Mark 4:21-34

11/16/11 Mark 4:21-34 GUMC Youth

Chapter four of Mark is something of a chapter of parables. It was in this chapter that we saw the first of Jesus' parables, the parable of the sower, and it contains almost all of the parables we find in the whole book. Tonight, we are going to look at three parables that Jesus tells, one right after another.

What is interesting to me is how many people I have met that are only interested in trying to understand the parables one at a time, in isolation from one another. That means, they would want to look at the first parable in our passage first, then the second, then the third, but never really all at the same time. The thing is, these parables aren't put side by side by accident. It is actually only when we look at the parables one at a time, but also look at them all together, that we really understand what Jesus is getting at. Parables are the kinds of things where, if you want to understand one of them, you really need to try to understand them all, preferably at the same time.

The first parable that Jesus says here is about a lamp. He says, "Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?" The answer, of course, is that it would be stupid to do those things with lamps, not least because, since lamps at the time ran by burning fuel, it would be dangerous. The point is that you don't light a lamp for no purpose (especially if fuel was expensive, which it was). You light lamps so you can see. And because you light lamps so you can see, you put them in prominent places in the house, high up so the light doesn't get blocked by all your furniture.

He continues on and says, "For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light." The point that Jesus is getting at here is that, as Christians, we are not saved, we are not indwelled by the Holy Spirit, to have it be our little secret. To be a Christian and to have nobody be able to tell is like lighting a lamp and then carefully hiding it so nobody can see it. It is simply pointless. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that you should go to school and sports practices and make a really big deal about how you are a Christian. After all, a lamp doesn't stand on its lampstand and say, "Hey everybody, I'm a lamp!" Everyone can just tell that it is a lamp. Words are important and a willingness to talk about Jesus is important, but if people can't tell that there is something different about you, all the words in the world won't make a difference.

The other thing that Jesus says on this topic is, "The measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." The big point is of reciprocity, that what we receive and what we give are to be related to one another. If you give a lot, you will receive a lot. You don't always receive back the same kind of thing you gave, like, just because you give a lot of money, doesn't mean you will get a lot of money back, but you will receive joy, peace and love. If you don't put much into your relationship with God, you won't receive much in return. If you want your faith to impact your life, if you want to be someone who doesn't just go through the motions, but is actually impacted by the reality of God, you have to participate. You can't be surprised if God doesn't move in your life if you don't participate and take advantage of what you have already received.

There is another side to this. Not only is what we receive from God proportional to what we give, we are also called to give to God in proportion to what we have received. You see, God made the first move, took the first step. The fact that we can give anything to God at all is based firmly in the fact that we received from him long before we ever dreamed of giving anything to him. I want to give a somewhat silly example of this kind of thing. When I was in high school, I was in American History and I had just about the best teacher I'd ever had. We had real, hands-on projects, where we got to engage in the stuff we were learning. Like when we talked about the roaring twenties and the stock market crash, we all started with the same amount of money, and tried to trade with each other to end up with the most money.

Well, one project we did was we were each given a nation that fought in World War I, and we had to make alliances and fight battles with each other. As you can imagine, the people who had America, England, Germany, France, and places like that were able to conquer all kinds of people, they had hugely superior firepower and could easily win in battle. My partner and I ended up with some tiny country in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't get much done, but we did our best. At the end of the game, our teacher told us to take our scores and modify them according to a table that he showed us. As it turned out, the superpowers didn't do so well at the end of the day because they had to take away so many points. You see, anyone would have expected them to do well. They actually had to do really well in order to show that their victories were not simply because they started off with all the advantages. My partner and I ended up coming in like second or third place, not because we won the war, but because we did what we could with what we had.

We are held accountable for what we receive. If we have received only a little bit, God knows it and has tremendous grace. We are not judged according to what we don't have but what we do have. On the flip side, if we have received a lot, we are expected to give and live accordingly. I know that, from time to time, it seems like we really haven't received all that much, but we really have, especially in Spencer. Did you know that Clay County has one of the lowest poverty rates in Iowa? That doesn't mean that there isn't poverty, but that it is remarkably low, compared to places like Des Moines, Waterloo, and lots of places down in the southern part of the state. Simply looking at that, you can tell that you have received much. On top of that, you have been taken care of by your parents, which lots of young people simply haven't. The fact of the matter is that you have already received much. When you succeed, you don't simply succeed on the basis of your own natural talent, but because other people have paved the way for your success. You have received much. Will you give much with your life?

The other two parables don't take as much time to explore. Jesus says this. "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how." Now, any farmer will tell you that they don't just sit around after they've planted their seeds. Farming is hard work and, though there are seasons where it is less intense, there is always something to do. The point that Jesus is making is that, in spite of all the work that a farmer might do, the farmer really isn't causing the seed to grow, or even helping it to grow. The farmer is doing whatever he can to remove every obstacle to growth. The growth happens slowly and gradually. If you are like me and you don't spend all your time on a farm, when you get out into the country every few weeks, it seems obvious how much the corn, for example, has grown. I imagine that if you were a corn farmer, the difference in growth from the last time you looked at your plants to the next time is pretty small. In fact, you probably can't even tell, from to day to day, that they are growing at all.

I am always amazed at how closely this applies to my Christian life. One of the things that there is no shortcut for is establishing a relationship with God. The longer you've been a committed Christian, the more you know how God works in you. I have these times where it feels like I've completely plateaued, when I don't feel like I'm growing, but just kind of floating through the days and weeks. I'm still doing the things I should be doing. I'm still reading my Bible, I'm still praying, I'm still trying to put my faith in practice, but I don't feel like I'm going through any breakthroughs, like I have at certain points in my life.

At times like this, what I've tried to do is to force myself to remember where I've been. When I do this, I start to see that lots more was happening in those dry times than I ever imagined. To give an example of this, I talked last week about beginning to read my Bible and I said that, if you approach the Bible expecting to have your mind blown every single day, you will just get frustrated and quit. I spent a lot of those first years studying the Bible thinking that, in spite of my discipline, in spite of my desire to understand what was in the Bible, I just wasn't really learning it. Then, one day, I woke up and I found myself knowing the passages that the people around me were referencing. I started to be able to predict which passages people would use to make which points, I found myself being able to identify verses just from their references, which I could never do before. After all, like I told you, I was the worst Bible navigator ever. When you feel like God hasn't been moving in your life, take some time to remember where you used to be. Sometimes we just need to take a step back to see that God really has been at work.

The last parable is the parable of the mustard seed. It starts from a tiny seed, a seed so small that it takes 700 of them to even weigh a gram, which is not much. The mustard seed was so small that it was a common thing to use to emphasize how tiny something was. And yet, it grows up into a large bush that sometimes can even reach three meters high, which is like nine feet. We have had a phrase in English that gets at the same point. "Tall oaks grow from small acorns." At times, especially early on, our faith might seem amazingly small, so small that it couldn't turn into anything significant. Jesus' parable reminds us that the size of the seed doesn't tell us anything about the size of the plant. Our faith starts out small, but through a dynamic relationship with God, it grows and grows until it can even become a support for others.

Before we finish up tonight, I want to make a point drawing on all three of these parables. Faith cannot be hidden (like a lamp on a stand, like a growing plant, like a seed that is planted). It must be shown. It doesn't need to be shown because we will let someone down if we don't, it doesn't need to be shown because we have to force ourselves to do it, but it needs to be shown because that is what faith does. So, even though I'm not asking you to try to make a big deal about your faith (because that is counter-productive as well), I want you to think about whether anyone else can tell that you are a Christian.

I want to tell a story from my life to try to show what I mean. Now, you all have only known me as a pastor. It is probably pretty hard to imagine me as someone who is not a pastor, harder still to imagine me as someone who is not a Christian. And yet, as I have pointed out several times, I have not always been a Christian, and even after I became a Christian, I really didn't take it really seriously until I was in college. A few years ago, after I'd been a pastor for a while, a friend of mine from high school got married and I went to his wedding. While we were at the reception, we sat with some other folks we knew from high school There was one girl, a pastor's kid, who asked me what I'd been up to. When I told her that I was a pastor, she was astonished. She said, "Wow...um...wow. That really surprises me. I just never imagined that you would become a pastor."

Now, in my defense, I wasn't exactly that hard partying, heavy drinking, drug using wild man in high school. In fact, my first thoughts about her reaction were, "Wow. What did I do in high school that would make it so amazing that I could become a pastor." I really wasn't all that bad of a kid. And yet, that actually makes the point even stronger. Whatever my faith looked like in high school, it certainly didn't show itself to other people. I might have been a fairly good kid, and people might have noticed that, but there was nothing about who I was or how I lived that would have given anyone a clue that I had the Spirit of God dwelling inside of me and was following in the footsteps of Jesus.

Guys, that isn't what faith is supposed to be. Our faith is supposed to be like a lamp on a lampstand, it is supposed to be like a crop that, even though it starts small, grows up into a healthy, mature plant that everyone can see. It is supposed to be like the seed that might seem small at first, but grows into a mighty bush. The difference between someone who loves the Lord and one who does not is described in the New Testament as the difference between life and death. It can't be reduced to what we say or what we do, but it involves those things. Jesus Christ has given his life for us. The only thing that makes sense is that we would give our lives for him. Let us pray.

AMEN

Toleration

Toleration
 
Recently, I have been thinking about the issue of toleration.  It is very interesting being a Christian thinking about this topic because the church, it seems, has been on every conceivable side of this issue over the years.  At the very beginning, the church was a persecuted minority.  Occasionally, Christian thinkers wrote treatises about the practices of the church to show authorities that they were not downright evil people as some were saying (there were some rather disturbing rumors going around about what happened during the Eucharist, for example).
 
Later in Western history, you had the Protestant Reformation, where various secular leaders aligned themselves with different religious leadership, effectively choosing what brand of Christianity their domain would practice.  Those who dissented from the majority made appeals for toleration, that they might be able to continue practicing the religion they chose.
 
Now we find ourselves in the modern day, in a country that, in so many ways, was founded on the idea of religious toleration (or at least, such an idea was close to the main few ideas included in the Bill of Rights).  And yet, it feels like there is just as little toleration as there has ever been.  Sometimes, it is the church that persecutes people of other religions or people of no religion at all.  Sometimes, even, the persecution goes the other way.  What is fascinating to me as a Christian leader is to see that Christianity can be seen simultaneously as the dominant religio-cultural influence in America and yet also be a persecuted body, perhaps in some instances, as a persecuted minority, depending on the context.
 
When one glances back over Western history, the cry for toleration has been nearly ever-present.  Somebody always wants to be tolerated by someone else and does not feel like they are being so tolerated.  However, it has not always been the same groups.  What that means is that, as persecuted minorities become tolerated and eventually become more and more dominant, there seems to be a trend that they then deny other groups the toleration they battled so hard for.  Why should that be?  Should not those who have yearned for tolerance be that much quicker to show it?  Or perhaps, to be somewhat cynical, do those who have more acutely felt the need for toleration withhold it precisely because they were denied it in the past, a kind of “I’ll do unto you as they did unto me,” attitude?
 
There is much that could be said on this topic, and I do not pretend to have studied this particular issue as deeply as I might, but I have a few thoughts to share.  It seems that, when people refuse to tolerate others, it is because, to their mind, those others are wrong.  To tolerate people who are wrong, it would seem, is a disintegrating force in our society at its most basic level.  When people are tolerated, it is as if we are saying, “We don’t agree with you, but you might possibly be right.”  This is, of course, perhaps part of the reason why many people do not want to tolerate others in the first place.  Toleration can easily be read as tacit approval, and, if the opposing group is wrong, they ought not to be approved.
 
I think that this has done tremendous disservice to the idea of toleration.  It seems that to tolerate someone is precisely to tolerate them as someone who is wrong, at least from your point of view.  If I think that you might be right, it would seem that it is best to say that I conditionally accept you rather than say that I tolerate you.  But once I have conditionally accepted you, toleration is really not the issue.
 
It might seem that I am asking for people to be more harsh with one another, since I am not necessarily advocating “conditional acceptance” for all, but rather “toleration.”  The reason for this is because to insist that we all “conditionally accept” one another is, in practical terms, to superimpose a kind of uniformity (or at least a meta-uniformity) that just does not exist in everyday experience.  I think that, in order to really find unity among people, we need to allow the differences to be what they are so that those differences can be in dialogue with one another as differences.
 
What this means is that I still reserve for myself the right to think that someone else is wrong, but it also means that I reserve for others the right to think that I am wrong.  What it also means is that I will tolerate you, not because I secretly think that you are more right than I am, or that I, deep down inside, wish I could think like you do, but because you are another human being for whom Christ died.  It means that I don’t want you to tolerate me because you think that I have some secret key to happiness that you have missed, but simply because I am another human being, even if, from your point of view, I am completely wrong.
 
It is simply foolish that Party A should persecute Party B, then tolerate Party B so that it can gain a foothold in the culture and even rise to prominence or dominance, only for Party B to deny toleration to Party A because they are “wrong.”  Since when did “right” and “wrong” enter into the rules of toleration?  A toleration that says, “I will tolerate you so long as you fit into my definition of ‘right,’” is not toleration at all.

Let us strive for genuine toleration, that we might join together to seek genuine truth.

Some Reflections on Understanding People

Some Reflections on Understanding People
 
Something that has driven me crazy for some time within the church is the way we treat the Pharisees in the Gospel narratives.  I would hear sermons and other messages that would talk about how hypocritical the Pharisees were and that they were people who spent all their time trying to earn their way into heaven while, at the same time, imposing unbearable requirements on the people, seeking to eliminate the people who got in their way rather than give up their power.
 
What particularly bothered me is that it seemed clear to me that the problems that we see in the Pharisees have not gone away.  They are everywhere, perhaps more in the church than anywhere else.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these were not two isolated facts, but were deeply related to one another.  The prevalence of Pharisaic problems in the church makes perfect sense because they are problems that religious leaders are more likely to have than anyone else, precisely because of their status as religious leaders.  If this was indeed true, it seemed that our tendency to demonize the Pharisees did nothing but blind our eyes to seeing how we are just like they are.
 
After that, I felt I could no longer treat the Pharisees that way.  I began to realize that, just like most people who act like the Pharisees in our own day don’t realize they are doing it (and I can give you many examples from my own life where the same has been true of me), it is entirely possible that the Pharisees themselves did not understand the sinfulness of their behavior.  In fact, the more I got inside their heads, the more I realized that they weren’t being evil for evil’s sake, but were trying to act with integrity within their tradition as best they could.
 
This does not, however, mean that the Pharisees were any less wrong.  What it did, though, was help me to understand not only what they were saying and doing but why they were saying and doing it.  More than ever, it has taught me to see where I do exactly the same things, where I wasn’t able to see it before when I behaved as if there was no similarity between them and myself.
 
This has taught me the evils of demonizing people.  It has become more and more clear to me that a large part of our problem today is that we cannot have honest conversations with people and a large part of why we cannot do that is because we tend to demonize the people with whom we disagree.  So long as we refuse to understand why someone might come to a different conclusion than we do, we will never be able to take them seriously.  We will develop a caricature, a straw man, and then ruthlessly cut it down, without taking account of the fact that it bears no relation to reality, or, at least, not much of one.
 
Let me use as an example the issue of abortion, as the opposing sides, as I see it, are rather clearly expressed.  Those who think that abortion is always wrong call themselves “pro-life.”  Those who think that abortions are acceptable in one form or another call themselves “pro-choice.”  Now, pro-lifers will say that pro-choicers are “anti-baby” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, such people advocate the killing of babies (It must be noted that those who are pro-life often work with an understanding of embryonic and fetal life as equal to life outside of the womb, an understanding that is not shared by everyone else).  Pro-choicers, on their part, tend to say that pro-lifers are “anti-women” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, the forcing women to have their baby forces women to give up their dreams and is a financial burden (It must be noted here that the battle often rages the hardest over the issue of pregnancies that result from rape or incest, where the mother had no real choice in the preventing of the pregnancy).
 
The problem with this way of thinking is that it does not reflect the truth, or at least only a partial rendering of the truth.  It is entirely possible that some pro-life people are truly anti-women and some pro-choice people are anti-baby.  However, I have serious doubts that people lay awake at night thinking, “I really hate babies.  How can I act on this intense hatred of babies?  I know, I’ll support abortion!”  Or, conversely, “I really hate women.  How can I oppress women as best as I can?  I know, I will refuse to let them get abortions!”
 
This way of thinking emphasizes only the positive aspects of each view (that life and/or choice is good) and attacks only the negative aspects of the other (that there are bad side-effects that can arise from these views).  In practice, this completely eliminates any hope of real conversation and dealing with issues.  If a pro-lifer calls a pro-choicer a “baby killer,” how likely is that pro-choicer going to want to have real dialogue?  Indeed, how likely is that pro-lifer to want to have real dialogue?  After all, they have resorted to a caricature.
 
Why are do we do this to each other (and here I have stepped away from the specific issue of abortion)?  I think it is because we are desperately afraid.  In our increasingly polarized culture, to take a position that is not on one extreme or the other is to be seen as a traitor to both sides.  To take the opposing side seriously means to treat the people as if they may truly be human and, thus, may have some things in common with well-grounded, sensible people like us, which makes it much harder to take a hard line against them.  To really listen always carries with it the possibility, no matter how small, that we may be convinced by what we hear, or at least that we may begin to see varying shades of grey where we used to see nothing but black and white.  
 
It is difficult to toe the middle line when all around seem to be running as far from that middle as possible.  And yet, though I surely try to live in this tension and I certainly advocate that others do so as well, I do not think we should pursue moderation as if it were a kind of replacement ideology, as if an ideology of the middle is any better than an ideology of the left or the right.  I think that the reason that the extreme positions are destructive is because they are not true, because they distort the facts and then use power to try and enforce conformity to that particular distortion.  I think that we should see shades of grey, not just because I wish we could stop the bitter fighting but because I am convinced that the shades of grey are real and that thinking in terms of black and white forces us away from what really is.  I think that we need to stop demonizing people because it prevents us from experiencing them as they really are.

Strong Feelings in Our Contemporary Culture

Strong Feelings in Our Contemporary Culture:

We live in a culture today where many people have extremely strong feelings about various topics.  That’s fine.  Not only do I believe that people should have strong feelings about things, I myself have very strong feelings about certain issues.  However, what inevitably happens is that a person comes into contact with another person, or especially another organization, that disagrees strongly on the same issue.  This is where the problems come in.

Let’s say we have a person, let us call them “Person A” who has strong feelings in favor of an issue, let’s say, “Issue B.”  Eventually, Person A meets someone or reads an article or even just hears through the grapevine that some organization, “Organization C” is very much Anti-Issue B (Whatever issue B happens to be), ostensibly because of their own deeply held, strong feelings about the issue.  What is Person A to do?  They are now faced with something or someone who disagrees with their strong feelings.  Surely, they cannot simply remain silent about it.

So they write an article, or post a link to an article that someone else (who agrees with them) or just even a strongly worded status update on Facebook denouncing Organization C for taking a stance that deviates from the opinions of Person A.  However, this seems to seldom take the form, “I do not think that you should support Organization C because they are against something that I am in favor of or because they are in favor of something I am against.”  Rather, they are usually much more pointed than that.  Often, the strong feelings underlying the position of Organization C are acknowledged simply to be dismissed or, what is more often the case, demonized.  Words like “hate” and “evil” are thrown around with alarming frequency.  The impression one gets after reading something like this is that, if I find myself either agreeing with Organization C or even simply deviating slightly from the rigid position of Person A, then I must be equally hated by Person A and therefore am equally dismissed or condemned by them.  The other potential conclusion is that I may find myself completely in agreement with Person A and the writing has further empowered me to continue to hold my own strong feelings and condemn those of others without feeling the need to understand the other person.  This particular point is deeply related to the content of my previous note (Some Reflections On Understanding People).

It is important to point out that there are both liberal and conservative forms of this situation.  I have seen countless appeals from one group to completely boycott or fight against another group because of the views they hold.  I say this because, though it might seem that I am particularly picking on one side or the other, I am fully aware that this is a widespread issue and cannot be pinned only on one side of the political spectrum.

The question that I believe needs to be raised is, “How can we, in good conscience, do these kinds of things?”  I cannot express how many times I have seen someone write words to the effect of, “This person/organization supports/is against this particular issue.  They are so arrogant, closed-minded and exclusive.  You should avoid them or write letters of protest against them.”  How is this tactic any less arrogant, closed-minded and exclusive?  How is it that I can, on the basis of my own strong feelings, condemn someone else who, on the basis of their own strong feelings, acts accordingly?  Does that not seem as though I am doing precisely the same thing that I am condemning them for?  How are my own exclusive actions and words more noble than those I condemn?  Is it because the other group or person is wrong while I am right?  If so, how am I so sure that I am right?  I fear that, all too often, the determining factor of whether I am “right” or not is simply because I choose to believe that I am right.

This leads me to say a few words about what has developed in Western culture, particular in America, which I like to call the ideology of inclusivity or the ideology of pluralism, as the two ideas are deeply interrelated (There is some overlap here with a previous note on pluralism).

Inclusivity is something that is prized very highly within the various mainline denominations in America, not least the United Methodist Church, of which I am a minister.  There is a deep conviction that the church ought to be inclusive.  The rationale for this is that Jesus was remarkably inclusive, eating with sinners and Gentiles, ministering to women and the poor.  So far as we remain rooted in Christ, I have no problem with being inclusive.  However, when we take the statement, “Jesus was inclusive and we are called to be like Jesus, so let us be inclusive like Jesus was,” and transform it into, “Jesus was inclusive so inclusivity is a goal in and of itself,” insurmountable problems arise.

What does it mean to be inclusive in an ideological sense, that is, being inclusive for the sake of being inclusive?  Perhaps this can be best expressed by taking a look at the cognate idea of “pluralism” that has developed.  I am a Christian.  Someone who is a pluralist in the popular sense would say to me, “It is fine that you are a Christian.  However, you must not make any claims that Christianity is true, unless you limit it and say, ‘Christianity is true for me.’”  The reason for this is because it is clear that not everyone in the world is a Christian and to say that “Christianity is true,” is to say to the non-Christian, “Your religious convictions are wrong.”  This implication, that someone else might have a wrong opinion, is deemed as “not loving” and “exclusive,” and must therefore be eliminated.

This seems to be a consistent view at first, because it advocates and actually insists upon making room for other views.  However, it is, in practice, almost never consistent.  What does the ideological pluralist do, for example, with the neo-nazi or the member of the KKK?  If we are to make room for everyone’s convictions, religious or otherwise, on what grounds can we say that some people are wrong?  Those who advocate pluralism or inclusivity as an end in itself, find themselves condemning people, in spite of their own philosophy.  What began as a view that allowed everyone to have their own opinions and lifestyles transitions into a view that says that at least some opinions and lifestyles, are not allowable.

Why are some lifestyles allowable and others not?  It cannot be on any pretence to “truth” because the ideological pluralist or inclusivist is too postmodern to think that any community can have a monopoly on truth and that we must allow for those who disagree with us.  However, radically intolerant groups, if left unchecked, will tear society apart.  They must be opposed.  But on what grounds?  What seems to be put forward most often is an ideal that is stated with such confidence that it must not be questioned, “Ideas and lifestyles are alright if they do not hurt other people.  If they do, they are not acceptable.”  This is so widely believed, but on what is it based?  At best, purely Western values such as are enshrined in the American constitution; more often, simply on the whim of the speaker, who does not want to be hurt by others.”

The problem with this is that, once you have said that something is wrong and it is always wrong, regardless of the community to which a person belongs, a standard has been made by which every other view is judged to be acceptable or not acceptable.  In spite of the alleged “humility” that presses someone into a radically pluralist or inclusivist view, it actually becomes very paternalistic and judgmental because it claims that the radically pluralist or inclusivist view is “right” and any group that is exclusivist is “wrong.”

Let us put this into its clearest form.  Those who wish to be radically inclusive realize they must take a stand against those who are radically exclusive, so they take the stand, “Everything is relative, but pluralism is true!”  This solves their moral problem by condemning any person or group who is exclusive in their eyes.  However, this statement has shown that the radical inclusivist is indeed exclusive of exclusivists and therefore must be excluded by their own ideology.  If one must be exclusive of those who are exclusive, that same person is automatically excluded.

Professor Alan Torrance at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, has written a profoundly insightful essay called “Toward Inclusive Ministry:  The Logical Impossibility of Religious and Theological Inclusivism, Pluralism and Relativism.”  Torrance, a committed Christian, begins by explaining the famous threefold typology of “Inclusive, Exclusive, and Pluralistic” popularized by Gavin D’Costa.  However, in the years following the publication of his book, D’Costa has completely changed his mind on this issue and now contends that it is only possible for human beings to have an exclusive stance, inasmuch as it is logically impossible to truly follow the implications of an inclusive or pluralist ideology.

Without going into all the details of this excellent essay, what is important for this discussion is that Torrance questions what we mean when we say that we should be “inclusive.”  Do we mean that we must be inclusive of ideas or that we must be inclusive of persons?  This is a significant distinction.  If we wish to be inclusive of all persons, we must consider certain ideas to be out of line, such as genocide and all forms of abuse.  However, if we wish to be inclusive of ideas, we cannot be inclusive of persons, as some ideas are defined by their stance against certain persons.  Torrance concludes by upholding this understanding of inclusivity, which is markedly different than the word is popularly understood, but as, he believes, is much more consistent with the gospel and much more productive of actual conversation with people of differing opinions.

To bring this back to the original point of this writing, our strong feelings are not intrinsically evil.  However, what ends up being destructive is our determined ignorance.  If I criticize someone else for running roughshod over my cherished beliefs and, by doing so, run roughshod over their cherished beliefs, I am just as much to blame as they are.  To complain that a person or organization is being closed-minded and discriminatory in such a way as to use primarily emotionally charged words without actually engaging in the issue in a calm and clear way is to be equally closed-minded and discriminatory.  Nothing will change so long as we continue to insist that we are always right and that any deviation is grounds to brand the other as “evil” or “hateful” or “closed-minded” or similar things.  We have to be the ones who take the lead, who treat others with love, even when we are not treated in a loving manner.  We must be the ones who allow our strong feelings to be what they are but refuse to let them isolate us from others, but put them to the test in dialogue with those who disagree with us.

Read Your Bible

11/09/11 Read Your Bible GUMC Youth

One of the single most important things you can do as a Christian is read the Bible. There is no shortcut to learning about God, knowing how you should go about your life and about the promises that God has for you that somehow lets you bypass the Bible and just listen to what other people have read. If you wanted, you could say that the whole message for tonight is a giant commercial for reading the Bible, but I hope it isn't boring.

Before we talk about some of the reasons why you should read the Bible, I want to share about my own experience reading the Bible. You see, I can give you all kinds of good reasons to read the Bible, but none of those reasons can possibly be as convincing as a personal testimony to how it has changed my life. Always remember that Christian faith does not always get a lot of good press these days. There are plenty of groups out there that make a lot of people decide that they want nothing to do with Jesus. With so many reasons not to believe floating around, we need to remember that the Bible is only convincing to people if they have already made up their minds that they even care what is in it. If the Bible is nothing more than a book, it is hard to get people to read it. It is only when you become convinced, either by your own experience or because you have been convinced by the experience of others, that God uses the Bible to speak directly to us today, that you will read it and make it a habit. Your personal testimony, your own growth, your own faithfulness, will do far more to convince the unbelieving world of the truth of the gospel than any academic argument.

Before I can say anything else about my growth through studying the Bible, you need to be reminded that I did not grow up in the church; not at all. I did not go to church and Sunday School until I was a sophomore in high school and I only went to a youth group for a little bit before that, and when I went to those things, it was just as much because my friends were going than because I was actually learning anything. So if that is you tonight, I know exactly where you are coming from. I know what it is like to sit in a youth room listening to someone talk about the Bible and have absolutely no idea what he is talking about, not sure where anything was in the Bible. I used to call myself "The worst Bible navigator ever." It didn't matter how many times we looked at a book in the Bible, I never learned where it was. I didn't know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament other than their names. I barely knew anything about Jesus. I went more because I didn't really have a whole lot of friends and it gave me something to do on a Wednesday night.

What this means is that many of you have a much better start than I had. Many of you have been raised in the church, you have heard the stories of the Bible from an early age and you have been put into a position where you can hear the word of God being spoken to you and heard by you. I don't know if any of you have maybe heard God speak to your heart, encouraging you to become a pastor or pursue some kind of vocational ministry, but you are afraid or feel like you couldn't do it because you don't know much about the Bible, think again. My first pastor asked me if I felt called to be a pastor. When I heard that, I laughed at him. I couldn't imagine that someone like me could be called to be a pastor. I didn't know anything about the faith at all! And yet, as you can all see, here I am. This is my sixth year as a pastor.

Alright, so here's my story. I started going to youth group because my older brother (who, by the way, is still not a Christian) was going and I wanted to go, too. He wasn't always excited that I was there, but I sure was. Eventually, someone I knew from that youth group invited me to come to an after school Bible study that met twice a week. All during this time, I wasn't going to church at all. One Sunday, I got a call telling me that a guy from the Bible study was getting baptized that morning and that there was a reception at someone's house. So, even though I wasn't there for the baptism, I went to the reception. When I was there, I heard that some people were going to a study with the pastor of this church and asked me if I wanted to come. When we got there, some of the people said, "Hey Travis, you should totally stay for youth group" (this was a different church than before) so I did. Then, one of the kids from the youth group who knew I played guitar said I should stay because they had a small band that practiced after youth group. So, I went from not going to church at all to going to church, Sunday School, a study group, youth group and a band practice every Sunday all in one day.

Eventually, I became a Christian. I would say that I really became a Christian when I went to Chrysalis and things started to sink in deeper than they ever had before. However, just a few months later, my family moved to Iowa. I got involved in a youth group that I am amazed my faith survived. Eventually, I got plugged into a group with a bunch of people I went to school with and I really started to grow more, but I wasn't really reading my Bible. During this time, I got involved in a small group, let by my youth pastor, where I learned how to pray and talk about my faith. What is kind of funny is that it seemed like everyone else in the group except for myself and my friend David were certain they were called to be pastors or other leaders full-time, and, as far as I know today, only David and I are in full-time ministry.

All of that is important so I can tell you about what happened when I was in college. I became deeply aware of the fact that I hadn't spent much time reading my Bible and I knew that I should do it. I kept trying to make myself do it, but it just never seemed to work. Over a few months, I found myself in two or three different groups of guys and, in each of them we realized that none of us were getting into our Bibles like we knew we should. In one group, we split up into groups of two and my partner and I decided that we were going to try to help each other stay on top of our Bible reading. We both thought that jumping into reading it a bit everyday would be too much to expect, so we thought about doing it just a few days and then getting back together to see how we did. I didn't do it. Neither did he. We never met again.

The next group I was in decided that we were going to read one chapter of the Bible every day, and we'd all read the same chapters together, then we'd get together at the end of the week and discuss what we'd read. Now, at the end of the first week, I had the seven chapters read, but I didn't read everyday. I had to do a lot of catch up. When we got back together the next week, there was this guy, Nick, there. I had met Nick before and I had realized that he was really the first person I ever met who really knew his Bible. I suppose that my pastors knew their Bible pretty well, but Nick the first person I had ever met in my life who took reading his Bible extremely seriously and applied it to every aspect of his life. I knew that, if you want good suggestions on how to do something, you ask someone who has actually succeeded in doing it. I knew that I needed to ask Nick how he read the Bible and see if that would help.

What Nick told me was surprisingly simple. He said that, when he got started reading the Bible, he followed a simple rule: "No Bible, no breakfast." If he didn't read his Bible, he simply didn't eat. Now there are people in the world who just don't eat breakfast, so it might seem that this idea wouldn't work for them, but then it would just become "No Bible, no lunch," which doesn't have a neat alliteration, but would still be effective. Anyway, I am someone who has always eaten breakfast, so I thought this might help me and I decided to give it a try.

The next morning, I got up, and before heading down to the dining center for breakfast or eating something in my room, I remembered: No Bible, no breakfast. I went and sat in my chair and read the next chapter of John, the book that group was reading. It seemed so easy to do. I got up the next morning and did the same thing again. After months of repeated failure, after trying time after time to find some way to get the job done, something as simple as "No Bible, no breakfast," finally worked for me. Not only did I start reading the Bible, a chapter a day, but I quickly began to really love the Bible and I started to read more than one chapter a day. I found out the next book we were planning on working through and I read that. I started to get so far ahead of the group that I had to figure out what I was going to read on my own.

I went through all that about how hard it was for me to start reading my Bible so the significance of the transformation can be as impressive to you as it was to me. I used to see those "read through the Bible in a year" plans and was amazed. How could someone read the whole Bible in just a year? It seemed like such a huge book. What I realized was that, because I got so excited about reading the Bible, I wanted so badly to know what was in it, that I read the whole thing, without really even trying to do it, in five months. People have asked me when I first knew that I was going to be a pastor. I don't know exactly when it was, but when I started reading the Bible, I knew for sure I was going to be a math teacher. When I was done, I knew that I was going to be a pastor. Now, that is not to say that, if you read the Bible, you will become a pastor. I can point out all kinds of people who have read the Bible, even very quickly, who have not been called to be pastors, but that is how it was for me.

The whole reason that I tell this story, the reason why I put my whole past in the Bible out for you all to see is not because I want you to think about how cool I was to read the Bible because, if you think about it, I really wasted a lot of time. I had been a Christian for about three years before I started taking the Bible seriously. I didn't start reading the Bible until I was nineteen years old. I've only been reading the Bible with any regularity for about eight years. I don't know if you think I know anything about the Bible, but if you do, think about how much more you will know by the time you are my age, because you started so much earlier. Think about how much opportunity you would give God to transform you if you started today, or stayed on top of it.

Now that I've shared my story and now that I have made it clear that I think that reading your Bible is something worth fighting for, it is something worth making sacrifices for, I want to try to explain the "why" behind the "what" of my story. Folks, there is nothing magical about the Bible. It isn't as though every single page is going to flood you with joy, simply because every word on it teaches you some great and glorious thing you never heard before. If you approach reading the Bible like that, you will get discouraged so fast. It is true that the Bible has lots of great teaching in it, teaching that will strike you like lightning when you read it. Sometimes, even, something you've read a million times will jump off the page and change you when you read it just that one more time. But there are lots of things in the Bible that aren't what we would normally call "Inspiring." There are lots of things in the Bible that are challenging, that are frustrating, that are even frightening. Very often, the passages that make us feel incredibly uncomfortable are the ones that mean the most to us, that change us the most.

We read the Bible for lots of reasons. We read the Bible to learn how to live but, contrary to what some people will say, it is not actually a handbook for daily life. There is almost nothing in it, short of the book of Proverbs, that is ready-made to lift out of its context and shoved into our own. We read the Bible because it points us to Jesus. We read the Gospels because they tell us about Jesus' actual life and history on earth. We read the letters because they point us to how the reality of the Gospel transformed the lives of those first Christians. We read the Old Testament because it is only when we understand the whole history of Israel, when we know the stories, and what the law and the prophets say, that we can really understand Jesus how we ought to. We read the Bible because, in all its parts, it is a comprehensive witness to all that God has done.

I have said over and over again that who we are is partially dependent on those we surround ourselves with and that, sometimes, in order to change what we believe, to change what we think, we need to change what we do. It is completely true that God can speak to you just as much on the sports field, or in a musical rehearsal as he can in church. But if you are seeking God, if you are hoping to hear a word from him, where should you go? If you were an alcoholic and you wanted to get sober, where would you go? Would you go to a bar? Of course not. You would go to a support group, to a counsellor. You would go where you had a chance to find what you were looking for. You would put yourself in a position to be changed.

That, in many ways, is the reason we read the Bible. We read it because it is the record of God interacting with countless people over countless years. We have the promise that the same God who was in relationship with all those people in the Bible is the God who pursues relationship with us. Just like you can't get to know someone unless you spend time with them, we cannot get to know God unless we spend time with him, with his word in our hands and getting into our hearts. Let us pray.


AMEN

The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.

From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."

The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.

I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.

At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.

Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.

The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.

Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.

At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).

In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:

If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”

Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.

It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.

For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.

Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.

That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.

Mark 4:10-12

11/02/11                       Mark 4:10-12                   GUMC Youth

       It is possible to take what I am about to say and completely misunderstand it.  It is possible that you might hear this first thing I have to say and interpret it to mean that I have a low view of the Bible.  That is not the case.  I do, however, want to point out something that you may have already noticed, or may one day notice all on your own.

       Even though there is a tremendous amount of similarity between the four gospels, especially between the first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, they are not identical.  This is a good thing because, if they were identical, we wouldn't need all of them.  The different gospels do not all tell the same stories.  Sometimes, when they tell the same stories, they put them in a different order.  What is interesting is that there are times when two different gospel writers will have differences between their accounts of the same story.  This passage is a wonderful example of this.  In it, we have Jesus quoting the prophet Isaiah, but the quotation is a little different depending on which gospel we read it in.

       In Matthew, for example, we read this.  "You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive.  For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - and I would heal them."  Mark's account, that we just heard, reads a little differently.  "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables," and now comes the quote, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."

       Do you see the difference between the two?  In Matthew, we get the sense that the problem is that the people are just being stubborn, that they are shutting their eyes and ears and hardening their hearts so they can never hear what God is saying to them.  It is a lamentable situation that breaks Jesus' heart.  In Mark, however, we get the idea that the telling of parables and the hardening of hearts are related.  We get the impression that Jesus tells the parables precisely in order to harden people's hearts.

       If we look at these two accounts side by side, we can see that Mark's account is just a bit harsher, isn't it?  In Matthew, the parables just happen to be met with stubbornness; in Mark, the stubbornness is caused by the parables, that Jesus tells the parables in order to provoke the stubbornness.  Because of this, you almost never hear anyone preach on Mark's version of this.  In fact, even when someone does set out to explain Mark's version, it almost always works itself out that they say that we should understand Mark's version to be saying what Matthew's version says, and not the other way around.  We don't want to think about it.  We don't want to deal with the boldness of Mark's account so we hide in Matthew's account.

       But why would they be so different?  Here's a thought.  The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, but it was translated into Greek about four hundred years before Jesus was born.  By the time the New Testament was being written, far more people were reading the Greek version than the Hebrew version of the Old Testament.  As it turns out, the difference between Matthew and Mark's version of this quotation is the same as the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew version of Isaiah.  You see, the Greek version is exactly like Matthew's account and the Hebrew version is exactly like Mark's.  Even though the Hebrew version is the "original," we cannot pretend that people would not have had both versions in their head.  This is why they are both important and why we must take them both seriously.  But what it means is that, even though they are both important, the fact remains that we are considering Mark's account of this event and not Matthew's, so we need to deal with what Mark has to say in all its harshness.

       But, because Jesus is quoting Isaiah, in order to really understand what Jesus is saying, we need to take a moment and go back to the book of Isaiah and understand what he is saying.  This is what we read.  "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.  Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings:  with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.  And one called to another and said:  'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.'  The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.  And I said, 'Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!'  Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  The seraph touched my mouth with it and said:  'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.'  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'  And I said, 'Here am I; send me!'  And he said, 'Go and say to this people:  "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand."  Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.'  Then I said, 'How long, O Lord?'  And he said, 'Until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.  Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.'  The holy seed is its stump."

       You see, the first verses of that passage are famous and well beloved in the church because it is a wonderful account of being called by God and the response of a faithful person.  But once we get beyond those first verses and get closer to the end of the chapter, things get more than a little uncomfortable.  Isaiah lived in a time when all of Israel thought that Jerusalem, their capital, was the home of God and God would never, could never, allow Jerusalem to fall into enemy hands.  One of the big points that God's command to Isaiah is that this is simply not true.  God not only can allow Jerusalem to fall, but would indeed do so.

       Part of what we learn from this passage in Isaiah is that God is not concerned about the things we are concerned about.  For the people at the time, the idea that God might allow the capital of Israel to fall was unthinkable.  If that were to happen, it seemed, everything would be lost.  If it happened, it would mean, they thought, that God was defeated.  Isaiah's difficult message is that the fall of Jerusalem, when it happened, would be so far from being a defeat of God that it actually would be at God's hand.  Whatever else this passage might mean, and I think it has lots of levels of meaning, it shows us that God is not limited by the things that limit us, that the most stable things in the world might be taken away from us to remind us to trust in God and in God alone.  The success of God is not and can not be tied to the success of any human project.

       I think that this helps us to understand what Jesus is getting at in our passage from Mark.  It is a tearing down of everything that we think needs to be the case for God to be successful.  Just like the invasion and defeat of Jerusalem does not carry with it the defeat of God, the attack on and even crucifixion of Jesus does not mean that God has been defeated.  Instead, we need to remember, at every step of the way, that God was so aware of what was happening, that he walked right into it, knowing that even death could not stop him.

       On another level, we need to look at it in its context.  If you remember back to when we met last, two weeks ago, I said that this first part of chapter four is an example of Mark's so-called "Sandwich technique," where he takes one story, splits it in two, and includes something else in the middle.  One of the things I said was that both the story that gets split apart and the stuff that goes in the middle have something to say to each other, that we can't understand them correctly unless we think them through together.

       Jesus has just told a parable that explains why some people listen to him and other people do not.  The parable talked about people who are on the "inside" and those who are on the "outside."  There are some soils that can make a seed grow and others that cannot.  What is more, we cannot always tell right away which is which.  Sometimes, a plant will sprout right up but it has no roots and will ultimately not grow but die out.  One of the things that Jesus is saying by quoting that chapter from Isaiah is that we should not think for a moment that, when lots of people reject him, when people just don't get excited about following Jesus, that God has somehow failed.  Even when Jesus is betrayed and murdered, God is still working and overcomes death through resurrection.

       I promised that this would be a message that did justice to Mark's account of Jesus' reference to Isaiah and not just resolve it into Matthew's reading.  So far, the message has focused on things that are in common between the two, things that would need to be said, regardless of which version we were looking at.  However, we still have to deal with the fact that Mark's account seems to be quite harsh.  It certainly seems that Jesus is saying that he is intentionally causing people to stop up their ears, close their eyes, and harden their hearts, that it isn't just a coincidence that people aren't listening, but that he is, in a sense, causing them to reject him.  What are we to do with that?

       I have the tendency to give myself difficult preaching assignments, for one reason or another.  Once, for example, I preached once from every single book of the Bible.  One that I did last year for Advent was particularly interesting and challenging and I think it speaks to the troubles we have with this text.  Since Advent and Christmas celebrate the time when God himself came into our world of space and time and encountered us, I asked the question over three weeks, "What happens when God comes close?"  When we look at the Bible and take it seriously, we find that the answer to that question is very interesting indeed.

       The first week, we looked at a passage in Paul's letter to the Romans, where he talks about the law that was given to the ancient Israelites.  He says things like, "If it weren't for the law telling me not to covet," that is, to be jealous and want things you can't have, "I would have never known covetousness."  He says that, if God had not ever said, "Don't do this," he never would have wanted to do it.  In some fairly small way, when God took just one small step toward the Israelites, giving them a law that simply said, "These things are not allowed among the people of God," all of a sudden, the part deep inside of them that did not want God to tell them what to do woke up and said, "Well, I'm going to do them."

       The next week, we looked at this passage from Isaiah that we have been considering tonight.  We saw that, when even the great prophet of God came into God's presence, the impact was overwhelming.  This man who was called to speak the word of God to the people of God realized that he had unclean lips, that he was not, in himself, worthy of the message he had been given.  This feeling of inadequacy was so strong that he felt like he was going to die.

       The third week, we looked at a passage that almost nobody talks about, the slaying of the innocents.  Remember when Jesus is born and the wise men from the East come and Jesus' family has to get up in the middle of the night and run away to Egypt?  It was because Herod was going to come in and have all the children under two years old killed.  We read and rejoice that Jesus was saved from that, but there were lots of children who were not.  The very entrance of God into our world so offended the secular authorities that it had serious consequences.

       So what does this have to do with those tough words in Mark?  It has everything to do with them, because it seems to be the case that, if God comes close, it can be extremely uncomfortable.  We sometimes hear people talk about God coming close as if it was always a warm and happy time for everyone, but it simply isn't so.  It is true that, in telling the parables, Jesus was blinding the people and stopping up their ears and preventing them from really listening, but it isn't as though he was doing this because he was being mean, but rather because there was no other way.  Time and time again, we see that, when God moves among his people, we react badly.  This is not a weakness in God, but a weakness in us.  It just so happens that, when God demonstrates his love toward us, we freak out and don't want to receive it.

       When we see it this way, we can see that, however harsh Jesus' words seem to us at first, it is really unbelievably gracious, from beginning to end.  We see that God does not give up his good plan when he sees that we don't accept it right away.  If he was worried about what grace looked like at first, he would never do anything for us.  It is precisely because he cares about us more than what we think about it that he keeps going, he doesn't give up, but follows through with his good plan.

       Jesus' purpose in coming to us was not so that we could know a lot of interesting things, neither was it first and foremost that we should live a certain way, though it is definitely good if we learn things and live in a faithful way.  His purpose was to redeem us, to show us the Father, and to transform us from the inside out.  And in order to do that, he did not stop when we got offended, but kept going.  His perseverance pushed him to be killed for us, but that did not stop him.  He was raised from the dead, ascended to heaven and gave us his Spirit, that we might know what we could never understand before.  Our God has gone to tremendous lengths to renew us.  Let us give thanks and lean on him in all things.  Let us pray.

AMEN