The Role of Community in Personhood

09/07/11 Role of Community in Personhood GUMC Youth

Last week, we spent some time thinking about the people that Jesus called to be his disciples. We noticed how incredibly different they were from each other and how they all had their own problems, just like we do, but that through following Christ, they were challenged to grow and become who God had called them to be. I want to take tonight and look at the big picture issue of the role that the communities in which we find ourselves shape who we are. It is particularly appropriate to do this now, since we were just thinking about the community that Jesus called into existence to follow him.

In America, we have a long tradition of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals, who do whatever we want. We tend to see the individual as more important than the community in which that individual finds itself. We have some basic rules about how we live together, but by and large, we consider our individuality to be more important than who we are in relation to others. We like our constitution because it shows us that our community values individuality.

In spite of that, what we are finding more and more is that the community plays an incredibly important role in who we are. Perhaps one of the most important ways it shapes us is in the way our community plays a role in what we can know. Did you know that there are some things that you simply can't know unless you are in a community of people who knows them? That you have to live in the right place and with the right kind of people, and live in the right way to even see certain things and to know certain things?

To give a somewhat simple example of what I am talking about, how many different words do we have in English for "snow?" Just one. However, even though we have only one word for snow, we can actually identify a few different types of snow, can't we? I have not yet experienced a Spencer winter, but I've been led to believe you get a fair amount of snow, so you might know more about snow than I do, but most people I've met can identify about four or five types of snow. There is light, powdery snow, there is wet and heavy snow, there is slushy snow that is hard to drive in, and a few others. But if we are really pressed, we can't come up with too many more types of snow that we experience.

But, if you were to travel into parts of Alaska and meet with certain tribes of Eskimos, you would find that they have over forty different words for snow. But if you looked at the different types of snow, you probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between them. After all, you can only identify four or five kinds of snow. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference, in fact, you might even think that the whole tribe is playing a trick on you, but to the natives, it would be as plain as could be. They have absolutely no trouble telling the difference between the forty-odd types of snow they have; it is as natural to them as breathing.

So, what is the difference between them and us? Why can they see what we cannot? Is there really a distinction that we just can't see or are they just tricking themselves into seeing what isn't really there? Well, there isn't a real difference in their eyes or their brains, so there is no biological reason why they should be able to see what we can't, so what could it be? Well, if we were to move away from Iowa and move in with the Eskimos with the many words for snow, and we not only saw the same snow as they did, but lived the way they did and experienced snow like they did for a period of several years, you would start to be able to tell the difference between some more of them, but you still might not ever have quite as many words for snow as they do.

The reason for this is that the Eskimos have a deep need to be able to tell the difference between the forty types of snow. Their very lives depend on it. If they aren't careful about what kind of snow they go out in, they might very well die. But the reason I bring all this up is because, even though it is as clear as night and day to the Eskimos, people like you and me simply can't see it. They might be able to break down the differences so that you have some idea of what to look for, but even with a great guide, it would take quite some time before you were able to really see what you are looking for. You have to indwell, to use the term of scientist, Michael Polanyi, a way of life and experience before you can really know what is there. It is something like the process of learning an instrument or a sport, or any new subject. It takes time to get used to the rules or how you move your body before you can really do or know it.

The fact of the matter is that knowing is much more complex than we often give it credit for being. You will find militant atheists who try to hide behind the advances of sciences to be the reason why they can't bring themselves to believe in God. They say that, unlike the claims of Christian faith, anybody who simply does the experiment can see the truth of science. Well, this simply isn't true. As it turns out, most people, even if they had access to a world-class laboratory, couldn't actually reproduce the experiments and, even if they managed to pull it off, wouldn't even be able to see what they were looking for. It is only when people have spent years of their lives being trained in a particular field of inquiry that they can actually understand and experience what is really there. Unless you are a trained scientist, the claims of natural science are not any more accessible to you than the claims of Christian faith. You know, even if you were a trained scientist, only a small portion of the findings of science would be open to you. In fact, if you have been a Christian for a while and have your thoughts and life transformed by the gospel, you might be able to understand the claims of Christian faith far better than you could do lab work.

But the trick to all of this is that it means that you can only know the truth if you are part of the right kind of community. If you want to know the truth, you need to be surrounded by people who are also seeking the truth. If you want to really understand what Jesus says, you need to be in a community of people who are passionately committed to what Jesus says. One of the greatest thinkers in the history of the church, Athanasius, wrote a book on God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. At the very end, after he had written for pages and pages explaining the biblical and theological issues, he says this in his last paragraph.

"But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds."

I want to make absolutely sure that you understand what he is saying. He is saying that, if you insist on living in sin and doing what you know to be wrong and making a habit of breaking God's laws, you will never be able to understand what the Bible says. If you knowingly and lovingly engage in sin on a regular basis, don't be surprised if you can't make any sense out of the Bible. If we want to know things, we have to live in a way that is consistent with them.

You know, this emphasis on community really shouldn't surprise us all that much. After all, one of the core claims of Christian faith is that God is, in God's own life, a community of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For God, community isn't just an extra options that he can choose to be in or not; community is rooted in the very being of God, and we are made in God's image. How can we be surprised when we find out that the communities in which we find ourselves make up part of who we are? God is who God is because of the community that God is.

You know what? Even natural science supports this idea that who we are is partly shaped by those we are around. It used to be, according to a Newtonian view of the universe, that everything could be broken down into atoms that just bumped into one another. They were individual particles that had no real connection to any other particles, unless they all just happened to move in the same direction at the same time. With the insights of James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and others, we have come to see that we can't really think of things this way. All of what we call matter can be understood as knots of energy in a continuous field of energy. Remember the equation E = mc^2? It is saying that energy and matter are not finally separate things, but that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter. The point is that particles aren't just free-floating individual things, but are only what they are in their interrelations with each other.

So, if we can only know certain things if we live in certain ways, and if God wanted to reveal himself to humanity, what would he have to do? Well, he would have to mould and shape a whole culture from the very beginning. So, he would have to pick one person and take him out of his context, so he could start to reshape their basic ways of thought and life bit by bit. God would have to establish a special relationship that is unlike his relationship with another nation, not because God does not also love those other nations, but because God has to start somewhere. Over thousands of years, God would have to teach the people how to live so they might be able to understand him. He would have to give them a law, a distinctive form of thought and life, would have to continually call them back whenever they went astray, and carefully and slowly reveal himself using these transformed words that mean something different in that nation than they do anywhere else. Only after this culture is shaped over a long period of time would God be able to really reveal himself in his fullness.

I don't know if you remember back to Sunday School and confirmation, but this is exactly what God has, in fact, done. God selected Abraham and took him from his home, gave himself to his descendants in a particular way, delivered them from Egypt and gave them a law, sent prophets to call the people back to faithfulness. Eventually, Jesus came, but he couldn't have come until Israel's culture was ready to understand him, at least brokenly. That is why Jesus came in Israel. Not because they were better than other people, nor because they were worse, but simply because they were better equipped to understand him and this is only because God had been moulding and shaping them, sometimes painfully, over the last several thousand years.

The question you might be asking yourself is, "What does all this have to do with me? What difference does this make for my life?" It actually makes a lot of difference, especially as someone who comes to youth group and goes to church. You see, youth group isn't just a place where we can come and hang out with friends or meet new people. It isn't just a place where we can eat some food and play some games. It isn't just a place where we can sing some songs. We are about the business of creating and shaping a whole culture, a community of young people who follow the Lord. There is a sense in which we are constantly trying to develop culture that has been established earlier, since none of us were here with this youth ministry was started, but it is also a culture which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is continually being established anew.

Another reason why this stuff about community affects you is because you are profoundly shaped by your communities outside of youth group as well. If you surround yourself with people who love the Lord, who are passionately committed to the gospel and allowing it to impact every aspect of their lives, you will find that is is so much easier to be faithful yourself. When there are people you can go to for support, when you know that you aren't alone in your seeking after God, it is much easier to do what you are supposed to do, to live right, to read your Bible, to pray. If you, on the other hand, surround yourself with people who don't really care about God, who like to do all kinds of things that are contrary to what God calls us to do and be, you will find that it is incredibly difficult to be a faithful Christian. In fact, if you spend all your free time in destructive communities, it doesn't really matter what your influences are at home or at church, it will be nearly impossible to really follow Jesus.

This is why we need to all work together. If any of us decides that we are going to be lazy, to just show up and go through the motions, it affects the rest of us. It is only when we all work together and support one another in our daily lives that we can really be who God has called us to be. There is no substitute for being part of a group of people who love God. As we work together and as we grow together, do not be surprised if you begin to look at the world differently, that you begin to see and understand things that you never could before. I am going to challenge you to think hard about what you believe and why you believe it. The reason for this is because we simply cannot assume that our secular culture has prepared us to know God.

If we want to study the heavens, we need to go where the telescopes are. If we want to study exotic plants, we need to go where they are found. If we want to know about microscopic life, we need to put ourselves in the places where we can learn about them. As Athanasius said, if we want to see a particular place, we have to go there. If we want to know God, we need to meet with God where he has met with us, which is, above all, in Jesus Christ and in the Bible. Not only that, we need to do it together. So let us join together, as people of different ages, with different backgrounds, and help one another meet with and come to know God in deeper ways every day. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 3:7-19a

08/31/11 Mark 3:7-19a GUMC Youth

This passage in Mark's gospel is interesting because we start to see the difference between what it means to be part of the crowd that is following Jesus around and what it means to be one that Jesus has specifically called to join him in a deeper way. We are going to see this interplay between the crowd of followers and the twelve disciples over and over again, but this is where Jesus first separates the twelve out from everyone else.

We need to understand just how popular Jesus was. He really had a crowd of people following him wherever he went. Remember, he is ministering primarily in Galilee at this time, which isn't much to write home about. Galilee is the kind of place where you only really go to because you need to go through it to get where you actually want to go. It is kind of the backwater place that has nothing about it that really draws people to it other than the fact that Jesus is there. We get people from all over the place coming to see Jesus; we read about people coming from Judea, Jerusalem, and Idumea in the South and Tyre and Sidon in the North. It seems that everyone in the world wants to come to see Jesus. Somehow, the mere presence of Christ makes Galilee the most important place in the universe, the center of the world.

However, it is at this moment, where Jesus is more popular than he has ever been before, that he calls out twelve people to be his close disciples. So, at every point after now, we have this idea that there are some people who are in the inside and some who are on the outside. In general, we will see that the disciples are on the "inside" and the crowd is on the "outside." But before we get too rooted in that way of thinking, I want to give you a head's up, that the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside is going to get taken up over and over again. Even though Jesus makes this distinction between the crowd and the disciples, we are going to continually be asking the question, "Who really is on the inside or outside?" and the answer to that question might surprise you as we explore it.

However, be that as it may, I want to take tonight and look at the people that Jesus called. The fact of the matter is that history has tended to venerate the disciples and put them up on a pedestal, but it was a bizarre bunch of people. I want to talk about several of them. You might find that one of them reminds you of yourself in one way or another. You might even find that some of them resemble people you know, which should encourage you to remember that God is calling them, too.

Let's start with people we talked about a few weeks ago, Levi the tax-collector and Simon the Cananean, also called the zealot. The Cananeans were a group of radically nationalistic Jews, who hated the Romans more than anyone else. There had been armed uprisings over the years, for which they were at least partially responsible. They were not the folks who were just mad at the fact that they were ruled by a foreign power, they were prepared to put their money where their mouth is and to even attack the Romans, even though they were far more powerful.

On the other hand, Levi is a tax-collector, a person who is employed by the Roman government in order to collect the high taxes from their neighbors, who even were known to take more than they were supposed to and just pocket the rest. If there were two kinds of people in the world that would have hated each other, it would be the tax-collectors and the Cananeans. And yet Jesus calls them both. The call of Christ commands them, and us, to set aside our differences, even our deep differences, because few of us can have deeper differences than Levi and Simon did, and join together in following Jesus. We could name all kinds of opinions that divide us Americans today, but when Jesus calls us, and he does call us, we must lay them down, not because they are unimportant, and not because we do not have strong feelings about them, but because, compared to Christ, everything else is unimportant by comparison. To use modern language, Jesus calls both the most conservative Republican and the most liberal democrat and, even though they will probably continue to disagree, they must not allow their serious differences to tear the body of Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only one who can actually make that work. Certainly, nothing else seems to.

The next disciples I want to mention are James and John, the ones that Jesus calls the "Sons of Thunder." These are people who are extremely fiery and dominating. There is a moment, when Jesus and his disciples go and preach in a town, and nobody seems to listen. When faced with this frustration, James and John ask Jesus if they can pray that God would send down fire from heaven and consume the people. Jesus just rebukes them and moves on to the next town. There is another moment, that we will see later, when James and John go up to Jesus and ask if, when he comes into his kingdom (which, by the way, they thought was an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one), they can sit at his right and left hand, that is, they wanted to be the most powerful people in the kingdom, after Jesus. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the other disciples. We will talk about what Jesus said to them when we get there, but these are the kinds of people that James and John were.

And yet, both of them become people who laid down their lives for others. James is ultimately killed for his faith, as an early Christian leader. John is not killed, and he is either the only one who wasn't killed or one of only two who weren't. The point is that, when we look at the writings of John, we find him to have become one of the most deeply loving leaders in Christian history. The story goes that, when John was too old to be able to actually deliver sermons, and had to be helped around by others, he just came into the church and said, "Children, love each other," and left it at that. This man who had been so completely obsessed with power had been transformed into one of the most humble people in history.

Next, I want to talk about someone who does not appear in the lists of Jesus' disciples. His name was Nathanael, and he was a bigot. When his friends, Simon Peter and Andrew, told him they had found the Messiah who had been promised, Nathanael's response was, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" He didn't think that those people could do anything good. He certainly didn't think that God would save humanity through someone who grew up in Nazareth, of all places. When he actually met with Christ, Nathanael was so overwhelmed by him, that he cried out, saying, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Christ, being who he is, challenged and overcame, even some deep prejudices.

Jesus had a disciple named Thomas, called "The Twin," who, it seems to me, is something of the disciple of our modern age. Church history has called him "Doubting Thomas," because of a famous scene in the gospel of John. After Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, he met with the disciples, but Thomas wasn't with them at that time. Everyone was making a big deal about the fact that they had met with Jesus, but Thomas wouldn't believe it. He said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Thomas said, in so many words, "Seeing is believing." Even though Jesus did indeed show up and allow him to satisfy his curiosity, people can't do that in the same way today. He shows us that the disciples were not only a bunch of people who would simply believe everything they heard, regardless of how far-fetched it might be. Instead, we have an example of someone who refused to believe until God proved it to him.

But, though Thomas was a skeptic, he did not remain one forever. There are people who say they need proof, when in fact, they have already made up their minds that nothing can ever really be proof. They say, basically, "You will not convince me, even if you convince me," and they can always find a way out of believing if they find themselves in a corner. That was not the case with Thomas. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually calls him, not "Doubting Thomas," but "Believing Thomas," because he finally believed Christ, crying out, "My Lord and my God!"

There are just two more disciples that I want to lift up for your consideration, and these last two are the most interesting for us today. The first one is Peter, who I like to call "The Bold Bumbler." Peter very quickly became something of a spokesman for the disciples, so we hear him speak up as the one who tells us what the disciples were thinking. He was probably the oldest of the disciples, since he was married and most of the others, as far as we can tell, were not. He has something of a strong personality and is really excited about being involved with following Jesus. It is Peter who, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, responds with, "You are the Christ." It is Peter who actually gets out of the boat and walks on the water when Jesus calls to him. It was Peter who made it clear that he was going to follow Jesus to the very end; even if everyone else abandoned him, Peter would not, he would stay and he would fight for his master.

But Peter isn't exactly always, in fact, the great and mighty leader that he wanted to be. We read about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is and Peter gives what certainly seems to be the right answer; but right after that, when Jesus is explaining that he was going to be handed over and killed, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. Jesus' response is to turn around and return the rebuke, saying, "Get behind me, Satan." In one moment, Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else did to being called Satan. Later on, he promises that he would die rather than abandon Jesus. Unfortunately, before that night is over, within just a few hours, he not only abandons Jesus, but denies him three times. Peter might be one of the most famous Christian leaders in history, but he wasn't always that great. He messed up an awful lot.

The last disciple I want to mention by name is Judas. He is different from the others because he is not a name that shows up again at all after the Gospels. He completely drops out of the narrative because he does not live until the church really began at Pentecost. In fact, he even died before Jesus did, and did not even get to see the resurrection. You see, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus, who handed him over to be killed by those who hated him. His death was either, depending on who you are talking to, the result of suicide or divine judgment. There are many people who use Judas as the greatest example of someone who has been rejected by God. Dante, the famous poet, in his Inferno, speaks of a special place in hell for people like Judas.

And yet, Judas was one of the twelve, one of those who was hand-picked by Jesus to follow him, to be part of the community set up by God himself to spread the good news to everyone. Jesus called Judas, walked along side of him, entrusted him with the money bag, included him in his last supper; Jesus even washed Judas' feet. Can you imagine that? Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, bent down and washed the feet of the one who was going to leave any moment to hand him over to death. Even though Judas would be responsible for his death, Jesus was not ashamed to be associated with him. He had called him and made him one of his own.

The reason why I bring this up is that Jesus calls all kinds of people. When we first heard about Levi and Simon being called a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Jesus not only calls us, but he calls our enemies. We are called, and so are the people that we hate, regardless of who those people might be. The thing that we need to deal with is that we are not the ones who get to choose who Jesus calls and who he does not call. We have to be able to live with the fact that, just as Jesus calls us when we didn't deserve it, he calls other people when they do not deserve it. That doesn't seem so bad until we realize that, because Jesus calls us and because Jesus calls them, we have to deal with them, too! In fact, if we let them, it is actually the other Christians who drive us crazy who are able to help us the most, because it is when we realize how deeply we disagree with other people who love Jesus that we realize just how strong the blood of Christ really is and how far mercy and grace really extend.

The fact of the matter is that it shouldn't take too much effort to see yourself in the disciples. In many ways, we are just like they are. I can see my own impulsiveness in Peter, my own skepticism in Thomas, my own fear of the unknown in Nathanael, my own pride in James and John, my own zeal for my own tradition in Simon and my own desire to just blend in with the culture in Levi. Perhaps you see yourself in more than one of the disciples. I want to encourage you to identify as deeply as possible with the disciples and I want you to do this for two reasons. First, the more we identify ourselves with the disciples, the more we will be humble. Even these people who we hold up as great examples of faithful Christians were real human beings, just like we are. When we make mistakes, we can be reminded that Jesus didn't call perfect people, in fact, not that it is a contest, we might even say that Jesus called people who were even more imperfect than we are, regardless of how imperfect we might seem to be. The second reason we should identify with the disciples is because they did not always remain weak and broken, but did become mighty heroes of the faith.

The Jesus that we worship and cling to is a Jesus who invites everyone to come to him, who extends his arms to the weak, to the broken, to the sinner, to the fallen, to the awkward, to the people who have problems. It wasn't the people who had it all together who followed Jesus. In fact, those people didn't like him, because he told them that, unless they followed him and came to know the Father through him, they didn't actually have it all together. Jesus consistently calls the people the world doesn't think all that much about. For goodness sake, he even called Judas and washed his feet. He put up with Peter's bull-headedness and was patient when he stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he dealt with the sharp conflict between Levi's connection with the Roman government and Simon's hatred of the Romans; he overcome bigotry, he knew how to put arrogant people back into their place while still loving them.

Wherever you are tonight, whoever you think you are, know that Jesus loves you and calls you, even as you are, and we know this because of the people he called when he was physically present on earth. However, we also need to remember that, though he called all kinds of people, regardless of how messed up they were, he did not leave them that way, but sent his Holy Spirit into them, and transformed them from the inside out. They were joined to Christ's own ministry and empowered by the Spirit to do it. Just as we are broken like those first disciples, the only thing we need to be great heroes of the faith like they became is the same Spirit they received, and that Spirit is promised to us in abundance. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 2:18-3:6

08/24/11 Mark 2:18-3:6 GUMC Youth

We took a break from Mark last week to consider the Problem of Evil, but we are back into it tonight, with something of a long passage, but a passage that, for our purposes, can be seen as making a point and then bringing forward two stories that confirm and illustrate that point. Two weeks ago, we read about Jesus getting in trouble with the religious authorities for eating with tax collectors and sinners. He reminded us that it is sick people who need a doctor, not those who are well or, at least, those who think they are well. Tonight, our passage is about Jesus catching fire for not fasting, which means going without food for a religious reason. It is interesting that, even though we've had a week in between them, we have two passages in a row; one of them is about feasting and the other one is about fasting. It is as if, when Jesus' opponents realized that they couldn't get Jesus one way, they turned around and tried to get him the other way.

Look at what the people ask Jesus, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" I imagine that most of you do not have a whole lot of experience fasting, and probably don't know all that many people who have taken fasting seriously in their lives, so this question probably doesn't sound as pointed to you as it would have to people at the time. You need to understand that fasting was one of the single most common and important ways to practice your faith. If something terrible happened to you, whether by accident or your own fault, you would fast, that is, you would stop eating so you could devote yourself more completely to prayer. If disaster came upon the nation, the prophets would call the people to fast and pray. Fasting has a long tradition of helping people to be close to God.

Why should fasting make such a difference? It is really amazing to think about the things we do, not because we have a good reason to do them, but because our bodies compel us to do them. How many of us eat, not because we are hungry, but because we just want to eat? How often will we go back for seconds when we don't really need them, but are driven to it by the fact that it tastes good? By fasting, which isn't just not eating, but not eating so that we can devote ourselves to God, we are saying to our bodies, "No, you will not tell me what to do. God is in charge, not you." If you can control your body's desires, you can make better choices, and you will be more able to hear God, because you have already taught your body to keep quiet about its demands.

The point is that, if you were a religious person in those days, you fasted. The Pharisees, for example, had a practice of fasting twice a week. So here we have the disciples of John the Baptist fasting and the disciples of the Pharisees fasting, but Jesus and his disciples are not fasting. They kind of stick out.

Jesus' response is interesting. He says, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day." So, Jesus is saying that they aren't avoiding fasting because they don't think it is important. After all, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness fasting before he was tempted by the devil. He is saying that they are in such a time of radical celebration that they couldn't fast if they wanted to. Because he is present, it is like being at a wedding. The Pharisees did not understand how pointless it was to fast when Jesus was there. If the point of fasting is to get close to God, why do you need to fast when God himself is in your midst? Jesus says that there will be a time when he is taken away and, when that happens, his disciples will fast, but it doesn't make sense at that particular time and place.

Jesus uses this conflict as a chance to say something incredibly powerful. He says, "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." What I think Jesus is getting at is that, in Christ, all the rules are changed. You can't jam him into an old way of thinking and expect him to fit. Instead, the old way of thinking will be torn apart. This isn't because Jesus is mean, but just because he is who he is, he cannot fit into our little boxes that we make for him. And, by the way, when I say that Jesus explodes out of old ways of thinking, I don't just mean that he breaks out of ancient ways of thinking, but that he even breaks out of our ways of thinking, even though they are "new" in a sense, and we are still young people.

This is really important and I think we need to take some time and take this seriously. It is absolutely imperative that you understand just what this means. In Jesus Christ, everything changes. Our whole way of thinking and our way of living is changed, even the definitions of our words are changed. This is something that I don't think most people, even most Christians, take seriously enough. Jesus steps into our world of space and time, where we use words to communicate, and shatters them. We can no longer mean the same thing that we used to mean when we said that things are "good" or "evil." We can no longer think of good and evil in static, impersonal terms, where something is good or bad based on how we feel about it. Instead, things are good or evil based on how well they do or do not conform to Christ, who is who he is. This means that even the Ten Commandments, as helpful as they are, are not a final authority, independent of Christ, but serve to point us to Christ where we see what they really mean. We have to understand all the commands to not do things as ways to describe what it means to be like Christ, instead of free-floating rules. It means that, when we read that we are to have no other gods before God, it means that we are to understand the God, before whom there can be no other gods, as the God who reveals himself to us in Christ.

Everything about the way we think, the way we live and the way we speak is transformed in Christ and every attempt to make Jesus fit into our old ways of thinking, living and speaking is doomed to fail, for Jesus cannot be contained in them. Old ways of understanding God and interpreting the Bible, and of looking at life, are ripped (like the old fabric with a new patch on it) and burst (like the old wineskins carrying new wine) by Christ.

This is made even more clear by a statement we get in Luke, though not in Mark. In Luke, Jesus adds, "And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, 'The old is good.'" The fact of the matter is that we get used to things. Our whole framework of thought, what some people call our "worldview," is moulded and shaped by countless influences over our lives. By the time we even come to consciousness as toddlers, we have been shaped by our families and our environment. In our elementary school days, we are shaped by our friendships and our classes. We are in our framework of thought and life like a fish is in water. We are so deeply immersed in it, we can't even see it anymore.

That is the reason why it is so important for you to give your lives to Jesus when you are young. You have less baggage to deal with than you will when you are older. Some people will talk about becoming Christians later in life, so they can have their fun now and then be faithful later. First of all, not being a Christian isn't any more fun than being a Christian, and being a Christian is not anti-fun. But on top of that, you need to take seriously the fact that there are decisions you can make as a young person that you simply can't make, or at least become much more difficult, when you are older. It's like learning an instrument. If you go and talk to a bunch of world-class musicians, I imagine there are hardly any who took up music as adults. Whether they were making music as five year olds or not, most of them will have picked up music before they were in college. There is a certain age, which is different for everyone, after which it is impossible to master things like music to that kind of level. The longer you put off giving yourself to Christ, the harder it will be.

Let me put it this way. I have a dear friend who has, during his whole life, been deeply formed by a particular view of the universe, that it is rigidly deterministic. He is scientifically minded, so he has been taught by certain branches of natural science that this is so. However, he is also a committed Christian, but has been formed by a particular branch of the church that emphasizes God's sovereignty to the point that everything happens because God causes it to happen. This man loves Jesus, but the whole way he looks at his faith and life is formed by this deterministic framework which, in my judgment, is not helpful and even distracts us from seeing what really is the case. This way of thinking is so bound up with his understanding of Christian faith that, when I challenge him on that framework of thought, he has no other way to interpret it than to say that I am attacking the gospel, when my goal is to help liberate his faith from a destructive view that is hostile to the gospel. The sooner we get it through our heads that Jesus doesn't just change what we think, but how we think, the easier it will be to let ourselves be formed by him.

Let's see how the rest of the passage illustrates what I'm talking about. Jesus and his disciples begin to travel through a field and pick off pieces of the grain and eat them, a practice which, by the way, is totally legal according to ancient Israelite law. The Pharisees point out that it is the Sabbath and that gathering food is not legal on the Sabbath, however legal it might be on other days. Now, if you think this is somewhat nit-picking, you need to understand that there is a story in the Old Testament about a man who is executed by stoning for gathering wood on the Sabbath. The command to keep the Sabbath holy doesn't get taken very seriously these days, but it was a really big deal at the time.

What is interesting is that, even though there was some debate at the time at exactly what people were supposed to do or not do on the Sabbath, Jesus does not make use of this difference of opinion to justify himself. Instead, he tells a story of a time when king David broke the law by eating of the priest's bread. What David did was not, strictly speaking, legal, but it is not condemned in the Bible, not because there was some secret reason why it wasn't actually breaking the law, but because David was who he was. What David did was legal because it was David who did it. What Jesus is doing is legal because it is Jesus who is doing it; he is the Lord of the Sabbath, in his own words. He is one who is able to overturn hundreds of years of tradition and radically reinterpret the law because of who he is. The old wineskin of the Pharisees' interpretation is absolutely exploded by the reality of Christ. Even though Jesus makes the argument that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of humanity and not the other way around, the real reason he can do what he is doing is because He is the one who is doing it.

The last part of our passage is a story of Jesus entering into a synagogue and healing a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees were watching, hoping he would heal the man, but not because they wanted to see the brokenness and hurt of the world lessened, but because they wanted to accuse Jesus of breaking the law. Because of this antagonism, we read that Jesus is angry when he asks, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?" This question might seem obvious to us, since we live in a more pragmatic age, where it doesn't matter whether something is said to be right or wrong, but whether it helps or hurts, but it was a radical overturning of tradition that would have been shocking to the people at the time.

The point is that Jesus reinterprets the law because of who he is. He does not make an independent argument, as if we could simply go by how something feels and decide whether it is right or wrong; instead, he makes a change based on who he is. Apart from Jesus, the law could easily become nothing more than a crippling, cold and impersonal rule that steals life instead of giving life as Jesus intends for it to do. When we see Jesus reinterpreting the law, we must not conclude that we can reinterpret it based on how we feel at the moment, but that the law must be interpreted in light of who Jesus is. There is no substitute for the reality of Christ. He completely changes the rules of the game, not because he just wants to mess things up but because the way the world looks at things is so completely problematic that he cannot enter into our world without overturning everything.

I want to draw attention, by way of conclusion, to the last verse in our passage. "The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him." You need to know that the Pharisees were the major religious authority over the people and the Herodians were the supporters of King Herod, the secular authority over the people. Both groups of people were deeply offended at what Jesus was doing, at who Jesus was. They both wanted to get rid of him. They wanted to do this because they were no fools. They knew exactly what Jesus was doing. He was overturning the way the people lived their lives. If the people actually changed to be like Jesus was calling them to be, they would lose their power.

The power of the world is broken in Christ. If you give your life to Christ, do not be surprised if, all of a sudden, the whole way you used to look at the world starts to shift. When Jesus becomes the center of your life, all the old ways of living start to be torn like old clothing and burst like old wineskins with new wine in them. As your priorities change because of Christ, you might find people not being very happy with you. No longer do your peers who used to have power over you at school have that power, for your ultimate authority is Christ, and they might even get mad at you for it. But Christ is already the center of the universe, and he has already come and died for you, and he has also already come and lived for you, that you might have life. Know and trust that, if you are deeply in Christ, and everything you do is in line with who Christ is, no one else can have ultimate control over you. Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, and he can save you from the false powers of this world. Take courage, for God felt you were worth dying for. Let us pray.

AMEN

Luke 10:25-37

08/21/11 Luke 10:25-37 Grace UMC

It seems that we are in something of a season where we are looking some of the parables of Jesus. The parables are interesting because we often speak of them as if they are more or less straightforward stories that speak to the common people in such a way that the mysteries of the kingdom are laid bare for all to see. We tend to look at the parables as if anyone who took a moment to look at them would understand exactly what they say. And yet, it is amazing because we actually find, more often than not, that some of the parables get interpreted in one particular way so often that it blinds us to what is actually there.

One of the classic examples of this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. I know that I have heard my fair share of sermons on this parable and you probably have, too. How does a classic sermon on the Good Samaritan go? We look at what it means to be a neighbor. There is a man, beaten and bloodied on the side of the road, attacked by bandits, who is hurting and may not even be able to survive without help. First, a priest, a holy man, one whose very job it is to take the concerns of the people before God, walks by. However, he does not help the man in need. In fact, he purposely crosses the road to the other side so that he doesn't even need to walk near the man. Perhaps he planned to help in his own way; perhaps he was going to go before God and pray for that man, perhaps he was going to speak to the authorities responsible for this dangerous road and try to stop this kind of thing from happening in the future. Perhaps the priest can sooth his conscience by telling himself that the problem is too big for him and he will do what he can by petitioning the secular leaders.

The next person who comes by is a Levite. Now the Levites were a whole tribe of Israel who were set aside to serve in the Temple. Every priest came from the tribe of Levi, so this is a guy who is not as high and lofty as the priest who walked by a moment ago, but he was still one of the people associated more fully with the work of God. So, if the first one who walked by was like a modern pastor walking by, the second one was like a church employee or a major church volunteer. These are people that culture teaches us to expect to help, even when nobody else does. When they come and pass by, what hope can we have?

The final person we read about is a Samaritan. We emphasize that Jewish people hated the Samaritans, that they were half-breeds, according to the "pure" Israelites. They did not worship in temple, but on a mountain in the North. They had different opinions on a number of issues. The Israelites did not just think that the Samaritans had problems, but that they hated God and were hated by God. If there was anyone who we would expect would leave this hurt man on the side of the road, it is the Samaritan. After all, the Israelites had systematically excluded the Samaritans from the people of God, had treated them poorly, and had given them every reason to ignore them, if not be hostile to them.

And yet, he stops and helps. But he does not just come by and offer a prayer, which in itself would have been better than what the priest and Levite did. He comes and takes him and applies first aid to his wounds. Then, he chooses to walk and intentionally inconvenience himself, so he can put the hurt man on his animal. This means that he will likely be late to wherever he was going. Then, he takes him to an inn and tells the innkeeper to take care of the man at any cost and he will be responsible for it. This Samaritan, in the blink of an eye, went from being on his own way, minding his own business, to being late, inconvenienced, and financially obligated for the recovery of another person, and had absolutely no idea how much his bill would run. This is a man who made tremendous sacrifices for someone who probably hated him.

We nearly always conclude by looking at the last exchange between Jesus and the lawyer. "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" The lawyer responds, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." I want to share with you the words of Karl Barth, without a doubt one of the most important theologians in the last several hundred years. He says, "We might expect...that Jesus would have said to the teacher of the Law: This Samaritan did not ask questions like you. He found his neighbor in the man that had fallen among thieves. He treated him accordingly. Go and do thou likewise."

That is precisely what we would expect, and it is precisely what we have heard over and over again. We heard it in Sunday School when we talked about this story, we have been told that this is the main point of the story whenever we hear sermons about it. But when Barth says that we might expect this would be the lesson, he means that, in his judgment, as true as it might be, it isn't actually what the parable is about. When I first read that, I was taken aback. What else could it mean? What else could Jesus possibly be telling us than to go and be like the Good Samaritan. Isn't that the point, to help one another, to be a blessing to those who need it?

Amazingly, this is not what Jesus has set out to tell, and I must admit that I never realized this until I was basically clubbed over the head with this one day. When we read the story of the Good Samaritan this way, we are almost always putting ourselves into the story in one way or another. We are asked who we are, are we the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan? Of course, we find ourselves being all too much like the priest and Levite and not enough like the Samaritan. But that isn't where Jesus puts us in the story. Somehow, we lose our way between the beginning of the story and its end.

Immediately before Jesus starts telling the story, we read, "But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor.'" At the very end, Jesus asks the question, "Which of these three men, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" Do you see what Jesus has done? The question still needs to be asked, who are we in the story, but the answer is not what we expected. We are the man who fell into the hands of the robbers, the one who is broken and bleeding on the side of the road. We are not the ones who are helping those who are in need, but the ones who are in need themselves.

When we look at this story from this point of view, the whole thing changes on us. The question is no longer "who is in need that you can you help," but, "from whom are you willing to receive help?" And, as it turns out, this is a much harder question to answer. The fact of the matter is that we see ourselves as very self-sufficient people. We don't want to ask the question that Jesus asks, because it presupposes a picture of ourselves that we simply don't want to entertain. We want to focus on who it is that we can help because we look at ourselves and we see that we, by and large, have the resources, financial and otherwise, to take care of ourselves. We are so self-sufficient that it is hard for us to even really understand what it is like to be in need. We have had skills and a strong work ethic drilled into us from an early age and we have worked hard all our lives.

To look at ourselves and ask, "From whom are you willing to receive help," is to offend deeply. We want to respond and say, "What makes you think that I need to receive help at all? Have I not worked hard to be where I am, do I not deserve what I have?" We are much more comfortable with the call to help others, because that call allows us to continue to see ourselves as those with power, those in control, those of means who can stoop down and bless those who are in need.

In light of this, let us look again more closely at the context. We read that the reason the lawyer asked his question at all was because he wanted to justify himself. He wanted to be reassured that he was already being faithful. He expected to show Jesus up, to be better than Jesus actually expected him to be, to be the one who truly loved God and loved his neighbor. However, he had too much pride for this. He was starting from a position of self-assurance. He already presupposed that he loved God and loved his neighbor, and we have no reason to believe that he was an obvious hypocrite. He was probably loved and respected by all, as one who really did love God and love his neighbors. However, Jesus wants him to rethink his whole conception of what it means to be a neighbor.

He asks, "And who is my neighbor." To ask this means already that we want the category of "neighbor" to be restricted to one degree or another. Surely, it cannot mean everyone. If everyone is our neighbor, it means not only that we are called to show love and kindness to them, even if we do not like them, but it means also that we must submit ourselves to receive love and kindness from them as well, even if we do not like them. The real question, according to Jesus in the telling of this story, is not "Who you can help, who you can bless with your abundance," but "From whom you are willing to be blessed, whether you are even willing to admit that you need blessing from beyond yourself?"

This is a much harder question. For a wealthy and secure Israelite to come alongside of the Samaritan he dislikes is still possible, it is still something that he can make himself do. However, it is a completely different situation to be the one in need and have the Samaritan be the one doing the assisting. After all, this Israelite would have no problem believing that the Samaritan needed his help, perhaps even help that only he could provide, but how humiliating would it be for this Israelite to have to admit that he is so far from being able to help someone else, that he himself is in need and, in particular, in need of the help of a Samaritan, one he hates, one he believes hates God and is hated by God. How far has he fallen, that he needs to be helped by a Samaritan?

Are we willing to be blessed by those we think don't have the money to do it? Are we willing to receive help from those we don't think are able to help us, who are, perhaps, not as equipped to help us as we think we are to help ourselves? Are we willing to be blessed by those we consider to be beneath us. Do we even dare to admit that there are those we actually consider to be beneath us, in our hearts if never in our words? Why do we, as human beings, feel that help can come from some people, but it can't from others? I am more and more convinced that it reveals that we have something of a stunted understanding of grace.

If someone with whom you got along pretty well were to come up to you and say, "I just wanted you to know that I forgive you," how might you react? Well, we might want to say that we are grateful, because it is always good to be reconciled. But, judging by my own tendencies and those I have seen in others over the years, I imagine the response might be somewhat different. If someone with whom I did not think I had a problem came up and declared their forgiveness, I am quite likely to get somewhat upset. After all, that word of forgiveness carries with it, at the very same time, a word of condemnation. They are saying, "You have done something that needs forgiveness, and I am forgiving you." The word of grace is simultaneously a word of judgment. I will probably question the person for assuming that I even needed to be forgiven; after all, in my own mind, I'd done nothing wrong.

When the man who was attacked by robbers was helped by the Samaritan, he had to come face-to-face with the fact that he needed help, because he was not, in fact, self-sufficient. He did not get to choose who helped him; those he would have preferred just crossed the road and ignored him. To push this image as far as I think we need to, we need to remember that, if the man was stubborn and said, "No! Absolutely not! I will not submit to be helped by a Samaritan!" what would have happened? He would have died.

Jesus is saying that, in order for us to really love our neighbors, we have to be willing to be saved by them. We have to be willing to let them serve us, we have to admit that we have needs that we are unable to fill and that we welcome anyone who can help us to do so. If we say in our hearts that we can do it ourselves, that we have all we need and that we would rather do without than to rely on another, we do not yet love our neighbor as we have been called to love.

Let us think about this in the light of the good news of Jesus Christ. Jesus, while on the cross, actively dying because one of his own disciples betrayed him, said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." The fact of the matter is that the people who nailed him up thought of themselves as knowing exactly what they were doing. They didn't need his pity, his forgiveness. As far as they were concerned, he was a criminal, a disturber of the peace. It never crossed their minds that they were the broken and bleeding man and that Jesus, this despised person, was their help. They were doing quite well enough on their own, thank you very much; they didn't need a Good Samaritan.

Jesus once said to Pharisees who wanted to put him in a bad light, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." Jesus came to save sinners. If you are a sinner, take heart, for God came to earth for you, he suffered for you, he died for you, he was raised for you, he ascended back to heaven for you, and he prays for you. All that God, in his mercy, has done, has been for you. If you are not a sinner, then Jesus did not come to save you. If you are not a sinner, or, at least, if you do not consider yourself a sinner, you won't even listen to Jesus, for Jesus speaks only to sinners, to those who know all too well that they need help.

Brothers and sisters, we find ourselves broken by the side of the road in our sin. Even though our life depends on it, we can do nothing to free ourselves. Will we allow ourselves to be helped by this man, this man who was crucified as a criminal, who challenges the powers of this world, who completely changes the way we think and the way we live? Will we receive help by those he sends, even if they are poor, even if they are weak, even if they are, in our opinion, of no account? By God's grace, let us do so. Let us be willing to hear that word of judgment, for it is lodged deep in the word of grace. Let us pray.

AMEN

The Problem of Evil

08/17/11 The Problem of Evil GUMC Youth

There has been a question that has bothered people for literally hundreds of years. It is this, "If God is all-good and if God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world?" The basic issue is that, if God is really all-good and all-powerful, there would not be any evil in the world, because such a god would not allow evil to exist. Basically, God would prevent it. This question is so famous that it has a name. It is called "The Problem of Evil." This is a question that comes into the spotlight every so often in the wake of some significant tragedy. For example, when the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th, 2001, while many people found refuge in the midst of disaster in God, many others raised doubts. They said things along the lines, "Why run to God in the midst of tragedy? After all, where was God when this happened? If God is really all-good and all-powerful, could he have not stopped it from happening? Clearly, if God couldn't have protected those people from this, why should we follow him?"

The question was raised again recently in an interview with Rob Bell, a prominent pastor from Michigan, which took place right after Japan was hit by the earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. The question was asked, "Is God not powerful enough to help the Japanese or is he powerful enough to do so, but just doesn't care?" Though it is a bit of a weaker way of putting it, we could say that the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people" is basically the same as the problem of evil.

I imagine that most of you have either asked this question, or something like it, yourselves, or you have heard other people ask it. Even if this is a totally new idea to you, the fact of the matter is that it is such a favorite topic of atheists, you will hear it at some point in your life. Nearly every time anything bad happens on the national or international level, someone posts something online about how this disaster, and those like it, destroy faith in God and should demonstrate to everyone with half a brain that believing in God is a waste of time at best, and dangerous at worst. I want to spend tonight thinking about this problem, some of the main ways it gets dealt with, and how I think that we should approach it from a completely different angle.

You see, when someone asks the question, "If God is all-good and if God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world?" there are really only three ways to answer it. We either have to say that God is not all-good, that God is not all-powerful, or that evil does not exist, or that it is not really that big a deal. Let's take those one by one to see where they lead us.

First, what if we respond and say that the reason that evil exists in the world is because God is not all-good. To be honest, for many religions throughout history, this would be the way they deal with the problem of evil. Why is there evil? Because god, or more likely, the gods, are simply not all that good. If you ever read any Greek mythology, for example, you will find that the gods aren't all that good. They are jealous, they are angry, they are vindictive, and they are unbelievably selfish. A common criticism of Greek culture made by the early Christians looked something like this. "You say that children should look to the gods to see how they should behave, but then, when they go and do what the gods do, you punish them for it. How can you worship such terrible gods?" We need to remember that the Judeo-Christian tradition is just about the only one that insists that God is absolutely good, so good that he is the definition of all that is good.

The early Christians made a very important point. If the gods are so far from being all-good that they are not even any better than human beings are, why should we follow them? If God is not all-good, it seems that we would be better off finding a great human teacher that we could follow instead of listening to God. Clearly, as Christians, we must not, we cannot give up the fact that God is indeed all-good.

So, we turn to the next possible solution of the problem of evil. What if we were to say that the reason there is evil in the world is not because God is not all-good, but because he is not all-powerful? If we are dealing with a God who is not all-powerful, does not the existence of evil makes perfect sense? After all, God is just doing the best that God can; he is merely suffering along, just like you and I are. Perhaps the best example of thinking along these lines is the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who developed something called Process Philosophy, which has had a tremendous influence over certain portions of the church. In this philosophy, God gives everything that exists new possibilities that they either fulfill or don't fulfill and, if we don't fulfill them then we are not what we are meant to be, but that is not all. If we do not fulfill them, according to this view, God cannot be what God is meant to be. It is interesting to notice that Whitehead developed this view after he lost his son in World War I.

But, as Christians, does this really solve the problem of evil? Is the claim that God is simply not able to deal with evil comforting, or even remotely commensurate with what we read in the Bible? It really isn't. After all, one of the main points in the Bible is that God is radically against evil, that, in Jesus Christ, God has waged and even already won the war against evil. It is precisely because the Bible and the whole Christian tradition state so clearly that God is indeed powerful enough to overcome evil that the problem of evil got started in the first place. If God cannot defeat evil, then what good is it to follow him? If God cannot save us from our sins and deliver us from the clutches of evil, we are just wasting our time. Clearly we cannot, as Christians, take this route.

But what about the third option to deal with the problem of evil? What if we ask the question as to whether evil really exists, or whether it isn't as bad as we might think it is? To me, to deny the existence of evil is kind of silly. After all, we can look around us, even in our own little corner in Iowa, and see that things are not as they ought to be, that evil has permeated every aspect of life. I think it is very hard to say that there is no evil, or that evil is not a big deal, if we take any time at all and look around the world and see all the pain and suffering at the hands of human cruelty that exists.

However, since lots of people have taken this approach, let's look at it. One response might be, "Since God is all-good and he loves us, God had to give us free will (since it is not good and loving to make people into nothing more than machines or puppets). If God gives us free will, though, evil becomes a distinct possibility. If God were to prevent evil at the expense of removing our free will, there might be less suffering, but we would cease to be real human beings." If we take this view, evil is no longer God's fault, but ours. At first, that might not seem so bad, and maybe there is a nugget of truth in it, since human beings are often very much to blame for the evil in the world. However, if our free will is made so central that God can no longer be seen as interacting with our world of space and time, can we still be Christians? If we really take this view seriously, how can we avoid the conclusion that, since God cannot prevent our evil without destroying our free will, God cannot bring about the triumph of good over evil without destroying our free will, so we are on our own? Again, in light of the fact that the Bible teaches us clearly that God does indeed engage with our world, we can't really affirm this view, either.

Another variation, with a long and glorious tradition is to say that, because God is all-powerful, nothing ever happens by accident, but happens directly because God expressly willed it to happen. That means that if I were to throw something at you and break your nose, you could say that I broke your nose, but in reality, you would have to say that God broke your nose, using me to do it. Because God is all-good, we would have to say that, if we interpret something to be evil, it is only because we do not understand that what has happened has happened only because God has willed it. If God wills it, it must be good. Even John Wesley, at a moment that is far from his best, wrote to his sister, who had just lost her infant child, that God had brought it about to save her the troubles of motherhood. A particularly famous pastor from Minnesota was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years ago and said that his cancer came directly from the hand of God and that it was ultimately the pure and good gift of God and that everyone who has cancer should realize that it is simply the gift of God, regardless of what might seem bad about it. According to this view, there really is no such thing as evil, since God is good and God causes everything that happens. If you think there is evil, the problem isn't with God, but with you.

Another way to downplay the seriousness of evil is to claim that we live in the Best of All Possible Worlds. This view, which is closely associated with the philosopher Leibniz, is that bad things happen, but they do not happen for no reason. They only happen in order that better things might happen. Everything that happens is for the greater good. This means either that, when tragedy strikes you, it is only so that something even better can happen to you, or so that something better can happen to other people. Nothing is really totally bad because everything is, as the philosophy says, "for the best."

But do you see what this means? It means that evil has to happen, that it is built into the perfect plan of God. There is something about evil that makes it absolutely necessary for good to take place. It means that whatever we might want to say about God being all-powerful, we don't really mean that he is all-powerful, since he is not powerful enough to bring good about without having to inflict evil on people. A French writer named Voltaire wrote a work called Candide, which shows how this view is not helpful and, actually, quite absurd. Later, the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wrote a long book, The Brothers Karamazov, part of which includes a discussion of the evil that happens to children and poses the question, "Is it worth all this evil to call God good?" The answer given in the work, which I agree with, is that it is not. Not only because I find it deeply offensive, but because I do not think it bears even the slightest relation to what we learn in the Bible.

The closest that the Bible ever gets to dealing directly with the Problem of Evil is the book of Job, where Job, the righteous and wealthy man, is attacked by Satan, who wants to show that hardships will drive anyone to curse God. Throughout the book, Job loses everything and his friends come and say, "You must have sinned. Nobody suffers like this unless there is a good reason for it." However, in the conclusion, the question is never really answered. God never gives a reason for human suffering. If this sounds somewhat weak, let us consider a passage from the Gospel of Luke.

"Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Jesus does not give a reason for why some people suffer and others do not. According to the Bible, evil is real, incredibly deadly real, but it is also absolutely irrational. There is no reason for it, and if we try to find a good reason that evil exists, we will always lose our way and distort the whole issue.

I mentioned at the beginning that there were basically only three ways to answer the question, "If God is all-good and God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world;" to say that God is not all-good, to say that God is not all-powerful, or to say that there is no evil, or that evil is not that big a deal. But every time we looked at one of those ways of answering, we found that we couldn't really agree with any of them as Christians. What are we do about this? If none of the possible solutions to a problem work, what options do we have?

The fact of the matter is that, in this as in other cases, we are dealing with a question that is a false question, that is, the problem of evil, as it is usually stated, is a question that does not have an answer. The reason it does not have an answer is not because it is not an important question, nor because we haven't thought hard enough about it, but because it is an absolutely wrong question. When we ask it, it certainly seems like we know what we are talking about, but it turns out that this is not the case. When we ask the question, we presuppose that we know what the goodness of God is, what the power of God is, and how serious evil is. In point of fact, if we can ask that question, it shows that we don't know any one of the three! In the end, it is only when we look to Jesus that we realize that our usual way of thinking is distorting and unhelpful and that we get a clue to a real solution.

How do we often think about the goodness of God? We tend to think of God's goodness as goodness at a distance. We want God's goodness to be like the love of a distant relative, who cares for us and sends us money and does favors for us from a distance, but doesn't actually come into our lives and make a difference. We want God's goodness to be a kind of impersonal benevolence. We want to define God's love in terms of the things that we don't like, that God isn't certain ways and that he prevents certain unpleasant things.

But when we look at what God's goodness actually looks like, when we see God actually come among us and show his goodness to us in a remarkably personal and concrete way, what do we see? We don't see a God who was content to simply send a messenger to tell us what to do, to give us a list of things to do and a list of things to avoid, but a God who comes among us himself. We see a God who encounters the brokenness of the world himself, who puts his own life on the line to join with us in our trouble. We realize that God's goodness is not a goodness from far away, but a goodness that comes close, that meets us where we are.

How do we often think about the power of God? History teaches us that, when we think about the almightiness of God, we tend to think about human power and multiply it by a million, or something like that. When we think about the power of God in relation to the problem of evil, we tend to think of a God who just has to snap his fingers and the problem of evil vanishes. We want the power of God to be a power of sheer, brute force, that asserts dominance and forces everything else to fall into obedience. But when we see God enter into our world, we see God's power is the power of suffering love, a power that allows evil to have its way with it and overcomes it anyway. The power of God is a power that does not prevent the crucifixion, but allows it to take place and triumphs in the resurrection.

This is closely related to our mistake in understanding evil. Even when we want to say that evil is serious, once we raise the question of the problem of evil, we have trivialized it. When we ask that question, we show that we don't think that evil is that big a problem, since God could just speak a word and do away with it. However, when we look at Jesus, we see that evil is quite a bit more serious than we ever imagined. Think about this, if evil is such a serious problem that nothing short of the second Person of the Triune God becoming a human, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally crucified can wrench humanity out of the clutches of evil, than evil is a huge problem, a problem that costs God everything to deal with. God does indeed triumph over evil, but we must not think that it is a small thing that God has done. It is, in fact, something so great that we can only dimly understand it.

So you see, evil really is a problem, but not in the way we tend to talk about it. In reality, it is the greatest problem that humanity has ever had. It is not an abstract question that we can answer in a classroom or by reading a book. It is an incredibly practical problem, because our whole lives are infected with sin, and it needs a practical answer. That practical answer from God is not a theoretical argument but the simple fact that God himself has dealt with evil, at tremendous cost to himself. Christ himself has died for us that we might live, so that we might not be ruled by evil, but that we might stand strong in truth and righteousness. So, as you go to face school, which is undoubtedly a place where you encounter evil on a daily basis, remember that, though evil is a problem, God has not abandoned you to it, but has endured it and overcome it, has taken its greatest attacks and has even allowed himself to be crucified by it, but is truly the victorious one as the one who is resurrected from the dead. Take courage. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 2:13-17

08/10/11 Mark 2:13-17 GUMC Youth

In this next passage in the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus does something that most of us would not expect him to do. He calls a tax collector named Levi and then eats dinner with him. In doing this, Jesus caused something of a scandal and opened himself up for attack.

In order to understand how serious it is that Jesus called Levi the tax collector, you need to understand just who tax collectors were at the time and why most people hated them. As you probably have picked up by now, there are a whole bunch of people in America who are not at all excited about paying taxes. You have one side of the argument that emphasizes that we pay taxes so we can get a whole bunch of services; after all, our police and fire departments are paid through our taxes, there are many good things that are paid for by our taxes. There are also services for people who simply don't have any money to speak of that we help to pay for, without which, many people would not be able to survive. On the other hand, there is a question as to whether we need all the services that we have, or, just as often, whether we can't offer the same services to the people more efficiently, with less cost to everyone else. Our situation today is complicated by the fact that our country is in an absolutely enormous amount of debt and something has to be done, both sides can agree, at least, on that. Arguing about taxes is about as American as apple pie. There will always be those who want taxes to go up (usually, though, they are interested in the taxes of other people going up) and there will always be people who want taxes to go down.

Now, in first century Israel, it was a little different. Israel was governed by Rome, so the taxes, in general, weren't going to help the people have better public services, or even to their own people, but were going to Rome to help make it a more beautiful and glorious city. When you are telling the Jewish people that they have to pay taxes in order for this great, pagan, superpower to be rich, it is hard to get them to play along. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Rome was seriously the most powerful nation ever, Israel would have rebelled in a heartbeat. In fact, that had done that once upon the time, when the Greeks were in charge, but it didn't last very long.

You see, when America was being taxed by England, they made public demonstrations, like the Boston Tea Party. It was fairly easy to do that when the people you were protesting against were over a thousand miles away and there was nothing but water between you. It would take months before they would even know what you'd done and months more before they could respond. This was not the case in Israel. You paid your taxes, or you were in serious trouble.

So you can see why the Israelites would hate to pay their taxes in general, but it is actually much worse than that. In order to collect the taxes, Rome employed a bunch of native Israelites to collect the taxes for them. Already, this is a reason to hate the tax collectors. After all, now you have your neighbors who are working in close company with the Roman government. Not only that, the tax collectors weren't exactly known for being particularly honest. It was common practice for tax collectors to collect more than they were told to and just pocket the extra. So, now you not only have your neighbors working for the people you hate, they are ripping you off on top of it. This is the kind of person that Jesus calls in our passage. Jesus had already called a bunch of fishermen, who were poor and something of outcasts from society; now Jesus has called someone even further outside the people that most folks want to interact with. Jesus accepts the unacceptable.

As a side note, it is interesting to notice that, when we read lists of Jesus' disciples, there is always included a man named Simon "The Cananean" or "The Zealot." People who had this title were staunch nationalists, who hate the Romans more than just about anyone else around. I bring this up because Jesus calls both the tax collector and the zealot to follow him. Both of the radical extremes have to set down the issues that divide them and unite in Christ. The reality they encounter in Christ is far more important than their political differences and forces them to approach their whole lives from a different point of view. Jesus is calling you, and he is calling those who you hate. Jesus calls everyone, whether we like it or not. You will meet many people that you might not be able to imagine why God has called them, but he calls them anyway. If God accepts them, we have to deal with our own prejudices.

Let's turn our attention to the controversy that arises when Jesus goes to eat dinner with Levi and his tax collector friends. But before we can understand that, we have to know something about ancient Jewish practice for eating together. According to custom, Jewish people did not eat with non-Jews. To do so was said to make them unclean. The same was true if they ate with people who were unclean. Now, aside from the fact that tax collectors, in the eyes of their fellow Israelites, had already set themselves up against them and against God, they were also close associates with the Romans, which means they, too, were unclean. To eat with tax collectors was to eat with sinners who hated God and God's people. If you ate with sinners, it meant to the people that you approved of what they did and you made other people think that you were just like them.

So these Pharisees see that Jesus is eating with Levi and other tax collectors and sinners and they are deeply offended. Here was this Rabbi, this teacher, who, in spite of the fact that the Pharisees are some of Jesus' biggest enemies, is actually quite like them in a lot of ways, sitting down and eating with people who have set themselves up against the longstanding tradition of the people. By eating with tax collectors, it is almost as if Jesus was turning his back on his nation, turning his back on the tradition, and setting himself up against the religious leaders of the time. They ask, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

Listen to Jesus' response. He says, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." Jesus' point is really quite clear and correct. If you are a doctor and you decide that you are not going to help people who are sick because you don't like sick people or because you think that only people who are healthy are worth helping, you aren't much of a doctor. If you are a doctor, you have to go where the sick people are, or at least be available for the sick people to come to you. If you only associate with people who are well, you never heal anyone, so, whatever you are, you aren't really a doctor.

The point is clear. Jesus is here, not only to heal those who are physically sick, but to heal those who are sick in their soul, deep in who they are. Just like our bodies get sick, our souls and minds get sick, too, and they have just as serious of an impact on our lives as physical sickness, maybe even more. If we get caught up in destructive patterns of thought and life, it might hurt us even more than being terribly sick would. If Jesus is the one who can heal people like this, then where else should he be? If the tax collectors are the people who have the most disordered minds and lives, shouldn't Jesus go and help them? Doesn't that make sense? If they are sick, they need a doctor; if they are sinners, they need Jesus.

This is incredibly good news for you and me because, whether you realize it or not, we are all sinners. None of us lives like we should, none of us does what is right all the time, none of us lives a life that is totally pleasing to God. Even when we are at our best, we all get distracted by ourselves, by seeking what we want instead of what is best for others. We get caught up in our own problems instead of being more concerned with the needs of others. We are incredibly selfish people, even when we don't look like it. We are people who are sick and in need of a doctor, sinners in need of a savior. And Jesus came to save sinners and only to save sinners. If you are a sinner, rejoice because Christ came for you, Christ died for you, Christ was raised for you, Christ was ascended for you, and Christ prays for you, even now. When we read about Jesus, nothing is more comforting than realizing that we are sinners who need saving, for it is only when we realize that we need saving that we will embrace Jesus with our whole lives.

You see, there are two sides to Jesus' statement here. It is at the same time a word of comfort and grace as well as a word of critique and condemnation. The tax collectors and sinners, who were seen as those on the outside of society, heard that Jesus was there for them, to heal them, to make them whole, to give them a new hope and a new reason for living. The Pharisees, who were very moral people, who lived carefully by God's laws, who were understood by everyone around at the time to be on God's good side, who were on the inside, are revealed to be very arrogant indeed. After all, they look at the tax collectors and realize that they are sinners without even noticing that there is just as much capacity for evil in themselves as they see in others. Know this, if you can look down on another person, whether because of what they do or what they don't do, if you can think yourself better than someone else, it is not because you actually are; it is because you have been blinded, for one reason or another, to the fact that you, too, are not what you ought to be, and cannot be who you were made to be apart from the Spirit dwelling inside of you and making you like Christ. As Christians, we are never confirmed in ourselves, accepted for who we are, but because we have been made Christ's own brothers and sisters, we are accepted because of who Christ is.

The fact of the matter is that nowhere in the Bible will you find any acknowledgement of people being good and holy on their own. It will speak of people being righteous, but never in isolation from God. Jesus speaks of those who need a physician and those who do not, but we must not take that too literally when he speaks of people who don't need a physician, because Jesus does not mean it to be taken literally, which is clear when we look at all of what he says. Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, "If you had any idea how much you needed to be healed, you wouldn't be sitting here criticizing me, but you would be coming to be healed, yourselves."

But the real fact of the matter is that it is not easy to admit that we need help. We are told that we need to be self-sufficient, that we need to figure things out for ourselves. To admit that we need help is to admit that we are not able to solve our own problems, that we need guidance, that we need people who know us better than we know ourselves to sort through our issues. Are we prepared to admit that? Again, Jesus is the savior of none but sinners. Are you a sinner? Are you willing to admit before all that you have sinned and that you are, left to your own devices, completely unable to heal yourself? That is what you say when you become a Christian. You cannot say that you are a Christian, that you follow Christ, but that you don't have a problem with sin like all the other people who follow Christ. Christians ought to be the most humble people in the world, for Christians, by definition, are people who are weak, who are unable to make it on their own, who recognize that without God they are nothing. Christians know that, whatever it might have looked like before they started following Christ, they were lost, they were alienated from the truth.

Is that a claim you are willing to make tonight and forever? Are you willing to join with the rest of the sinners in this room, which is all of us, and follow the Jesus who laid down his life for us, who died that we might live? Cling to the truth of the Gospel, that when humanity had turned away from God, had decided that they were not going to listen to him, God entered into the weakness and brokenness of our world of space and time and became one of us, to live like us, to struggle like us in the difficulties of life, to grow up like us, to be betrayed by friends like we are, and to suffer the depths of the evil of the world. But remember this. Though Jesus was crucified, though he was killed, his death was not the final word; Jesus rose from the dead, not even death, our great enemy, could stop God.

If this is what God has done for us, on our behalf and in our place, know and trust that he cares for you, has done amazing things for you, and wants desperately for you to be transformed from an enemy of God to his friend, from a sinner to a saint, from one who tries to do it on your own to one who trusts in him for everything. We are sick sinners, but we have a great physician who has endured much so that we can be healed. So, let us learn to cling to Christ every day, that we might truly be renewed and restored. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 2:1-12

08/03/11 Mark 2:1-12 GUMC Youth

When we read the first chapter of Mark, we found that he told a whole bunch of stories very quickly. We got the sense that he wanted to cover a whole bunch of stuff really fast so he could set the stage and move on. As much as it pains me to make this connection, it is just a bit like the movie we watched at the lock-in, Napoleon Dynamite. That movie has two main stories in it, getting ready for the school dance and Pedro running for class president. The first twenty minutes or so, however, have almost nothing to do with either of those two stories. However, just because they don't fit into them doesn't mean that they do not contribute vitally to the movie. If we didn't have those first twenty minutes, we wouldn't understand the rest of the movie. We could hardly say that they are what the movie is really about, but we need them so we understand who Napoleon, Pedro, Deb, Kip, Uncle Rico, and everyone else are about. Mark's first chapter is hardly the real meat of the book, but, if we didn't have it, we wouldn't even know how to begin to understand the rest of the book.

Now that we move into chapter two, we start to see Jesus actually start to teach and to do miracles and to interact with both the crowds of people and the leaders of the time. We could say that this is the first real story of the book of Mark. And right out of the barrel, Jesus has ruffled feathers. Imagine this. Jesus is amazingly popular as a healer of the sick and a worker of miracles. So, the moment he comes back to Capernaum, he is crowded into the house where he is staying, which is probably Peter's mother-in-law's home. What is interesting is that, though everyone is coming to see him because he heals the sick, that is not what he does when the crowd comes to see him. Instead, we read that he is teaching them. Again, remember back to last week when we saw that Jesus intentionally left the people who needed healing because he needed to preach to others in the other towns. Jesus is able to heal people, and he is willing to do so, but what he cares most about is that we know God and what God is doing among us.

There are many people in our culture today who don't think that knowing and believing things are all that important; what really matters is doing things. How often do we hear that it doesn't matter what you believe, so long as you do this or that? It doesn't matter what religion you are, or if you are an atheist, so long as you love one another, or at least don't hurt one another. The only problem is that this imagines that there is a big separation between what we really believe and what we do. The fact of the matter is that there is no such separation. We do what we do because of what we believe, that is what we really and deeply believe, and not what we might think we believe. We are only good to one another because we believe that we ought to be or that it is best for everyone if we do so. However, once that conviction is shaken, if it is not rooted deep in the gospel, it is only a matter of time before we abandon that value. It is amazing to me that the people who affirm the loudest that you can be a moral person and an atheist at the same time have a basic ethical position that bears a remarkable resemblance to what the Judeo-Christian tradition has tended to affirm. What I am saying is that I will not be surprised if, as the culture becomes less and less shaped by the Christian message, our culture's standard of what it means to be moral will become lower and lower.

The point is that here we have Jesus teaching a bunch of people because knowing the truth, knowing God, is more important than being healed, though he is healing them, too. However, there are so many people, that a paralyzed man cannot get to Jesus, even to listen to him, much less to be healed. The fact that he can't walk to get himself to Jesus before the crowd showed up means that he has to stay on the outside. And the people of the time would certainly have been fine with leaving him on the outside. After all, he was not a contributing member of society, he probably did not come from a powerful family. Most of the people were so interested in seeing Jesus for themselves that they did not even think to help this man get in.

However, this paralyzed man had some friends who were willing to do some hard work to get their friend some help. They took him up to the top of the roof and, we read, they "removed the roof." Perhaps more graphically, the Greek says that they "unroofed the roof," and lowered the man down on a mat. Think about how the owner of the house would react! Do you have friends who would be willing to help you like this, not because they like to destroy other people's property but because they care so deeply for you that they would take the responsibility and financial cost of such a move upon themselves just so you could get help? Are you that kind of friend?

But after this man was dropped down in front of Jesus, what does Jesus say? We read, "When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.'" Again, because we live in a world that thinks that talk is cheap and it is actions that count, we kind of want to say to Jesus, "So what? He didn't come here to have his sins forgiven, he came to be healed. How can you assume that he has sins that need to be forgiven when you don't even know him?" The fact of the matter is that it would not have been at all uncommon for people at the time to assume that, if you were sick or crippled in some way or another, you must be a sinner and you are being punished for your sin. If Jesus had said, "Son, you never sinned, this paralysis is not your fault," nobody would have bought it. Everyone sins and everyone needs forgiveness. Not only that, saying that the paralysis is not the man's fault might take some guilt off his conscience, but it doesn't give him his body back.

But that isn't the problem that the people had with Jesus saying this. What do we read? "Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 'Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" Here is the problem as the scribes saw it. Jesus, though only a man in their eyes, was forgiving sin, which is something that only God can do. They are absolutely right when they say that only God can forgive sin. After all, regardless of whatever we might do, when we sin, even when we sin against other people, the biggest problem is not that we have hurt other people or ourselves, but that we have gone against how we were created, we have rejected God and our relationship with him.

Let me put this as strongly as I can. King David, one of the most important people in the Old Testament, had an adulterous affair with Bathsheba, who was the wife of one of his mightiest warriors. She became pregnant from the affair and so David had her husband killed in battle. Shortly after the child was born, that child died. In his grief, David wrote Psalm 51. Hear what he says in that psalm, "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment." This is a man who is guilty of adultery and murder, who has endured tremendous personal suffering because of his sin, and he says that he has, at the end of the day, sinned against God and against God alone. Does that mean that he, Bathsheba, and her husband, were not sinned against? Of course not, but that David understood that his sin against God was so much greater than his sin toward other people, that it was as if he had only sinned against God.

The scribes were actually pretty good theologians. They understood what we sometimes forget in our twenty-first century American situation: Only God can forgive sins. For Jesus to say, on his own authority, that this man's sins were forgiven is for Jesus to claim the very authority of God. The question is, does Jesus actually have the very authority of God, or does he not?

I think that C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a convert to Christianity from atheism, puts it well in his book Mere Christianity. "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

But how did Jesus show that he has the authority to forgive the sins of this paralyzed man? What do we read? "At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, 'Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven," or to say, "Stand up and take your mat and walk?" But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins' - he said to the paralytic - 'I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go home.'"

This is a really interesting thing that Jesus says. After all, which is easier to say? Well, on the one hand, it is easier to say that someone's sins are forgiven because, after all, it is hard to prove it wrong. You can't tell whether someone is forgiven or not just by looking at them, so there is a sense in which it is easier to say that. However, it is actually harder to forgive sins than it is to heal someone. After all, a great doctor might be able to heal someone, but only God can forgive, so, unless we are God, which we aren't, it is actually harder to forgive sins than to heal someone.

But, just like today, people then knew that talk is cheap. Which is harder to prove? Well, it is harder to fool people into believing that a man is healed from his crippling paralysis when he hasn't been than it is to fool people that his sins are forgiven when they haven't been. So, in order to show that Jesus can actually forgive sins with his word, he commands the paralytic to stand up and go home. By doing so, Jesus shows that his words are backed up by reality in the case of the healing of the paralytic, so he is trustworthy also when he forgives sins. It is a classic argument called a forteriori. If someone asked you if you could lift a hundred pounds and you responded by lifting two hundred pounds, there is a sense that you didn't answer the question, but there should be no doubt left in anyone's minds that you can do what they asked. Jesus can heal the body with a word, he can heal the soul with no more effort.

The point that we need to take from all this is that Jesus has the authority to forgive sins, that Jesus is indeed God in human flesh, that God has actually come among us to meet with us, to reveal himself to us, and to transform our lives. Jesus heals so that we can know who he is, that we can trust that God loves us so much that he came to be among us. If we can think about the fact that God became a human being and not be absolutely floored by it, it means that we do not yet understand what it really means that God would do that. This is the God of the universe, who has all power, who can do whatever he wants, and does not have to do anything that he doesn't wan't to do, who came to be born as a weeping and wailing baby, the word of God unable to speak, and submitted himself to grow up just like you and I do, to become an adult, be hated and persecuted, all because he loved us, and finally killed by being nailed to a cross. We hear a lot about bullying and people being picked on today and it is serious business, but we need to always remember that nobody was hated so intensely or as much for no reason as Jesus, and, if he didn't want to, he didn't have to put up with it. But he chose, understand this, he chose to endure it all, just so he could be with us.

The Jesus who loves us is the Jesus who came and was attacked. The Jesus who came is one who was hated by the people who thought they had everything together. The only Jesus there is is one who suffered so that we might be healed. When people accused him of overstepping his bounds, of doing what only God can do, he dealt with their anger, because he was doing the right thing, he was being who he was, is, and evermore will be, God. When you look into the face of Jesus, you are looking into the very face of God. If you want to know what God is like, what God would say to you, look at Jesus. There you will find that God is not at all like what you expected, but is far greater. He has the power to forgive, and he does forgive. He forgave those who put him to death, he will forgive you. Let us pray.

AMEN