there is no such thing as resurrection, then nobody is raised from the dead, which means even Christ has not been raised from the dead since he is a somebody. Here's the problem, though. We have been proclaiming, and you all believed, that Jesus has been raised from the dead and that it is through this death and resurrection of Christ that God has worked out our salvation and we have been reconciled to God. So, if it is true that there are no such things as resurrections, then Christ has not been raised, which means that the gospel that is built on his death and resurrection is useless, which means your faith is useless, and we have all been deceived. If we trust in a Christ who has died and will live no more, we are the most pitiful people in all the world."

Now, I pointed out earlier, that if Jesus' main point was simply to teach us a good way to live and that we should be generally nice to each other, then it doesn't matter whether he was raised from the dead or not, but Paul seems to think that it makes a huge difference whether Christ is really raised or not. What then are we to conclude from this? If nothing else, it is that Jesus came to do far more than simply turn us into "nice" people. What is it that we learn from the resurrection of Christ from the dead?

We learn that our bodies really matter to God. I remember that I used to imagine that, once Jesus ascended to heaven forty days after he was raised, it was the end of his humanity, that Jesus shed his humanity like a snake sheds his skin. I don't know for sure why I thought that, since the Bible doesn't say that anywhere. I imagine that I thought that, since it was such a tremendous sacrifice for God to become a human being, when the time for being physically present with his people was done, he wouldn't need his body anymore. After all, what purpose would it serve? And yet, what we actually read in the Bible is that God becomes a human being, dies as a human being, is raised from the dead as a human being, ascends to heaven as a human being and will one day come again in final victory as a human being. That means that Jesus is a human being right now and will be forever.

This is really astonishing news. It means that, not only did God enter into our world of space and time in Christ but it means that God has taken our world of space and time back into God's own life in Christ. It means that the God who is so self-sufficient that he never needed to create anything has so loved humanity, has so loved you and me, that he has taken humanity back up into his own life, that human beings are so loved by God that he would join himself to our humanity forever. If nothing else, this means that salvation was never meant to be merely a gift of spiritual joy where we get to go to heaven, as amazing as heaven is. Rather, salvation is something that impacts every area of our lives, both our souls and our bodies.

The resurrection of Christ from the dead means that God knows what it is like to be a human being and to endure all of the trials of life, including that final trial of death. It means that when Jesus sends his disciples out, giving them a Great Commission to go and fulfill, he is not simply doing so as the God of the Universe who has the authority to command and expect it to be done; he does so as our elder brother, as the one who knows our suffering, our hurts, our limitations, our fears as well as our hopes, and entrusts his plan into our hands (which we might sometimes wonder whether it is a good idea to do so). When Jesus says that he will be with his disciples until the end of the age, it is not just that he is going to disperse like a gas cloud to the farthest reaches of the earth but that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ the God-Man will be by their side, in the nitty-gritty of life and the hard work we find ourselves engaged in.

I don't know about you, but I am quite glad to know that I have a God who knows what it is like to live in this world because, in spite of all the differences between first century Israel and twenty-first century Iowa, people are people. We all still have problems with money, with other people, we still have days where we don't like the weather, we have accidents, we make mistakes, and we live with broken relationships that seem like they never heal, regardless of what we do. God doesn't just know about all of that because he is God and knows everything, but because he has actually stepped into the middle of this broken world and experienced it for himself in an incredibly intimate and personal way.

One of the most welcome things that the resurrection of Christ from the dead means is that the way things are is not the way they will always be. It is easy to get into the mindset that, when we see Jesus raised from the dead, its just something for him and has nothing to do with us, other than the guarantee that our sins have been forgiven. And yet there are places in the New Testament where we read things like this, in the letter to the Romans: "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you." Paul wants to make it as clear as possible that the resurrection of Christ from the dead is not just a nice thing to believe and a thing to sing about on Easter Sunday, but something that impacts your life and your future. The good news is not simply that Christ is raised, but that, because Christ is raised, you too shall be raised.

At the end of the day, that is what Paul is saying in the text from First Corinthians. He starts out by responding to the claim that the dead are not raised, which is in many ways a reasonable claim as I pointed out earlier, by pointing out how disastrous such a claim is to the belief that Christ was raised from the dead. But we need to remember that Paul has no interest in doing what many Christians, especially Christians who are interested in theological issues enjoy doing, and I realize that I myself fall into that category; he has no interest in simply arguing a point that has no real impact on our world. At first glance, if we looked at it the right way, we could say that Paul is simply combatting with others over the issue of whether they have the "right" doctrines or not. We could interpret it as a preeminent example of a theological bully, marginalizing the beliefs of others in order to assert his own. But that would be terribly misleading.

After all, Paul is not interested in reinforcing a "party line," a narrow orthodoxy that is more interested in drawing lines to keep people out than sharing good news with them. According to Paul, the reason that we need to take the resurrection seriously is not because we need to pass some doctrinal examination, but because our future is bound up with it. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

In the resurrection we see our future. It is a future of glory, of life, of healing. We see that, as final as death may seem to us, and we have all seen what power death seems to have, for it has touched each of us in one way or another, it is not the last word for us. Our God is a God who conquers the grave, and who not only conquers it for himself, but makes us share in that same victory. There can be no wonder why those first Christians remained bold in the face of persecution. They knew the truth of what Jesus told his disciples, "I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more." The worst the enemies of the gospel could do is kill Christians but they had no power beyond that, and in Christ, we can see that a power that can kill the body but nothing more isn't all that powerful compared to God.

We as Christians are called to be bold, to live strong in our faith in the good news of Jesus Christ. But what is the source of our boldness? It certainly isn't because we are better than non-Christians because it doesn't take much to look around and realize that Christians are sometimes some of they very worst behaved people around. It isn't because we have all our answers right in our heads because most of us give very little careful thought as to what we believe; speaking for myself, I am reminded daily about how much of God I do not know. Rather it is because we follow a God who has overcome the grave and has done so from within our own humanity. We are people who have been liberated from the need to fear death. In the light of the good news, we can say along with Paul, "Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

The good news of Jesus Christ is not that things will never go wrong. They will. Often. The good news of Jesus Christ is that the things that go wrong are never so wrong as to be the final word. Something I have found myself saying to many people is that, when we as Christians say "It will be alright," we don't mean it in any kind of wishy-washy way. Rather, what we mean is, "It will be alright, even if it kills me." That is why we are called to be bold because, in a very real sense, we simply cannot be stopped. There is persecution of Christians in various parts of the world, where people have to quite literally choose which is more dear to them, their faith or their life; and yet, they are not stopped. How much more so should we here, in the relatively safe and persecution-free community of Spencer, live with boldness knowing that, as John says, "greater is the one who is in [us] than the one who is in the world."

I would like to share words from Paul's letter to the Romans that are quite familiar, but I hope that, as we dwell on the incredible implications of the gospel, they might have greater weight than they might at other times. "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, 'For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.' No, in all these things we are more than conquerers through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Let us pray.

AMEN

Jeremiah 29:1-14

02/15/12 Jeremiah 29:1-14 GUMC Youth

Have you ever heard this passage before, specifically verse eleven which reads, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope." If you haven't heard it, or at least if you don't remember that you have heard it, I guarantee that you will one day, if only when you graduate from high school. If you get a chance to go to an open house for a senior, keep your eyes open for it because it shows up everywhere. Jeremiah 29:11 is a verse that shows up every time someone graduates from something and it has been the favorite verse of a bunch of people I have met.

Why might people like the verse so much? I think because it is such a strong message of hope, such a profound declaration that God actually loves us, that God will take care of us, even when things seem hard and that, even if it looks like things aren't going well, we can trust that God's plans are for our good, not our harm. For many people, it is one of the most amazing declarations of hope in the Bible.

So, why did God say this to his people? Did Israel graduate from high school? Did God mean it for his people the same way we often mean it for our friends and family or inside greeting cards? Tonight, we are talking about the Exile of Israel, that is, the time when the Israelites were taken captive by the Babylonians and taken from their land, and I chose this passage because it is probably the single most quoted passage about the Exile that people have no idea is about the Exile. So, since we've been talking about the hugely important, overarching stories that have shaped the whole history of Israel, which means that they have shaped us, too, I wanted to finish up by spending some time trying to understand the Exile and what we can learn about God from it.

You need to understand, first of all, that God was warning people that they might be taken into Exile some day from the very beginning. You can find all kinds of passages in the first few books of the Bible where God is effectively saying, "Look, I have taken you from Egypt and brought you into the land that I promised to your fathers. Don't ever forget how you got here. You didn't free yourselves, I freed you. You didn't win this land for yourselves, I delivered it into your hands. I am the God who takes the way humans do things and turns them upside down. If you forget that you are my people and you turn away from me, I will bring about an exile where you will have to serve your enemies."

The Exile shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. It wasn't as if God sprang on the people the moment they first made a mistake. Remember what we talked about last week about the whole prophetic tradition? God had been sending prophets to the people for over a hundred years who all told the people that they needed to remember God and be faithful, that their identity was bound up with their relationship with God, that they couldn't abandon God without ceasing to be who they were, who they were meant to be. Each and every one of them warned the people of what was heading their way if they didn't change their behavior. Also, we need to realize that it wasn't as though the prophets were adding all kinds of rules for the people; they were simply reminding the people of what God had already told them years ago and pointing out in some concrete ways how they needed to change.

To make matters worse, before the Exile happened, the nation of Israel had split into two, a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom and when we talk about the Exile, we are usually talking about the exile of the Southern Kingdom. Over a hundred years before the Southern Kingdom went into exile, the Northern Kingdom was defeated by Assyria and they went into exile. The Southern Kingdom should have known better. They had seen firsthand how the people of Israel could be defeated, and yet they didn't listen. Now, we shouldn't be too hard on them. After all, I don't know if we would have done any better if we were in their situation. After all, the people in the South probably didn't think that the defeat of the people in the North had anything to say to them. After all, from their point of view, the Northern Kingdom had abandoned God so of course God let them be defeated; it would be different with God's true people. It is always easy to feel superior to someone else until the same thing happens to you.

So, the Babylonians who defeated the Southern Kingdom took the people, especially their leaders and their educated people, and took them to Babylon. This caused a serious problem for the people. God had told them over and over again that they were only supposed to worship God, in the sense of making their sacrifices, at the Temple in Jerusalem. Now they were far away from Jerusalem and couldn't make their sacrifices there if they wanted to. What are the people to do? Do they make their sacrifices in Babylon? That might make a bit of sense, but does it really help to respond to God's judgment because the people broke his laws by breaking more of his laws? The people didn't think so, so they tried to find some other way of following God.

Their answer was to develop the synagogue system. The people looked at their lives and their history and they realized that there were two parts to what God had called them to do. He told them to make sacrifices in a particular way and at a particular place and also to follow his law. Now, why were the people in exile? Not because they were making mistakes with their sacrifices. In general, they did what they were supposed to do. The problem, as the prophets pointed out, was that the people were not following God's laws. So, what is the solution? The people realized that they couldn't sacrifice in Jerusalem if they were living in Babylon, so the sacrifices were out. However, there was no reason why they couldn't obey the law. It might be the case that, by being very careful about obeying the law, they might stick out a bit; after all, Jewish people weren't supposed to dress like the Babylonians or eat the same food as the Babylonians. Do you remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? The whole reason they were thrown into the fiery furnace was because they refused to live like the Babylonians. The same is true for why Daniel was thrown into the lion's den. Both of those stories come from this Exile we are talking about.

So, if the people got in trouble for doing the sacrifices right but abandoning the law, they responded by saying, "Even though we can't make sacrifices anymore, we are going to be careful and follow every little law, so this kind of mess never happens again." This whole trend survived, even after the people got to go back to Israel and the people who really focused on the law were around when Jesus walked the earth; they were the Pharisees. In fact, we live in a world where the modern Israelites cannot sacrifice like they have been commanded so, as you might expect, this desire to follow the law carefully is still around today. Today, the people who are called Hasidic Jews are the modern descendants of this desire to carefully observe every part of the law.

The bigger issue, however, is that the Israelites realized that they were not meant to live anywhere else but where God had given them to live. They had originally thought that this would mean that God would simply not allow them to be defeated, but this didn't happen. All kinds of people were asking "Where is God in the midst of all of this? How could God have let this happen?" They were supposed to live in that particular place. How were they supposed to be who they were meant to be so long as they were forced to live somewhere else?

This kind of frustration is clear in one of the more controversial passages in the Bible, Psalm 137. "By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, 'Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!' O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"

Not exactly a happy song, is it? Whether what they are saying here is a good thing or not, whether you agree with it or not, whether you even like it or not, can you at least understand the kind of anguish of soul that the people were going through? Their whole world had been turned upside down. Their anger is understandable. It feels as though God has abandoned them. All of a sudden, the warnings of the prophets seem to be all too clear. When they look back over the years of their lives, it starts to seem amazing that the people could have missed God's clear warnings. What, if anything, could they have done to prevent this?

And yet, the word of comfort, the reminder that God loves his people came from a singularly unexpected source: one of the prophets. Jeremiah was a prophet who relentlessly warned the people about what might very well happen if they didn't return to God and now it has happened. If Jeremiah was like we all too often are, we would expect him to say things like, "I told you so, but you didn't listen to me, did you? How do you like it now?" And yet, that is not at all what he says. Instead, he is transformed from being a vehicle for the judgment and warning of God to being a vehicle for the blessings and comfort of God. And yet, this isn't a contradiction, it is a window into the heart of God.

What we see in this transformation is not that God or Jeremiah changed their minds, but that when God said that he was primarily concerned about the people and that he didn't want the people to die but wanted them to turn from their evil ways, he actually meant it. The point of the Exile was not to destroy the people, but to remind them of who they were and whose they were. The last thing God wanted was any harm for the people, but when they refused to listen to words, it was worth the difficult times of the Exile in order to get the people back to who they were supposed to be.

What did this Jeremiah, who had spent so much time telling people that they needed to get their acts together or else they would go into exile, have to say when they actually went into exile? "Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

Why would God give this advice to his people? In the following verses we read that there were other people, who were either calling themselves prophets are were being called prophets by others, who were saying that God was going to bring the people back anytime now. We get the idea that these people were saying either that God would realize what a terrible mistake he had made in allowing his people to go into exile and make everything right or else he would raise up a great leader who would deliver them. Jeremiah's words, as often as we hear them in encouraging situations, were once again not the words that the people wanted to hear. "What?" you can imagine the people saying, "We are supposed to build houses and settle down with families, put down roots and get involved in the community of Babylonians? Why should we do that? Isn't it not showing faith that God will deliver us?" And yet, Jeremiah was saying that the people needed to get used to the fact that they were going to be in Babylon for a while.

So what do we learn from this? We learn a hard truth and a welcome truth. The hard truth is that sometimes, when we make mistakes, we have to live with the consequences. Sometimes when we finally figure things out, when we finally actually do what is right, we don't have to suffer any consequences for what we have done, but sometimes those consequences still come. The people who never listened to God until the consequences came wanted to be faithful, but they didn't care about being faithful in order to be faithful, which is what God wanted, they only wanted to be faithful so they could get out of trouble. What is amazing is that, in order for the lesson to really be learned that we cannot treat our relationship with God like dirt, not even God could reduce the time the people were going to be in captivity. Anything less than the seventy years and the lesson would not be learned.

The welcome truth is that, in spite of the fact that it seemed to be a giving up of hope to settle down and build houses in Babylon, in spite of the fact that the people were being punished by God for what they had done, God had not abandoned them. He says, "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope." What God told those people and what he is telling us is that, during those times when it doesn't seem like things are going right, when it seems that the only real option you have is not the one you want, God has not abandoned you. God's plans for you are for your welfare and not for harm, for a future with hope.

What we find is that what the passage really means isn't anything less than what we thought it meant by looking at all those cards, it means so much more. It means that our God cares for us more than we can possibly imagine, that how things seem to us isn't always what they really are. It means when all hope seems lost we can say, "God, I don't know what's going on, but I know that through whatever I have to face, your plans are for my good. You are the God who brings good that we could never expect out of the evil we face; make the good that I cannot see come out of this situation." God loved his people with a love that would not let them go, even when he was in the middle of correcting them. The Exile was not a sign that God had abandoned his people but a sign that he would not allow even their sin to separate them from him. How much more will God's love bind us, for whom Christ has died, to him? Let us pray.

AMEN

The Prophet Tradition

02/08/12 Jeremiah 20:7-12 GUMC Youth

Do you know what a prophet is? In our society today, we don't tend to take prophets all that seriously. Prophets are seen as somewhat primitive, oftentimes crazy people, who talk nonsensically about stuff that might happen in the future but also very well may not happen. On the other hand, I suppose that there are times that our society takes prophets incredibly seriously, though we sometimes wonder why we do. After all, it is 2012 isn't it? How much of America has spent time worrying about whether or not the world will end this year? Many would say far too much, myself included.

I think that we have a tendency to misunderstand just who the prophets were and what prophecy really is in the Bible and in our world as Christians. For example, we often think of prophets, when acting as prophets, kind of going into some kind of trance, where they stop being themselves and simply become a mouthpiece for God to speak through. That way, when we hear that a prophet said something, we should think that it is God and God alone who is speaking and everything that is said takes on a very mysterious quality. While it is true that there is a passage in the Old Testament that portrays prophets in this way, you really can't say that this is what the Old Testament prophets were really like. It is, however, exactly what the ancient Greek oracle of Delphi was supposed to be like. The oracle would breathe in these mystic vapors and then start speaking mysteries that were often incredibly difficult to make any real sense out of.

The other thing we tend to think of when we think of prophets are that they are people who give elaborate and deeply symbolic descriptions of future events. Again, though there are certainly places in the Bible where this is the case, most of the time, the symbolism wasn't so much intended to obscure what was going to happen as much as it was an attempt to adequately communicate what God was doing. The fact of the matter is that, when you try to explain what God has done and is doing, and if you don't want people to try to understand God as if he is just like everything else in our lives (which is something we do all the time), then you sometimes need to develop a completely new way of talking about things. The goal isn't to confuse people, it is to try to explain something absolutely new, so new that we simply don't have the words to describe it. It is not altogether unlike trying to explain color to someone who has been blind all their lives.

Before I get to what exactly prophets actually are in the Bible, I want to point out one more thing that they are not, a big difference between how prophets function in the history of Israel and the Old Testament and how we hear about them in other contexts. If you read stories that come from ancient Greece, you will notice that prophecy in the sense of telling the future is kind of a joke. What I mean is that you have all these heroes and kings who go to the prophets to try to find out what is going to happen in the future so they can prepare and act accordingly. That makes a lot of sense, right? You want to make decisions based on the best information you can get. But when they go, they get a prediction in the form of a riddle or something that is so incredibly vague, so amazingly unclear that it is a miracle if they can make any real sense out of it or, more often than not, the person who hears the prediction interprets it in a radically inappropriate way, going off in confidence when they should be preparing for defeat. Outside of the Israelite tradition, prophets are less people who give good information and more instruments of fate, telling people what they want to hear to make sure that everything happens in the way that has been foretold and there can be no change in the future.

By contrast, the Israelite prophets were always about telling people what God was up to, not to confuse them or to lead them down the wrong path, but to encourage them to do what was right. We have this wonderful passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel (33:11-20), where we read, "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel. And you, mortal, say to the people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin. Though I say to the righteous that they shall surely live, yet if they trust in their righteousness and commit iniquity, none of their righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity that they have committed they shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right - if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity -they shall surely live, they shall not die. None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right, they shall surely live."

The whole point of prophecy was to bring about change. Do you remember the story of the prophet Jonah, who was told to preach to the people of Nineveh, a city that hated God and he didn't want to go. We find out in the story that the reason he didn't want to go was not because he was afraid of being mistreated but because he was certain that the people would actually listen and if they listened, they wouldn't be destroyed and he wanted them to be destroyed! God sends prophets because he wants the best for us, even when we don't, and even when the prophets themselves don't.

Alright, so what is the main thing that prophets do? It is true that, sometimes, the prophets go into this kind of ecstatic trance and it is true that, sometimes, the prophets tell about future events and acts of God that are far beyond the ability of normal human knowledge, but that is not what they do most of the time. While it is true that the prophets are often foretellers, they spend most of their time as what we could call forthtellers. More often than not, the prophets we read about in the Bible are people who end up as advisors to kings, not necessarily because the kings want to have the prophets around but because they can't seem to get away from them. The main way the prophets functioned was as someone who stood outside of the mainstream of the political world who looked at the same events that everyone else was looking at but, instead of asking first, "How can we win our battles and make our nation great," would ask, "What is God doing in the midst of all this? Are we being faithful? Are we really doing what the people of God should be doing? Are we listening to God at all?" It is interesting that the constant claims we hear about various politicians being an "outsider," whether it is true or not, is based on this idea that those in political power need to be reminded of other ways of looking at the world.

Now, when we look at things from our American point of view, where we see all kinds of people on TV and on the internet who criticize the government and point out their mistakes, and we ourselves even join in the blame placing and finger pointing, we might get the idea that this role of the prophet was something that everyone wanted to do. After all, it is kind of fun to get into an argument where we can show everyone how right we are and how wrong someone else is. And yet, however respected the prophets may or may not have been at any given time, when we actually read what they had to say, we find that they didn't always want to be a prophet. Perhaps the strongest example is the text we read at the beginning, where Jeremiah said that God tricked him into being a prophet and that he wishes that he could just keep his mouth shut and not have to talk about God and what God wants, but every time he does, he says, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot."

The prophets were constant messengers from God to call his people back to faithfulness. They were the concrete and physical reminders that God still loved his people and it that it breaks his heart when we forget him and live as if he didn't really exist. These were people who, because of their ministry, helped to mould and shape a whole community over hundreds of years. It seems pretty clear how, when Israel was faithful, they were bound all the more firmly to God, but the whole prophetic tradition shows us that the mistakes of the people did not stop God from claiming them and calling them his own. Every time a prophet spoke out against the people, it was a declaration of God's love and faithfulness. Even when it seemed harsh, it was truly an act of love. After all, God doesn't need any of us. If he decided that he had had enough of the Israelites, he could easily have just turned his back and rejected them. Nothing would have been simpler. The fact that God continued to reach out to his people after they rejected him over and over and over again shows just how much God truly loves us.

Not everyone loved the prophets, though. As you can imagine, you can only go up to powerful political leaders and tell them things they don't want to hear and tell them that they have abandoned God so many times before you start to get picked on. Remember, Israel was a nation that, by definition was bound to God. For the prophets to say that Israel had abandoned God, even though God had not abandoned them, was to say that the nation and its leaders have completely lost their way, are not who they ought to be, have committed a crime, not against the people, but against God. They were not very popular among the people they came to speak to. Though we do not hear many details in the Bible, we know that many of the prophets in the Bible came to tragic ends. Some were beheaded, others, according to the book of Hebrews (11:35-38), "were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented - of whom the world was not worthy."

The question I want to ask you tonight and I want you to think hard about it both tonight and in the days to come, is "Who are the prophets in your life today?" Who are the people you know who stand up for what is right, even when everyone else around hates them for it? Who are the people who care so much about you that they will tell you that you are doing something wrong when everyone else is too afraid of hurting your feelings to say anything? Who are the people who wish they weren't in the spotlight because of what they believe but keep getting pushed into it because they don't really have a choice? I'm not talking about people who want to beat people with their faith and set out to do so, I mean the people whose lives are maybe a bit odd, but completely sincere and marked by love, even if that love looks a bit different than our world wants it to. Are there any prophets like that around? Are there any in your life? Do you want God to speak into your life and tell you what he wants you to do, even if it means that you need to do something that you may not want to do?

Here's another question. "Are you a prophet?" Most of the time, when people are asked that question today, their first reaction is to say, "Of course not. I'm not a prophet." But when they are asked, they almost always are thinking of some great and holy leader who sits on a pedestal or wears a sign on the street corner and spouts off symbolic doomsday predictions or something like that. My question is not whether you are like that. My question is whether you are a person who is so concerned for what God has done, is doing and will do that you are willing to stand for God when everyone around is against him, even if they would never say they are against him? Are you willing to be faithful even when nobody else seems to see the need for it? If so, it probably feels like everyone around gets all worked up over things that don't matter and seem to not care at all about the things that do matter. It probably feels like you are the only one who cares about God (though you should know that it isn't true. Lots of people care about God, even if it doesn't always feel like it). If that is you, you probably don't understand what people are getting at when they say, "You need to bring your faith into every area of your life," because you can't understand how faith can really be faith if it isn't something that affects every area of life.

Our world is desperately in need of prophets, but I don't think that it is because God simply isn't calling people to be prophets. I think it is because the people who God has called to be prophets don't realize that is what it is that they have been called to be because they've gotten the wrong idea of what the prophetic ministry is. Here is something that we read in the first letter of Peter. "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." Is God calling to be a prophet, to be a witness for what God has done and is doing in Spencer? Let us pray.

AMEN