The Failure (and Ironic Success) of Apologetics

The Failure (and Ironic Success) of Apologetics

        In 1988, a book by Alasdair MacIntyre was published under the title, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?  Without attempting to summarize the argument of its 400 pages, suffice it to say that MacIntyre demonstrates admirably that Justice (and, by extension, morality) is a word or concept that means different things to different cultures and times.  He traces, as a paradigm case, the change from what people meant by "justice" and "rationality" (two ideas MacIntyre claims are always deeply intertwined) from presocratic Greek thought, through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, through the Middle Ages to Hume and his heirs.  The change, even within Western history, striking.

         Some would argue that this means that there is no such thing as "absolute" justice, morality, rationality and the rest.  The argument being, if so many different cultures disagree on what these terms mean, how can we possibly say that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong?  This is amplified when we consider that we have a tendency to assume that the rationality, etc. that we are immersed (or grew up) in is "right."  In such a case, how can a claim to be committed to an "absolute" truth of any kind be anything other than a new form of imperialism, where we go into new cultures and, under the guise of spreading "rationality" or "truth," in fact end up spreading nothing more than our own forms of thought and life?

        I am not entirely convinced that arguments like MacIntyre's (and also, in their own way, of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others within the philosophy and history of science) lead us to conclude that there is and can be no such thing as absolute truth.  Rather, it means that, if there is such a thing as absolute truth, which is not just a characteristic of Christian faith but also is true of philosophical systems like Plato's (as well, incidentally, of Eastern philosophies which do not so much emphasize what is, but what is not which, ultimately, presuppose their own metaphysical convictions), we do not have access to it in any way that somehow manages to bypass a particular language and conceptual framework.

        There has been a longstanding strategy in modern Christian apologetics which gets an awful lot of mileage out of the idea (which, in my opinion, is suspect if not entirely false) that, because all human beings are created in the image of God, we all share a kind of common moral awareness.  By building on that, along with other related claims to commonality, apologists often try to reason that the "whence" of that moral awareness is God, and therefore, since everyone already believes in moral standards, everyone already believes in God.  It should be noted that, while many contemporary apologists for Christian faith would identify as being theologically (if not politically) conservative, this idea has far more in common with the theology of Schleiermacher, the father of Liberal theology, than the example of Paul the apostle and the other Biblical authors.  It should also be noted that, even if this line of reasoning were valid, it would not be a victory for Christian faith but for classical theism.  Any train of thought that simply does not take the actual life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ is not a distinctly "Christian" argument.

        What is interesting is that, in addition to the fact that this line of argument is not good theology, nor is it good apologetics, it is also fundamentally flawed from a philosophical and sociological point of view.  The irony of this is that anyone who is involved in missionary work can see the flaws.  It does not matter into what culture you enter, there are interesting differences as to what is "just" or "moral" that belie any real confidence in the standard apologetic argument from morality.  The best one could say is that, because every culture has moral standards (though they are often very different from one another), the source of the existence of standards in general (not the standards themselves) is God.  If this line of reasoning is sound, it is no more helpful than the other.  There have been several missionaries in the last twenty years or so who have shared how their experiences in other cultures have called into question their conviction that their own culture was the standard by which to judge the values of others, but this has challenged them to reflect all the more deeply about the nature of justice, morality and truth, rather than abandon them.

        All of this is to say that this line of reasoning (that truth and faith are bound up with moral standards) has become so deeply engrained into our culture that both the theological (and political) left and right believe it.  In fact, it has become something of a basic axiom which people have turned into a means to critique Christian faith from a new angle.  The argument goes something like this.  You are correct that I have a deep moral sense.  It is part of my very identity and I believe it, even when other things seem uncertain.  When I take this moral sense and I read parts of the Bible (or, as often as not, when I hear others tell me what is in the Bible), I find things there that violate my sense of right and wrong and so, therefore, I stand in judgment over what I find there.

        It is significant that, in many ways, this is nothing more than a contemporary, non-Christian (not to say atheistic) appropriation of the apologetical argument from morality.  While Christian apologists attempted to say, "Anyone who reflects for a minute on their sense of morality will realize that the gospel is true," these new non-Christian apologists are attempting to say, "Anyone who reflects for a minute on their sense of morality will realize that the gospel is ridiculous, as well as the Bible in which we read about it."  It is deeply ironic that this way or arguing has demonstrated that the apologists have actually won, even if their victory doesn't look like they wanted.  They have finally convinced the American people of their major premise, that our moral sense ought to be judge of everything else.  The only problem is that people took that major premise and concluded, not that they were immoral, but that the gospel is immoral.  If we combine this with a decreased sense of the majesty of the Christian tradition (which may or may not be too bad a thing), we find that people are unwilling to give the gospel the benefit of the doubt and, when their first encounter is bad, simply dismiss the rest.

        The problem with this is that, in the attempt to reveal Christians as naïve and non-Christians as enlightened, the secular world has joined large portions of the church in their naïveté by becoming every bit as imperialistic and paternalistic as the views they condemn.  We don't say that sex-slavery is wrong because it violates our own, culturally conditioned notion of how we ought to treat other people; it is wrong because it violates universal human rights.  In many ways, this is a more arrogant position than a Christian position that says that, because sex-slavery is clearly against what God would will, as revealed in Christ, it is against God and therefore is wrong, which at least recognizes that we need to be informed by God what really is right and wrong and that we cannot trust our feelings to always be right on the topic of morality, because it presupposes that there is something about humanity that should make it clear what is right and wrong and that people who do otherwise are not just in communities that have not yet been shaped by the gospel but are fundamentally evil and must be restrained from maintaining their tradition.

        If we cannot understand that other people have different points of view from ourselves and that we will need to translate and, at a more basic level, learn to listen, we will never rise above name-calling.  Baptizing our own point of view and using it as the standard by which to judge others does not become magically noble when separated from Christian faith.  Secular culture is every bit as biased and full of agenda as religious culture.  What we must do is learn how to work together and acknowledge the fact that, if indeed there is such a thing as absolute truth (which, as a Christian, I believe in wholeheartedly) it very well may stand in every bit as much judgment over me as it does over you.

"The Relevance of Christmas"

      12/16/12            "The Relevance of Christmas"          Grace UMC

In my experience, I can hardly go more than a few weeks without hearing someone who wants to talk about the relevancy of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  People are concerned with whether the church, and the gospel it proclaims, is relevant to the lives of people today.  There seems to be a widespread concern that the gospel, or at least the church is irrelevant.  What is interesting is not that there are people who are concerned with the relevance of the Gospel but rather the people who are so concerned.  The people who are saying these things so I can hear it are not my atheist friends.  After all, they don't need to express concern with what they perceive to be the irrelevance of the gospel; they simply ignore it.  It is actually the pastors I know who are very much worried about the relevance of the gospel.

This quest for "relevance" has been going on for a long time now.  In fact, we could trace the modern crisis over relevance in the church to some trends that started at the very beginning of the 19th century.  With the rise of the Enlightenment and modern science, there were many people who thought that Christianity as traditionally understood could no longer be believed.  Some people rejected the new ideas entirely, separating their faith from the world that was investigated by science, the world in which they lived their daily lives.  Others simply abandoned the faith of their childhood to take up a new faith, whose basic statement of faith could be, "Science is God, and Newton is his prophet."

There were others still who tried to reconcile their old faith with the new science.  First, there was an attempt to show that Christian faith and natural science were simply not in conflict.  While this might be true in fact, there was no question that there was indeed a conflict between science as people understood it at the time, and the way most people practiced their faith.  Then, there was an attempt to show that basic Christian beliefs could be arrived at through philosophy and science and there were many people who proclaimed loudly that this was the case.  After all, they argued, what did the philosophy and science of the Enlightenment teach us?  That there is one God over all, that all human beings are brothers and sisters, and that we ought to be nice to one another.  It is as that classical Enlightenment document says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There is, of course, a problem with that.  Historically speaking, none of those have been considered to be the basic building blocks of Christian faith.  It is true that Christian faith proclaims one God, but it is not the abstract god of the Enlightenment, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came and lived among us.  It is true that we believe that we are all bound together, but we are not bound together simply because we are human beings, but because we are people for whom Christ has died.  Ought we be nice to one another?  Absolutely, but not simply for the sake of being nice, but because we have been commissioned to continue Christ's earthly ministry through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The fact of the matter is that, in spite of the fact that there are many people who are deeply concerned that the gospel is seen as irrelevant, I would bet that there are many people even in this room who cannot even understand the issue, who have never even doubted the relevancy of the gospel.  What is going on?  How is it that something that can be as clear as day to one group of people can be so in question by another group that there is serious concern about it?

When people say that the gospel or the church has become irrelevant, what do they mean?  They mean that the contemporary world is becoming less and less familiar with Christian concepts that, a generation ago, we could have assumed they knew.  They mean that, just as Americans have a tendency to question every authority in their lives, they also are questioning religious authority.  They mean that there are certain practices of the church that might be more bound up with a particular generation of American Christians than they are with the Bible and need to be revised.

All of that might very well be true, though I would say things are actually significantly more complicated than that.  I would contend that the younger generations are actually more interested in the church being true to its foundations than trying to make everyone happy and that if we are going to revise our practices, we should try very hard to not just change the generation we are pandering to, but pursue faithfulness to the history of our faith, a history that challenges every generation, not just the ones before (or perhaps after) our own.

Though at any moment, it is always a question whether the church is relevant, I simply cannot see how the gospel could ever become irrelevant to human beings, regardless of how much our culture changes or how much we lose our biblical literacy as a society, and the reason I have this conviction is because of what we are celebrating during the Advent and Christmas seasons.

What is it that we celebrate at Christmastime?  There are some people, to be sure, who celebrate giving but perhaps more the receiving of gifts, but surely that is not what Christmas is about.  There are others who love Christmas for no reason other than it gives them an excuse to get together with family and friends.  It is a wonderful thing to gather with loved ones, but the reason for the season is much deeper than that, isn't it?

At its core, Christmas is about the amazing fact that Almighty God, the one who spoke the universe into being, the one who delivered the Israelites from the mightiest of human kingdoms, and who continually interacted with his people through the prophets, came into our midst in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth.  Because of Christmas, we cannot speak of God as being some kind of being "out there," but as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us so much that he would not simply sit idly by and let sin destroy us but directly and decisively intervened.

Our text for this morning is one of the most amazing passages that points out the relevance of Christmas, even though people don't usually think about it when they think about Christmas.  "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete."  John is telling us that the gospel isn't just a story, it isn't just an idea about God, but a dynamic and concrete reality that we can hear and see and touch.

Christmas celebrates that the vast distance between God and humanity has been bridged by God himself.  In Christ, God has walked the same ground we walk, has breathed the same air we breathe, ate the same kinds of food that we eat, spoke with the same kinds of words that we speak, and in every way joined us where we are.  It is an absolutely staggering reality, and it is something that sets Christian faith apart as unique in the world.  Every other religion and philosophy thinks it to be absolutely insane to say that God somehow comes to us as a man.  And yet, that is precisely what God has done in Jesus Christ, come to us, in all his fullness, as a human being.  As Paul says, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba!  Father!'"

The depth of this reality is only deepened when we look at the letter to the Hebrews.  "Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.  For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.  Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.  Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested."

Again the book of Hebrews says, "Since then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.  Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

What's the point?  We have a sign in the office that says "Christmas means we never have to ask God how much he loves us."  It is a wonderful reminder that when we say to the world, "God loves you," we aren't talking about some vague idea of love.  We are saying that God loves you so much that rather than sit off aloof in his almightiness, he chose to come, to be born as a helpless baby, to be ridiculed his whole life, be hated by the authorities, betrayed by his closest friends, and ultimately executed unjustly, all for no other reason than because he loves you and wants to be reconciled.  Our God is not a god who lives up in the clouds somewhere that may or may not answer prayer or even know we exist.  Our God is not a god who micromanages every little detail so that every tiny thing is either a reward or a punishment.  Our God is a God who comes close, who meets us where we are, and who transforms us from the inside out.  God knows the struggles of human life, not because he is all knowing but because he has lived it.

I have my own theory about the problem of the relevance of the church.  The way I see it, the church, as the earthly-historical continuation of the ministry of Christ, is intrinsically relevant.  How could it be otherwise?  The church is the means appointed by God to live out the gospel, to proclaim the love of God to the world, to make a difference, to fulfill the promise of Jesus that we would do even greater things than he did!  In what possible way can that be irrelevant?  We live in a world where people are hostile to God and hostile to one another, As we have seen so painfully, just a few days ago.  We live in uncertain times where we are not sure whether we will have our job next year.  There is brokenness and despair everywhere we turn.  And in the midst of it all, we have a message of reconciliation, of transformation, of healing for all.  We have good news of God come to earth, of a God who is not an idol, but that we can hear and see and touch in Christ.  If that is so, how can it even cross our minds that the church is irrelevant?

And yet, maybe that is the problem.  It seems to me that if we ever think that the church can be irrelevant it means that the church has become detached from her mission, from her identity in Christ and the gospel.  If the gospel is intrinsically relevant, if the gospel has a message for every generation and every individual, and the church is considered to be irrelevant, what can have happened but a loss of what it means to be the church in the first place?

How do we lose sight of our calling as a church?  It can happen when we get more interested in how to bring people in than how to go out and serve others.  It can happen when we view the church as more of the hub of a social circle than as a fellowship with other sinners and a group of people who help us to grow in our faith in order to take it out into the world.  It can happen when we look outside of our walls and start talking about "them," as if "they" were not already bound to "us" in Christ.

The relevance of Christmas, and the relevance of Christian faith as a whole, is that, though this world is not how it should be, God has done something about it in Christ, by coming among us and invading our world of space and time in order to set up a new kingdom.  But the good news is not just that God did something once upon a time and then stopped.  The good news is that God is still doing a mighty work through Christ, but now it is a work that is taking place in and through each of us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is good news; but it might also be bad news for some people.  It might be bad news for some because a reclaiming of the relevancy of the gospel means that being relevant is not something that we achieve by our own strength.  We cannot make the gospel relevant any more than we can make it irrelevant.  What that means is that the relevancy of the gospel is not up for grabs.  It is not something that can be collapsed into a certain kind of music or a well-run program.  We must cling to the relevancy that is already present in the gospel or else we either become irrelevant as just one more social club or we impose a relevance of our own devising and just pretend it is the gospel.

What is exciting is that the gospel cannot be defeated.  It is still the good news and it is still the driving force of the church whether or not any particular church realizes it.  In fact, I would imagine that God is at work in any particular church more than most people think.  God is working, even when his people don't listen to him.  There is some concern about a war on Christmas, but I am not worried.  What we celebrate at Christmas, the coming of God into our world, cannot be made false by legislation or changing culture.  The truth of God would stand firm, even if everyone told lies about it, and they do, and it does.

When people set out to make the gospel or the church more relevant, they have set themselves an impossible goal, to do what cannot be done because it has already been done.  If we set out to allow the gospel to do what it does, what it was meant to do, and transform lives, starting with our own, we are not only setting out to do something that is very much possible, but one that in a very real sense has already been accomplished.  In Christ, the work has been done.  Our calling is to rejoice and to let it work itself out in our hearts and lives so we can bear witness to it more fully, so others might join in the transformation and the reconciliation.  Let us pray.

AMEN

What is Baptism? (9/30/12)

         09/30/12                       Matthew 3:13-17                Grace UMC

Baptism is a practice that is at the core of every tradition within the church.  It marks us off as members of the body of Christ, it symbolizes our union with Christ, and it is our way of showing that we as a community are all bound together.  We do not baptize ourselves but are baptized out of ourselves and into Christ and we are baptized only once because when we are baptized, we are not declaring to the world anything that we have done but what God has done.

I love baptisms because they are a wonderful opportunity to join together and remember what is at the core of our faith, what binds us together.  We have an opportunity to reaffirm our own commitment to Christ and to be bound together all the more closely with every human being who is joined to our body.  I hope that you will indulge me a bit this morning, a morning where I have had the great privilege to baptize my own son, to share some convictions about baptism that are bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Nearly everyone who is here has been baptized, either as an infant, or in response to a profession of faith as an adult.  If someone claims Christian faith and yet has not been baptized, there is a significant urging from the church as an organization as well as from other Christians to move forward to baptize them.  But why?  Why should we be interested in baptism like we are?  What exactly is it?  What does it do?  Why does it have such a central role in the life of the church?

Many people have different opinions about the nature of baptism.  There are people in the world who see baptism, whether of infants or adults, as a kind of "get out of hell free" card, where simply the fact that one has been baptized is what matters, that something has happened that trumps everything else.  We see this view whenever parents get their children baptized, even if they have never had any real participation in the church of any kind, it is just something that is important to do.  To give credit where credit is due, when one considers how awkward it can feel to ask something of a church to which you have no real connection, just the act of getting one's child baptized can be a tremendous act of courage.

There are other people who see baptism as nothing more than an effectively empty ritual.  This shows up most often in people who have their children baptized simply because it matters to someone else, usually a close relative and not because of any response of faithfulness.  It also shows up, interestingly enough, among those who would deny baptism to infants, where baptism is nothing more than a confirmation of a faith already received.  The baptism itself is not truly important, only the faith that is confessed in connection with it.

But what is baptism?  In a sense, it is a sprinkling of water or a dunking in water, but that is not all it is.  It is a practice that goes to the very core of our Christian faith and is vitally important.  In order to understand that, we need to turn to the fascinating event of the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan by John the Baptist.

I particularly love Matthew's account of this event because he so wonderfully brings out the issues that are implied in the event and makes it absolutely clear that there is something here that is more than meets the eye.  What has John been up to?  He has been proclaiming the word of the Lord, reclaiming the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, and preparing hearts for the coming of the Savior.  Integral to his whole ministry is baptism, but it is a very specific kind of baptism; as Luke tells us, it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  What does it mean to receive baptism at the hands of John?  It means that you are a sinner, that you are aware of your sin, that you are genuinely sorry for your sin and you are repenting, that is, changing your behavior, because of it.

Now, all that is well and good, but something strange happens one day.  One day, while John is baptizing people, Jesus comes up.  This is what we read.  "Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him."  Nobody made him get baptized, nobody even specifically called him to suggest that it would be a good way to start his ministry.  He takes the long journey from Galilee, way up in the North of Israel, all the way down to a river south of Jerusalem, to be baptized.  Normally, I would imagine, John would be thrilled that people would come to be baptized.  After all, it is deeply symbolic of confession and repentance and a new life devoted to God.  But John isn't entirely happy that Jesus is there; not that he is upset, but profoundly confused.  "John would have prevented him, saying, 'I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?'"

On the one hand, we could say to John, "Look.  You know that he is the Messiah that you have been proclaiming, you knew it even before you were born.  You, of all people, know just how important he really is.  Why are you questioning him?"  And yet, it shows that John is actually a very good theologian, someone who knows exactly what seems to be at stake here.  To him it is clear that he has no business baptizing Jesus.  Jesus is the very one sent by God to transform the world, why on earth is he coming to be baptized?  If there is anyone in the whole world and throughout all of history who doesn't need to be baptized, it is Jesus.  What is going on?

This is an issue that we have to take quite seriously in the church today.  After all, we believe the book of Hebrews when it says this to us.  "Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respects has been tested as we are, yet without sin  Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."  We believe that Jesus, for all his solidarity with us, never committed sin, which means he does not need to repent, which means he does not need a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, which means it seems very hard to understand why he has gone to John to seek such a baptism.

What are we to make of this?  There are a few skeptical opinions that I want to throw out there, not because I find them convincing, but because they show us how serious this is.  Some have said that Jesus is not really any different than we are, that he needed repentance just as much as we do.  This view says that, in spite of the fact that Jesus is "better" than us, he still needed all the same things we do, which means he received baptism because, just like us, he needed it.  Another view is that Jesus only understood that he was the Messiah when he was baptized, which means he might have gotten baptized without realizing that he didn't need it.

But does that help us?  Not at all.  According to Hebrews, it is crucially important that Jesus didn't sin.  If that were not true, we would have no real high priest who can speak for us before God.  The gospel would come collapsing to the ground.  There are, of course, people in the world who would love to see the gospel crash to the ground, but I think we need to consider one more explanation, more fully true to the text itself, before we go there.

John does not want to baptize Jesus but what does Jesus do?  He insists!  "But Jesus answered him, 'Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.'  Then he consented."  Jesus knows exactly what he is doing.  He even forces John's hand, in a sense, to do something that John is not certain he should do with a calm reassurance of, "Trust me.  Whatever it may look like, it actually is the right thing to do and it needs to happen."

Let me put it this way.  Jesus willingly and very deliberately submits himself to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, but he doesn't have any sins to confess.  For me, this raises a very important question.  If Jesus doesn't have any sins and yet insists on having John baptizing him, whose sins is he confessing?  Yours and mine.

This is what baptism is all about.  We are baptized, not because we already have things together, not even because we realize just how big our problems are.  We are baptized because Christ was baptized on our behalf and in our place, who took our sins on his own shoulders and confessed them correctly when we so often can't even confess our sins all that well.  And you know what?  It is a good thing that he did that because, if you are anything like me, you aren't very good at repenting.  I know that, all too often, I confess my sins only to turn around and commit the same darn sins again, sometimes in the same hour of my repentance.  If my salvation is fundamentally based on how well I repent and transform my own life, I am in a lot of trouble.  The reason why Jesus can proclaim forgiveness so freely is because he has not just died for us, but has taken our place even in repentance and confession, doing perfectly what we always seem to do imperfectly.

Jesus did to baptism what he does for us; he utterly transformed it by his grace.  If baptism is a sign that we have repented, that we are already on the right path, then not a single one of us ever deserves to be baptized, because we always fall short.  What Jesus did is step into the Jordan on our behalf and in our place, confessed our own sin, and then, rather than turning back to it, like we all too often do, he took it all the way to the cross to nail it there and put it to death even in his own flesh.  If the first and foremost thing that baptism means today is that we have repented, then it makes no sense to baptize infants, for how can infants repent.  But that is not what baptism is all about.  Baptism is first and foremost a matter of participating in the baptism of Christ, of declaring to the world, "I am a sinner who needs grace.  I trust in what Christ did for me in the Jordan and so I join in solidarity with him, denying myself and my own ability to save myself, taking up my cross, the cross of Christ, and follow in his footsteps.

That is why we baptize infants, who are unable to feel remorse for their sin.  Even though they have never actually committed a sin, they share just as much as you or I in the brokenness of the human condition.  We don't speak of infants and say, "if they sin," but "when they sin."  They are in need of grace just like anyone else and why should we wait to claim their need for grace until they are older?  That would be like not taking your children to the doctor when they are sick because they are not yet able to explain that they do not feel good.

Baptism is not just a declaration of our need for grace, but it is a very public declaration.  The setting for baptism is in the congregation gathered for worship.  This is important for many reasons.  It means that when we declare, of ourselves or of our children, that we are in need of grace, that we are not how we ought to be, other people know about it.  It means that we put ourselves out there for all to see, to admit to all who care to listen that we are broken and we are seeking help beyond ourselves to deal with it.  It is also a profound request for help from those who are gathered.  As the body of Christ gathered together for worship, there are many people who have made similar declarations, who understand how needful it is to have Christian support in every area of life, who know that to try to be devoted to God on our own is impossible.  Whenever someone is baptized, it is a cry for help, but it is a cry that is made in sure and certain hope that help will indeed come.

The public nature of baptism is also crucial because there is an extremely important role that you all play as witnesses and as co-Christians.  You were asked if you will include those who have been baptized into your care and you made a promise, saying, "With God's help we will proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Christ.  We will surround these persons with a community of love and forgiveness, that they may grow in their service to others.  We will pray for them, that they may be true disciples who walk in the way that leads to life."  Those are serious words.  In order to live them out, in order for them to not be so many lies, we must all commit ourselves to being a community of love and forgiveness to surround them with.  This is not a promise that you have made for the first time today.  It is a promise that you have made over and over again.  Every time a person is baptized, you declare your communal commitment to love and forgiveness.  When a child is baptized, the promise becomes even more clear.  You are not making your promise based on what you think he will or will not do, for you don't know what an infant will do in the years to come, and yet you promise nonetheless.  You are promising unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, unconditional prayer.

In short, whenever someone is baptized, you are asked to promise to uphold your own baptism, to allow Christ to work in you and through you so that you can be his presence here and now and in all circumstances.  Whenever someone is baptized, we promise that this will not just be a community, but a Christian community.  It is a commitment that is bigger than you and me, it is a reality that transcends the concrete particular baptism we celebrate this morning.  With every person who is marked by grace in baptism, we are called to draw all the more closely together, to let love rule just a bit more, to follow through on our promises, even when it is tough, and to be the community that we are called to be, the community that Jesus died for us to be.

So let us join together in the midst of this sacrament that dwarfs all of us together, for it is primarily an act of God, and be reminded of the commitments we have made to each other, not just now, but when each person was baptized.  If you look around the room, you realize that this promise has been made many times.  Whatever may have been the case in the past, let us covenant together to hold one another accountable to it today since our commitment to God must be renewed every day.  Remember, baptism is not about us declaring what we can do, but what God can do, and God can do amazing things.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Some Reflections on Prayer

Some Reflections on Prayer

What, exactly, is the function of prayer?  One school of thought, which seems in many ways to be the most natural, is to say that prayer is a petitioning to God for things that might not happen otherwise.  For example, we pray that we might receive favor by some bureaucratic entity so that justice might be done, not because we think that they would be favorable whether we prayed or not, but precisely because we are concerned that they will not be.

There have been many who have felt that this kind of view of prayer portrays an undesirable view of God.  After all, it implies that God has to be coaxed into doing good things for us.  It implies that if something happens that we do not like, a reasonable explanation might be that we didn't pray hard enough, or well enough, about it.  It implies that, when something good comes to us that we attribute to the hand of God, it is very difficult to not read the unfortunate consequences of that thing for someone else as also from the hand of God.  It also seems to imply that God, the almighty, is easily swayed by our words and tears.

But what is the alternative?  The major alternative throughout history has seemed to be to say that God is going to do whatever God is going to do, whether we pray for it or not.  Some have asked, "Why do we pray?" if prayer doesn't really make any difference?  Some have drawn the conclusion from this that prayer is absolutely pointless and that we should not pray, though perhaps we should meditate.  Others, notably Calvin, argued that we should pray, not because of any change it might bring about in God, but because of the change it brings about in ourselves.  The retort might be, if prayer doesn't impact God in any way, it becomes pointless (not to mention significantly in tension with the rest of Calvin's theology, which stresses how important it is for our concepts to have significance, not only for us, but for God as well).

Are these really the only two ways (including any minor variations on them) of looking at prayer?  Do we really have no other way of looking at it without either making God remarkably capricious and pliable or making the entire practice nonsensical?  I think that there may be, and it is rooted in the actual life of Christ.

I am of the mind that one of the most concise yet powerful expressions of what the Christian life is to be about is when Jesus says, "If anyone wants to become my disciple he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."  This idea carries with it the notion that, as Christians, we go wherever Jesus goes, do whatever Jesus does, even to death and, through death, to resurrection.  If Jesus does something, we ought to do it too, even if it has to change slightly because of differences in time and place.

At the very least, this establishes the importance of prayer and the need to retain it, even if we do not fully understand it.  After all, Jesus prays to his Father.  Even if we do not know what that prayer means or how it is paralleled in our own lives, the fact that prayer is important is established by the fact that Jesus, God in flesh, prayed.  That, however, only solves part of the problem.  What exactly does prayer do and how does it work?

Ultimately, I don't think the scripture gives us an unambiguous answer to those questions.  To do so would transform God into nothing more than a machine who does what he does in response to prayer and so the way to get what you want is to make sure you pray in just the right way and, if you don't get what you want, it is because you didn't use the "Magic Prayer Machine" correctly.  God cannot be put into a box but remains free to act or not to act, based on his own view of the situation, which has a degree of insight and comprehension that dwarfs ours.

It seems to me that prayer, at its core, is a bringing to articulation and expression that we find our identity in Christ and that we have renounced ourselves and taken up the cross to follow him.  When we see prayer this way, then we don't simply ask for things, but cry out with Christ, "This is what I want.  Even so, not my will but yours be done."  It is an act of total submission, but it is not a submission that implies passive resignation.  After all, in Christ we see that God's will is not restricted to the natural course of events.  God does not sit idly by when the world is overcome with sin but actively engages, coming to be personally and physically present in his creation.  Jesus did not say, "Something will happen to those who are corrupting the temple," but went in with a whip of cords to drive them out.  Submission to God's will means, as often as not, a call to action that drives us forward.

St. Francis of Assisi is famous for saying, "Preach the gospel always.  Use words when necessary."  This, of course, emphasizes the holistic nature of preaching, that actions do, to cite the famous contemporary proverb, speak louder than words.  However, it sometimes gets interpreted in such a way as to imply that words are not always necessary, or that words can be, whether often or at all, jettisoned from the Christian witness.  This kind of interpretation runs up against the fact that Jesus is not just the Son of God made flesh but the Word of God made flesh.
The point is that, if the gospel transforms us, it ought to express itself in some way in every area of life.  It transforms our actions, to be sure, but it also must transform our words, our interpersonal relations, the very pattern of our thoughts.  It also transforms our relationship to God in a holistic way.  This means that we no longer seek to do things our own way, but God's way, which we see manifest concretely in Christ.  We pray because, as people who are not yet entirely conformed to Christ through the Spirit.  We pray, on the one hand, to remind ourselves that our desires need to change and that we need help from beyond ourselves.  We also pray, on the other hand, because we believe that God actually will speak into a situation and, more often than not, will do so in a surprising way.  Prayer does not imply that God will do anything we ask, so long as we get our prayers exactly right, but that God actually does listen to us and does respond, though in a personal, and not casuistic manner.

Why Do We Doubt (Matthew 14:22-33)

         08/27/12                    Why Do We Doubt?               Grace UMC
As a pastor, I have met many people who, because they are not pastors, think that they are unable to understand or explain the Bible.  They are quick to point out that they have not gone to seminary and so they are aware that there is much about the Bible that they simply have never been exposed to.  While many people have to endure their seminary experience, I loved seminary.  I learned a lot and got challenged in every kind of way you can imagine.  However, even though I think that seminary can be a wonderful experience, I am all too aware of the fact that there are times when seminary training does no more than teach people to read the same passages in the same ways over and over again, never learning anything new, never growing, never imagining that there might be something simple that speaks volumes that they might have missed.  Often times, these kinds of things are completely unrelated to the things you learn in seminary; that is to say, they are things that laypeople are every bit as equipped to discover as clergy.  In fact, it may be that lay people are even more prepared to notice them since they don't have their heads filled with all kinds of issues that may or may not be related.
I say all of this because I am amazed at how often a little detail, that I have never noticed but has been in the passage the whole time, something that seems so simple, will hit me like a ton of bricks.  This is the case with this passage we have just heard.  It is so simple that it doesn't seem like much at first.  It is so obvious and basic that the story simply couldn't have continued if it wasn't the way it is, and yet it is routinely ignored.  Let us consider the story.
Jesus has just fed the five thousand.  He had his disciples start across the Sea of Galilee while he stayed behind to dismiss the crowds and then he went off by himself to pray.  Several hours later, he was still on shore while the boats had gone on ahead.  A storm rose up and the disciples, experienced boatmen, were unable to make any progress, but here comes Jesus walking on the water.  At this point, Peter does something interesting; he decides that he is going to get out of the boat.  But first, he wants to make sure that he isn't dreaming or that all the hard work hasn't made him start seeing things.  He asks Jesus to invite him out of the boat, which he does.  At first, Peter does pretty well, taking a few steps as if he were on land.  However, his fear and doubt begin to get the better of him and he begins to sink, so he cries out, "Lord, save me!"  Jesus grabs him and chastises him a little, saying to him "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"
Now, we could go on all day about the virtues of faith and obedience, about how important it is to trust that, when God tells us to do something, we shouldn't doubt but do it with all our might, that Jesus has given us no reason to doubt him, and all those are good things to remember.  However, there is just one detail that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to this passage that I feel that we keep forgetting.  Peter loses faith and the consequences are significant.  After all, he starts to sink and it is serious enough to provoke a critique from Jesus.  However, we must never forget that, even when all this happens, Peter doesn't drown.  Now that seems a little bit silly, doesn't it?  Isn't it obvious that Peter doesn't drown?  After all, he is in the rest of the story of Jesus' life and he continued to be in ministry long afterward.  It is so clear that Peter does not drown that it doesn't seem worth mentioning.
And yet, I think it makes all the difference in the world.  Look at it from this point of view.  The disciples are being overwhelmed by the storms.  They simply cannot make any progress, even with all their strength.  Then along comes Jesus, just taking a stroll across the stormy sea; not concerned, not even working up a sweat.  It is as if the dangers of the storm and the sea simply do not exist for him.  They certainly aren't impacting him the same way they impact the disciples.  Peter looks out and, because a disciple in ancient Israel was accustomed to doing everything that his Rabbi did, and seeing that it is better to walk on the water than to be defeated by the storm, asks to be invited out of the boat.  Eventually, he starts to doubt and begins to sink.  So now we have three different kinds of people.  We have Jesus, who has absolute faith in his ability to walk on the water, we have Peter who has a bit of faith, but it isn't as strong as he might like, who has some success but then his faith begins to fail, and we have the other disciples who were so terrified of the storm that they didn't dare to get out of the boat at all!  The point is that not one of them died that day.  Not one of them was defeated by the storm.  In fact, the storm was defeated by Jesus when he stepped into the boat and they all made it safely  to the other side.
Why didn't Jesus sink?  He didn't sink because his faith was so strong that he simply could not be defeated by the storm.  Why didn't Peter sink?  He didn't sink because when he went down, he was secured by Christ's hand grabbing him.  Why didn't the disciples sink?  Because Jesus calmed the storm and made a way when there had not been a way.  Not one of the disciples made it to the other side on their own strength; Jesus made it possible, even for those whose faith wasn't even strong enough for them to get out of the boat.
It is very easy to get caught up with the quality of our faith.  We look at ourselves and we see how often our faith has failed.  We look at others and we see how much stronger their faith seems to be than our own.  The single most significant issue that marked the Reformation was a revolt against the kind of attitude that said that you had to do all kinds of things right before God would accept you.  If you sinned, you needed to do penance, and if you didn't do it, it didn't matter what else you did, you still fell short of salvation.  There was always this sense that the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ wasn't quite enough, that God did most of it, but we still had to finish the job.  That kind of attitude only leads to pride, if we think, wrongly, that we have it all together, or despair when we realize that we don't.  If that is our position, than we can only say that Peter wasn't good enough because his faith wavered and the other disciples were really not good enough since their faith didn't even go as far as Peter's.  We would have to say that the story of Jesus walking on water is a story of the radical failure of humanity to be good enough for God.
Maybe it does teach us that, but is that all that it teaches us?  I don't think so.  It seems to me that there is something profound that is here that goes above and beyond what it says about our ability, or at least our track record, to do what we should.  Peter's faith wavers, but Jesus catches him.  The disciples can't move their boat forward, but Jesus calms the sea.  The success that saved all of them was not in any way, shape or form based on their abilities, as we see with the other disciples, or even in the strength of their faith in Christ, as we see in Peter.  The success of the whole trip depended on the strength and faithfulness, not of the disciples, but of Christ.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul takes an entire chapter and points out that the Jewish people, and remember that Paul was Jewish, shouldn't boast in the fact that God gave them the law if they don't even follow it.  He pointed out that if the Gentiles follow God, even if they have never heard the law, they are more fully God's people than the Jews were who had the law but didn't follow it.  What is amazing is that he immediately follows this up with a question that might be put to him.  "Then what advantage has the Jew?  Or what is the value of circumcision?"    The question is basically this, "The Jewish people, by and large, were not accepting Jesus and being transformed.  Is there really anything special about the Jews?"  Paul's response is passionate.  "Absolutely!  For in the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God."  God had singled the Jewish people out for special interaction through the years and spoke to them in a special way.  But the question could come back.  "Paul, but what if some of them, or even most of them, were unfaithful?"  Paul's response is amazing.  "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?  By no means!  Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true."  Every pastor, every Christian, could be a liar, but that does not make God any less truthful.  Every human being could be absolutely faithless, but that does not mean that God has become unfaithful.
That is why everyone made it safely across the sea.  Peter's faith didn't get them across and the other disciples' lack of faith did not prevent Jesus from delivering them.  It was the faithfulness of Christ that does not give up when we make mistakes or when we aren't as good as know we should be that made it happen.  When we talk about having faith, the point isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to get all excited talking about how strong my faith is or how strong your faith is.  When we say we are saved by faith, we don't mean that faith is something that we do and, because we reach a high enough level of faith, we are considered good enough for heaven.  In many ways, that is just taking the Medieval notion of salvation by works and substituting faith in as the new work that we have to do.  Now, instead of having to reach a certain level of moral perfection, we have to reach a certain level of perfection in our faith, in order to be saved.  That is what the Reformers fought so hard to get rid of.
When we say that faith is important, what we mean is that it is the one in whom we have faith, that is important.  It is not a question of how much we believe but in whom we believe.  We are saved by grace through faith, but the reason that we are saved is not because we are so good at being faithful, but because Christ is so good at being faithful.  The good news of Jesus Christ for the one who has never done a good deed in their lives and has never even given a thought to God before is that, when they stand before God they can say, "I have nothing to bring.  No deeds that made people think that I was a good person, no wise words that built up my brothers and sisters, nothing of any value at all.  If what Jesus did on my behalf and in my place isn't good enough, then I have no other hope.  All of my trust, all of my hope is in Christ and if it fails, I have nothing left.  I would be as lost as Peter if Jesus had not grabbed him when he began to sink."  What makes that good is because that is all that is asked.  In fact, it is the only thing that any of us can say before God.
So why do we doubt?  That is the question that Jesus asked Peter.  What if the question about why Peter doubted is not a question of criticism, that is, what if it wasn't a way for Jesus to say, "Peter, you know you are supposed to believe, so why did you doubt?"  What if the question was a real one, one that Jesus asked because he simply could not understand why Peter could have any reason to doubt?  I can imagine that Peter might answer like many of  us would.  "But Lord, I got out into the middle of the sea and I began to realize that I can't do it.  I can't walk on water, so I began to doubt because I found myself doing something that I am not able to do and I didn't think that I could keep it up."
What would Jesus' response be?  If the real point of faith is for us to have strong faith just for the sake of having faith, as if faith in an of itself is a good thing, or if we take the modern attitude of self-help and the power of positive thinking as our guide, the question, "Why did you doubt," would be, "Peter, why did you doubt?  Do you not trust in the power of believing in yourself?  Keep trying and you'll make it someday."  But if that is not the case at all, if the point of faith is not that we believe but that we believe in Jesus, not that we trust our own abilities to do anything but trust in Jesus, who lives his life in us and through us, then the question is not, "Peter, why did you doubt yourself," but "Peter, why did you doubt me?"  Jesus was the reason why Peter could walk on the water in the first place.  His own abilities had absolutely nothing to do with it.  There was no reason to doubt because the ultimate responsibility to stay on top of the water didn't lie with him but with Jesus.
So that is the question for us this morning.  Why do we doubt?  And by that I don't mean to say that there is not room for a healthy curiosity about what we believe about God.  Anyone who has had a substantial conversation with me knows that I am all about probing beyond popular opinion about God.  What I mean is, if God has loved us so much that he stepped into our world of space and time in order to become one of us and one with us; if he was willing to not just come but to take our brokenness upon himself and take it all the way to the cross in order to deal with it once and for all; and if he did all of this, not when we had our act together but while we were yet sinners, before we even gave a first thought to God, why should we doubt whether God really loves us, whether God actually cares about us, whether God actually wants to redeem us and be reconciled?
Listen to Paul's reflections on this topic.  "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?"  If God loves us so much that he did that, why would we doubt that he wants to finish what he has started?  Paul continues.  "Who will bring any charge against God's elect?  It is God who justifies.  Who is it 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."  Paul is saying that the only one in all of the universe who is in a position to bring a charge against you or to condemn you is God, but this is a God who not only loves you with a love that will not let you go, but one who has gone through tremendous lengths to make that love real for you and prays for you, even to this day.
Our God is not a God who sits up in heaven with a chart to keep track of whether you are good enough or whether you have believed hard enough or not.  Rather, he is a God who calls you to do things above and beyond what you were ever capable of on your own, to do things that are amazing from a human point of view.  And in the midst of that calling and empowering, you might make a mistake, but you can trust that, when that time comes, Christ will grab you so that you will not drown and remind you that you do not need to doubt, because your trust and faith are not in yourself, but in him, and he has strength to support all of creation.  Let us pray.

AMEN

"Trinity Sunday" 2012

         06/10/12                  "Trinity Sunday" 2012               Grace UMC
Over the years, the worldwide church has suggested that local churches take certain times of the year and set them aside to talk about certain things.  For example, in December, we talk about Jesus being born and in the early Spring, we talk about the Resurrection of Christ from the dead.  There is nothing magical about these times; they could have just as well been different.  But the thing that is wonderful about this is that it gives us a pattern, a way to live our lives together as Christians that allows us to weave the key parts of the story of God's interaction with humanity into the very fabric of our lives so that it more deeply makes up part of who we are.
It is about this time of year that this pattern suggests that we should talk about the fact that the God we worship is not just a single isolated individual, marked simply by unchangingness and perfection.  After all, even the pagan Greek philosophers thought that God was like that.  Rather, the God we worship is a community of three Persons that are all bound together in the same Being.  That is to say, we worship a God who is Triune.
I would imagine that many of you have either not heard any sermons on the Trinity or, at least, not too many of them.  Why is that?  After all, we declare that we believe in the Trinity every time someone is baptized and we imply it every time we take communion.  In fact, the creeds that have historically bound the church together are deeply Trinitarian, both in form and content.  One could say that the Trinity forms the basic grammar of our Christian faith.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was profoundly Trinitarian, though not everyone has noticed it.  In his sermon on the Trinity, after he had made a point of stressing that Christians can disagree on a wide variety of issues, says this.  "But there are some truths more important than others. It seems there are some which are of deep importance...surely there are some which it nearly concerns us to know, as having a close connexion with vital religion. And doubtless we may rank among these that contained in [the words] 'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: And these three are one.'"  Wesley, who was so willing to be flexible on a number of significant issues, wouldn't budge on the Trinity.
Why is that we as Christians are so reluctant to talk about the Trinity in which, we say, we believe?  I don't think it is really all that much of a mystery.  After all, most people have never really heard the Trinity related to and connected up with their basic Christian faith and experience.  Now why not?  Why shouldn't a belief that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith be strongly related the very core of that faith in practical terms?  I think it is because we have had a tendency to start by saying, "Yep, I believe in the Trinity.  I'm not entirely sure why I believe in it, but they tell me that I should, so I'll go with it."  Once we do that, however, and it happens among scholars just as often as among laypeople, we have a doctrine that we hold because we were told to, not because it resonates with the depths of our Christian experience, and now we have to make sense of it.
But how do we make sense of it?  We sometimes use images like an egg, which is one egg but is made up of yolk, white, and shell, or water, which can be solid, liquid, or gas.  Now, whatever else those images might do, they certainly don't make us say, "Now I understand why the angels of heaven hide their faces before the glory of God and cry 'Holy, Holy, Holy!"  Even if we use more sophisticated images or ideas, we often set out to explain how three can be one and how one can be three in a way that doesn't really relate to what God has actually done in Christ.  I am not in any way blaming people for doing this, so don't feel bad if you have used those kinds of explanations.  After all, what better examples do we have?  In many ways, the history of the church has let us down because for the last 1,500 years, it is as if we have said, "We talked about the Trinity once upon a time but now we all agree, so let's stop thinking about it."  Then, it is only when someone comes along and says that the Trinity is nothing more than confused mathematical thinking, that we realize that we don't have a good answer.
Why is it that we should care about the Trinity?  The short answer is that it is bound up with the depths of our Christian faith.  Not a single other religion or philosophy has developed a doctrine of the Trinity like the church has.  In spite of all the times that it has been pointed out that the word "Trinity" does not appear in the New Testament, Christians have never yet been convinced, in general, to give it up.  There is something about the nature of Christian faith, that is unique, which drives us to consistently say that we have to think of God as one Being but three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  That something is the living reality of Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Trinity formed the major center of debate within the church for about a hundred years.  People wrote book after book on all sides of the issue, there were councils where the leaders of the church had heated discussion about it, bishops were exiled when they did not agree with the dominant opinion in their area at the time.  To us about 1,600 years later, it might seem hard to understand what the big deal was.  We might be tempted to think that the debates over the Trinity were like how our contemporary debates often are, either two sides who just like fighting and will fight over anything they can, or else a debate that has gotten out of control because both sides basically agree, but can't realize it.  However, neither of those things is the case.
The reason why the Trinity matters and why there were Christians who quite literally laid their lives down for it is because it goes to the very root of our Christian lives, whether we always realize it or not.  The very basic fabric of your faith is Trinitarian in nature and the fact that we worship a Triune God bears its mark on your most fundamental Christian experience.  John Wesley concluded his sermon on the Trinity with these remarks.  "But the thing, which I here particularly mean is this: The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith; with all vital religion...I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he '[has],' as St. John speaks, 'the witness in himself;' till 'the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;' that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, 'even as he honours the Father.'  Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [that is, not every Christian talks about their faith in distinctly Trinitarian terms]; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes."
The fact of the matter is that, if you are a Christian, if God has cleansed you with the blood of Christ and transformed you through the power of the Holy Spirit, you are already Trinitarian.  Wesley said that we could easily find that this is true if we just ask a few questions.  If I were to ask you, “Are you accepted in the eyes of God?”  You would say to me, “Yes!”  Then I would ask you, “How were you accepted by God?”  Your answer would be something like, “Because God became a man in Jesus Christ and died for my sins.”  Finally, I would ask you, “How did you come to know that you were accepted?”  Your answer might not be quite like this, but it would be similar.  “Because the Spirit of God bore witness in my heart that I am a child of God.”  Our very most basic Christian experience is rooted in the fact that God is triune.
I think it is one of the most profound tragedies of our contemporary Christian culture that we have neglected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is truly the Christian understanding of God.  And why do we do it?  We do it because we can't see how it actually applies.  We are told, perhaps in confirmation, that as Christians, we are Trinitarian, and so we believe it.  It has been seen for so long as so crucial to what it means to be a Christian that we are afraid to deny it, but we could never defend it if someone were to press us on it.  For many Christians, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with the Trinity and we are afraid to ask for clarification and often times we don't have any examples of people who think that it matters enough to talk about or think through.
So, what are we really saying when we say that God is Triune?  What we are really saying, what lies at the root of our fundamental, Trinitarian conviction is that, in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God.  When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that, when we look at Jesus and all the things that he said and did, we are looking at God doing them.  His words are the very words of God, his actions are the very deeds of God.  In Christ, we are face-to-face with God and not just a messenger of God.  Jesus is not merely a prophet, not just one upon whom the Spirit of God rests, but one who is God in his very self, at the core of his being.  We believe that everything that Jesus says and everything Jesus does is truth, that he is the very definition of truth, that he is the truth, and that this truth applies no less when we see him praying to and communicating with his Father in heaven.
When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that this same God that we come to know in and through Jesus Christ has also taken up residence in the hearts and lives of the people who belong to the Father through the shedding of the blood of Christ.  We are saying that, not only did God so love the world that he sent his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life, but that this salvation does not come like a kind of "get out of hell free" card, but by God coming and redeeming us from the inside out.  In Christ, we see that God loves us so much to limit himself, meet us on our own level, and ultimately take our broken and diseased condition upon himself and condemn our sin to death on the cross.  In the Holy Spirit, we see that God loves us so much as to enter into each of our fallen lives, to meet each of us where we are and to take our hearts and connect them to the heart of Christ, so that our words begin to sound like the words of Christ and our actions begin to look like the deeds of Christ.
This is why we heard that passage from John as our text for this morning.  Jesus says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine.  For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."  This is one of the most amazingly Trinitarian passages in the entire Bible.  Everything that belongs to the Father in heaven also belongs to Jesus, his Son.  There is nothing of God that is missing in Christ.  Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except "Father."  But that is not all.  The Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus refers as the Spirit of truth, is the one who takes the things of Christ and declares them to us.  The Spirit is the means through which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ, the one who took the blood of Christ and made it real in our lives, who continues to take the things of Christ and make them known to us.  In a very real sense, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Christ, God in flesh, is made real in our lives so that the blood of Christ begins to pump through our veins and shapes us into people who begin to follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ in his life of love, devotion and obedience to the Father.
So, aside from the fact that the very fabric of our Christian life is Triune, what impact does the Trinity have on our daily lives?  It shapes the way we live because we have not just been made in the image of God, but in the image of the Triune God, the God in whom the relationships between the Persons is every bit as important as the Persons themselves.  This means that we are people for whom our relationships are just as important as who we think we are on our own.  It means that we cannot be the people we were made to be if we insist on doing things by ourselves and always doing things our own way.
​ So, if we are made in the image of this Triune God, we would expect that we are made for relationship and that we cannot be who we were made to be if we do not allow those relationships to touch the core of who we are.  The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, we already are affected by our relationships.  More and more, both in theology and in natural science, it is becoming clear that our relationships make up part of who we are.  If our relationships with other people are not centered in Christ, there is a part of us that is not centered in Christ.  If we surround ourselves with people who do not love the Lord, who live in ways that are not compatible with the Gospel, it is only a matter of time before those relationships begin to drag us away from our God.  However, there are other people whose lives are so characterized by faith that it is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be a Christian when we are around them.  When we surround ourselves with people like that, it is only a matter of time before we begin to become more faithful, joyful people.  Both of these things happen because our relationships really do affect us.
We are the church.  We are the people whom Paul describes as being the ones who live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called, who live with all humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another in love.  We are the people who are to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  We are one body with one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.  If you notice, Paul even speaks of the church in Trinitarian terms.  We are the people who have been made right with God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit; we are the people who give our prayer and praise back in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father.  And because of all that, we are bound to each other, to build one another up, to contribute in our own unique way to the work of God in our midst.
We are Trinitarians because we believe that when we look into the face of Christ lit up by the Holy Spirit, we see the very face of God.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that what God has done shows us who God truly is.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that God does not just sit up, far away from his people, telling us what to do and what not to do, but loves us so much as to meet us where we are, to transform us, and to lift our lives, even here and now, into his presence.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that we is just as basic as me and we live our lives for each other because we know that what happens to you impacts me and what happens to me impacts you.  And finally, we are Trinitarians because God has loved us so much to reveal himself to us as he actually is and not how we would like to imagine him.  And that is good news.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Exodus 11:1-10

01/25/12 Exodus 11:1-10 GUMC Youth

Over the last few weeks we have been looking at some of the overarching, super-important stories in the Old Testament. We looked at the calling of Abraham and saw that, when God calls people, he often calls the people we would least expect to do the things we would least expect, when we would least expect it. We looked at the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Isaac and saw that it isn't up to us to decide the best way to worship God or the best sacrifice to give. God takes the very best we have to give and substitutes something else, something that he gives, in its place. Last week, we looked at the selling of Joseph into slavery and saw that, though God does not in any way cause suffering, tragedy and evil, he enters into the midst of it and brings good out of the things that we would least expect could have anything good come out of. Tonight, we are looking at another story. Though all the stories we've looked at so far have come from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tonight's story comes from the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

Because we are switching books, I want to take just a moment to remind you all of the timeline that we are dealing with. First, of course, you have Adam and Eve, then after a long time you get Noah and his ark, then after another long time, we get Abraham, which is where we started getting really interested in the story. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob, also known as Israel. Jacob had twelve sons, one of which was Joseph, who we talked about last week. Tonight, we pick up the story over four hundred years later than what we talked about last week.

In the years between the nation of Israel coming to Egypt and the story of the Exodus, the Israelites have become a large nation of about two million people. They have become so numerous that the Egyptians have started to be afraid of them. After all, if Egypt were to be attacked, if they wanted to, the Israelites could join the other side and be a real threat to the Egyptians. They were scared to death that this might happen, so they decided that the best thing to do was to enslave the Israelites and put them to hard labor. Now, you might say, "Why would you do that? If you are afraid they are going to join forces with your enemies, making them slaves is only going to make them more likely to try to overthrow you." That might be, but if you enslave a people and if you teach them over the course of generations that they are less than human, that they are worthless and weak, it is possible to so destroy their hope that things could be different, that they never dare to stand up to the people who are treating them that way.

The point is that, though this evil thing was happening to the people, God had not ignored them, but was waiting for just the right time to liberate his people. Eventually, the time came. Egypt was so worried that the Israelites might become strong and fight back that they decided that every newborn male needed to be killed upon birth. The Hebrew midwives, who were the ones who were helping out at the births, didn't want to do this, so they lied to Pharaoh, saying that the Israelite women were so hearty that they gave birth before they could get there. Realizing that he wasn't going to win this way, Pharaoh gave the order that all the male babies must be thrown into the Nile to drown. There was a woman who had a boy and wanted to protect him, but she couldn't hide him forever. She put him into a basket that was sealed up with pitch so it wouldn't sink and put him in the river. Notice that her son was "thrown into the Nile" but in a very different sense than the Pharaoh wanted.

Anyway, this baby is floating down the Nile and happens to go by Pharaoh's daughter who has compassion on him and adopts him for her own, naming him Moses and raising him in the royal household. Remember this, Moses, who ends up delivering the Israelites from slavery to the Egyptians, grew up as a kind of adopted child of Pharaoh's daughter. That means that he must have seemed a bit like a traitor to his own people since he was an Israelite but he was living in luxury in the Pharaoh's house while all the rest of the Israelites were working hard as slaves. Also, it means that, when he goes before Pharaoh with all the demands from God, he isn't just going in front of a powerful ruler, but before someone who is either his step-brother, or some kind of nephew. We need to remember that Moses is not just having to chose whether or not he will be a hero of God's people, he is quite literally having to choose between his family that he was born into, the family of the people of God, or the family that raised him, the family who used their wealth and power to oppress that other family. In a sense, Moses really had to choose between his God and his family. Whenever you think about Moses, always remember that this is a very personal issue for him.

Anyway, you all know the story. Moses finds himself in trouble so he runs away from Egypt, settles down and raises a family. Eventually, when he is growing old, about eighty years old, he sees the burning bush and is told that he needs to go back to Egypt and be the vehicle by which God liberates his people. You know, its kind of amazing that Moses was actually called even later in his life than Abraham, who was seventy-five years old when God called him. There were a bunch of plagues unleashed upon the land of Egypt, though the Israelites were spared from them. After many chances to do the right thing, Pharaoh refused to let the people go, so there was one more plague to come. God was going to kill the firstborn children of every house.

Now, I want to make sure I point something out because it is important. Most of the plagues were only directed at the Egyptians. For example, when frogs came out of the Nile, they didn't invade the areas where the Israelites lived but only bothered the Egyptians. When God was going to kill the firstborns, though, Israel was not exempt, but God hadn't abandoned them. God gave the people something very specific that they needed to do in order to be delivered from the disaster that was coming. They had to take a lamb, kill it, wipe its blood on the doorframe of the house, and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. They were to do all this expecting that they were going to be driven out the next day. They had to have this feast with their bags packed, as it were.

Now, we need to understand that not all of the Egyptians were hardhearted and refused to listen to Moses. We know, for example, that there were some of Pharaoh's officials who listened when Moses warned them of hail and saved their animals by taking precautions. It is entirely possible that there were a few Egyptians who followed through with the things Moses told the Israelites to do and so saved their children. But at that point, there is a crucial sense in which they stopped being Egyptians and became Israelites themselves, since they had taken sides in this conflict and the Egyptians were certainly not going to be friendly to them anymore.

The main point, the main thing we need to learn from this story, is about the nature of redemption. When God's people were in trouble, God redeemed them, but we need to realize that the redemption didn't come like we might think it should. God doesn't say "I am just going to kill the firstborn children of the Egyptians" but "I am going to kill all the firstborn children in the land, but here is a way to be redeemed." This act of divine redemption was so important because through it, God rescued a whole nation from captivity. Because of this, there are two things that we need to understand about redemption in general and our redemption in particular.

First, we need to see that redemption is not automatic, it requires obedience. We have to actually do something in order to be redeemed. Now, I want to make sure I am absolutely clear so you don't misunderstand what I am getting at. It is not as though, when we are saved, it is because we have saved ourselves. God is the one who does the saving. It also isn't like we do some of the work and God does some of the work, as if our salvation and redemption were some kind of partnership where we are saved because of some kind of team effort. God does everything, but he doesn't do everything in a way where God somehow sets himself against us, where he somehow saves us against our will, where he somehow does what he does in a way that we are saved without it actually impacting who we actually are. Rather, God does everything for our salvation and redemption in and through us. Paul says this in Galatians 2:20, one of the more famous verses in the Bible. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

You see, according to Paul, the Christian life is a life that is crucified with Christ. It is a life that, in a very real sense, is Christ's life lived in and through him. And yet, though the life that Paul lives in his flesh is Christ's life, it isn't as though Paul has been set aside, has he? He is still Paul, he still does the kinds of things that Paul does, he is still prone to make the same mistakes that Paul has made. Though Christ is living his life in and through Paul, Paul is still there; he is not merely an empty shell. The same is true for us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus lives his life in and through us. This doesn't make us any less who we are, but ever more who we were meant to be than we would ever have been on our own.

Another great example of what I'm trying to get at comes from Jesus himself. He says, in a famous passage, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Sometimes, when we hear that verse, we think that Jesus is just telling his disciples that following him can be hard sometimes, so they should get themselves ready for what can be a difficult time. First, Jesus is not just saying that the Christian life will be hard from time to time, he is saying that, at the end of the day, the Christian life will kill us. After all, to take up your cross is to be on your way to execution. By that, I don't mean that all Christians will be killed for their faith. What I mean is that we are not done living as Christians until we are done living in general. To be a Christian and to follow Jesus is to make a lifelong commitment; a commitment that lasts as long as we do.

But that is not all of what Jesus says. The most important part of what he says here is "take up your cross and follow me." The point is not just to take up our cross, as though hardship for hardship's sake was a goal in itself. The point is that we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, that we do what he does, that we go where he goes, that we say the things that he says, that we become the kind of people who are like him. Jesus takes up his cross and dies for us, on our behalf and in our place. We take up our own crosses and follow, not because bearing our cross contributes even the slightest bit to our salvation, but because it is us doing what Jesus was doing and participating in the salvation that God has worked out and is working out in our lives. Whatever else it might be, it is not salvation unless it is changing our lives, not just on Wednesday nights or on Sunday mornings, but every day of the week.

The other thing we need to make sure we notice and remember is that redemption is costly. Remember, it is not that God was going to punish the Egyptians and spare the Israelites, but that he was going to kill all the firstborn children. The difference is not that God treated the Israelites fundamentally differently than the Egyptians, but that God provided a way to be saved and the Israelites took it, trusting that God would actually substitute their lambs in the place of their children and take them instead. Think about what this means, though. God's redemption didn't make itself seen in the lives of the people until they actually became participants in it. They had to actually kill the lamb, rub its blood on their doorposts, cook it, and eat it. There was no shortcut to salvation that allowed them to bypass actually responding in faith to what God was doing.

Also, we need to remember that, though the children of the Israelites were spared, things still died. One of the things we read about in the New Testament is, "Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." There is something about the seriousness of sin that means it cannot be done away with just with a wave of the hand, even a wave of God's hand. Sin is such a serious thing that it can't be forgiven unless something dies. When God delivers people, they aren't just given a kind of "Get out hell free" card, like some seem to think, but when someone is forgiven, something has to die.

That is exactly what God himself has done on our behalf and in our place. The celebration that came into existence because of God's delivering his people from this final plague is called Passover, because the angel of death passed over the homes of the Israelites. It is no coincidence that, when Jesus had his last supper with his disciples, it was in the context of a Passover celebration. Jesus was saying to his disciples, "Do you remember that when God brought you up out of Egypt, your salvation was brought about through the eating of the sacrificial lamb? In the same way, your salvation from sin will be brought about through your eating of my body and blood. This bread is my body, this cup is my blood. Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me, just like you remember your deliverance from Egypt every time you celebrate the Passover meal."

Whenever you participate in Communion at church, as you eat the bread and drink the juice, remember that Jesus is your Passover lamb. Just like the lambs at Passover died so that the people of Israel could live, Jesus died for you so that you can live, so that you can live the life of joy that God has promised you. Always remember that you have been bought with a price, that Christ died for you and that you have been made a child of God to be a witness to God's love in this world that can be so dark. Let us pray.

AMEN