Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Three - Our Relation with God Restored

Preached on Sunday, January 27, 2019

Scripture readings: Romans 5:1-11; Matthew 16:13-28

Wandering around Malakoff Diggins
Near Bridgeport Bridge and North Bloomfield
California, May 5, 2015

The summer when I was eight years old, I went to YMCA Camp (Camp Osceola, near Big Bear, in the mountains of Southern California). YMCA is, or was supposed to be, a Christian organization, and one morning, toward the end of my week at Camp Osceola, a bunch of the younger campers were gathered at the campfire circle and we were given a talk about knowing God, and the greatness and beauty of God and his love. I’ve forgotten most of the talk.

Then we were all blindfolded, and guided by a bunch of the older boys through the forest. This is in a part of those mountains where there are ten-thousand-foot peaks.

Suddenly, bright light shone through our blinders. We knew that we had come out of the forest. The older boys sat us down on the ground, and the talk went on, something more or less like this.

“Every one of your lives is like a walk on a trail through the forest. You might walk on your path as though you were blind and didn’t see any of the beauty or greatness of God’s creation, but you can meet God through his creation. You can know for yourself how great, beyond your understanding, God is: how high, and beautiful, and deep, and lasting his love for you is. If you could know God, you would love him and never forget him. You would never forget how great he is.”

Then we were told to take off our blindfolds. We saw each other sitting on a wide, rocky shelf, on the top of a high cliff and, across the canyon, was one of those mountains that soared far higher than its tree-line, in rocky peaks and crags.

I felt as though my heart skipped a beat and then started racing. I got goose-bumps all over.

We’re not supposed to make images of God to tell us what he is like. Any image we try to make will fall short and confuse us, and distort our way of life more than it could possible help. But I have images of God in my head.

I sometimes think of God as being like a mountain so high that it will take my whole life to get to the top and see the world on the other side. I love mountains.

I don’t think I would ever want to climb one with ropes, and picks, and my own hands. I would rather love the mountains by walking on them. I’ve walked to the top a few mountains between eight and eleven thousand feet in elevation.

One of those was Mount Rose, between Lake Tahoe and Reno. It’s elevation is over ten thousand feet. I lived close enough to take multiple walks up to its summit, and once I took my youth group to the top. Below a certain height there were multiple trails, and you could use these to see more of the beauties of the mountain. You could wander through meadows and different groves of forest on the mountain-side.

If I had lived there long enough, I would have known Mount Rose from its many sides, and angles, and gentle, and sharp, and wide places, and ridges, and ravines, all over its slopes. I loved that mountain.

That’s part of how I think of God. God is a mountain so big, so high, that you can walk all over the Lord and get to know so much about him to love and cherish. I got to know God this way, because, somehow, I met God in a new way one summer morning when I was eight years old.

Sometimes I climb the mountain of God when I contemplate deep things in the Bible. Sometimes I climb when I’m exhausted by worry, or by puzzlement over what to do next. I might climb the mountain of God when I have a voice to sing with. I do it when I walk through this beautiful desert country.

Lately I’ve been using an image of God that my Baci (Babcia, my Polish grandmother), gave me, when she heard that I was planning to go into the ministry. It’s a small white statue of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms. She thought it was going to glow in the dark. She was disappointed when I told her that it didn’t, but that I loved it anyway.

I loved her. Now this Jesus who doesn’t glow in the dark represents a long, long love that I have lived with, or tried to live with, in good times and bad times, in the church, as a caregiver to the spiritual needs of others.

So lately I’ve been holding my Baci’s Jesus and talking to him as I hold him in my hands. For me, these days, it’s a good way to climb the mountain of God. It’s part of how I know “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. (Romans 5:1)

In our reading from Romans chapter five, Paul tells us how he knew “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. We know who God is because God, in Christ, gave us a free pass into his presence, at great cost to himself.

Paul’s picture of knowing God looked like one of the wonders of the ancient world called The Temple of the Lord, overlooking the city of Jerusalem: The Temple of the Living God.

Paul’s picture of knowing God in the Temple finds the Temple changed. In Jerusalem, only the High Priest had access to the innermost room, the Holy of Holies. God had promised to make his name to live in that room.

In that culture, the word “name” means authority, and the mysterious substance of what you are and what your life means. When the Lord made his name dwell in that innermost place, it meant that you could get to be with him there, if it was allowed.

In the real Temple, the High Priest could only enter that place of the presence once a year, and only if he brought with him the blood of a sacrifice that cleansed him and his people from their sins.

Paul says that his way, and the way that he taught others about knowing God, was like a Temple where anyone could come into the presence of the Lord, any time at all, if they and their sins had been cleansed by the sacrifice and the blood of Jesus. Yes, this is how me meet and know God: “when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son,” (Romans 5:10)

Paul also says: “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (5:5) We don’t know God by taking off our own blindfolds, but by the Father giving us the Holy Spirit to take off our blindfolds.

In Matthew, Peter didn’t know who Jesus was until the Father showed him, and I’m sure there was the silent power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, to show the true identity of Jesus to his disciple.

This happens to us, as well.

We see Jesus on the cross, crucified to bring us peacefully back home to his home, and to be at home truly in the presence of God. It’s the Holy Spirit who has the power to open our eyes to see the Lord Jesus on that cross, and to know that we are welcomed back to a relationship with God. Faith, peace, grace, glory, perseverance, a maturing character, hope, love, joy and celebration come into our lives through our relationship with God our Father, the Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Holy Spirit.

You don’t find these things anywhere else, although it is amazing how willing the Lord is to give all of this to his enemies. This gift is for his enemies: including us!

Maybe that’s part of the reason Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who knows just how far this grace will spread, in the end?

We were all created for a relationship with God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s our true purpose. It’s what we are designed for: what everyone in the world is designed for. Think what pictures come to you, what smells, what sounds, what flavors, what words help you to know God?

There may be a word, or a sentence, or a story in the Bible that helps you to know God. There had to be some experience that exposed your need for something more, in order to know God: a newborn baby, falling in love and proposing, losing a job, being in debt, making a big mistake, walking in the rain. You found that you had a need, and that need turned out to be God.

Everyone needs this, and God is big enough to meet the needs of every one of his creatures. You understand your own needs well enough to want to give help and care for the needs that others have for God.

In our reading, in Romans, there are the treasures of faith, hope, and love: the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit. Not everyone will admit their need for these. Not everyone understands or even knows their need for these.

People might have reasons to fear us Christians and the church; or at least dislike what we stand for, to them; although most people are charitable enough that they try to overlook these faults in us.

There will come some time when those we know, or work with, or play with will need a foundation to strengthen them, you don’t even need to call it faith until you get to a certain point, and then you can surprise them by what faith means to you.

There will come a time when the people around you will lose hope. They may feel this as weariness, or grief, or fear. You may have been given some understanding of these things, through your own life, and you know how a relationship with God will teach them hope, as it taught you. You can lead them through this change into hope.

A time will come when someone around you has their need for love exposed. I think it might be easier to talk about love, but not about the painful mistakes of love. People hide from love. They avoid the changes that love will make in their life. On Facebook, my persimmon friend David posted a joke that said: “I told my wife that she should embrace her mistakes . . . Then she smiled and hugged me.”

You have been given some gift for knowing how to care for those in need of love.

Paul’s letter is the letter of a helper, a caregiver, dealing with the spiritual needs of others. Paul was what we need to become. He is someone who has died and risen with Jesus. What we have to share, in the school of Paul and Jesus, is to know a glory that dies to bring us in. We become such people. In our turn, we die in order to rise with the Son of the Living God, and lead others where we have gone with Jesus. Just don’t forget your own need for meeting with Jesus. There’s more you need to know.

Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Two) - Reading the Heart of Need

Preached on Sunday, January 20, 2019

Scripture readings: 2 Kings 5:1-19; Matthew 9:1-13

Usually, when people ask me how I’m doing, I just say: “Fine! How are you?” Sometimes they’re already gone by then, because “how are you” can be just like saying “Howdy, catch you later!”.

Looking around near Bridgeport Bridge
Near Malakoff Diggins and North Bloomfield
California, May 2015

This winter, this past month, when people ask how I’m doing I tell them how long I’ve had my cold; and I explain how this is not because I’m getting old. It’s because I’ve always had disgustingly long colds. I go on to tell them how my roommates in college would complain about how long my cold had been going on, and how annoying I was, and why didn’t I go to the doctor?

Maybe that’s why it might be more polite, sometimes to just say “fine”?

No, when I ask you how you are, I really want to know. I Want to know how you are!

I wanted to be an astronomer, off and on, when I was a kid. I still have a small telescope that my parents bought for me when I was about ten years old. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve taken it out but I have used it, now and then. I’ve used it since I’ve lived here.

In the summer, I like to put a cot out in my back yard, with a sleeping bag, and just lie there looking up. I like looking at the stars and the planets and guessing which ones they are.

All of you are just like that!

To me, at least.

I mean, I really could just stare, and stare at you and wonder what you are and where you really are, way up there in the heavens above me.

Last Sunday I started a short series of messages in which I want to think and share what it might mean to care for the spiritual needs of others. How can we do that when we are like distant but wonderful stars and planets moving in the circles of the heavens? We’re all so mysterious.

That could be a good way of playing it safe with each other. One of the scary things my mom said to me when I was a child and I had done something wrong was this: “I can read you like a book.” That sure scared me. And school teachers claimed to have eyes in the back of their heads. Grown-ups were strange creatures who could know everything about you without your even saying a word. They know exactly what you will do next, and you can never know what they have in mind about you.

Now that I’ve more or less grown up, I don’t quite buy into that scary part anymore. I know that I can’t read you like a book. Although, I have been held responsible, before, for things that I should have known without having been told.

That’s just not in my grasp. If you tell me something important and expect me to read between the lines in order to “get it”, that will never, never happen. I am incapable of reading between the lines.

It can be a lonely thing, being a star out in the Milky Way, so far from the other stars. How can we help others in their need if we can’t read them? How can we ever hope to have our own inner needs understood and cared for if we are such mysterious creatures to each other?

We could share more. We could talk more, and be more personal.

That would help.

But that can be hard, too. And, then, what if our own hearts seem as far away from us as the stars and the planets of everyone else? What if you are too separated from your own star to know what’s really going on way out there, or way in there?

Today’s readings from the scriptures tell us about how the spiritual needs of people, including our own, can be hidden and disguised, or else How these needs can become visible, and clear, and accessible to our care, and the caring of others. Naaman the Syrian General with his leprousy; the paralyzed guy who was carried by his friends to Jesus; and the tax officer named Matthew, who because the source of our first gospel, all showed their spiritual needs that differed greatly from their apparent needs, or lack of needs.

I mean they all showed their innermost, genuine needs to Jesus. The people in the crowd hardly had a clue.

In the gospel, Jesus gave the young paralytic exactly what he came for, which was healing, but healing was not the first this he needed. The first Jesus gave him something completely different from physical healing. Jesus gave him forgiveness first.

Jesus gave Matthew something that no one else of his own people would ever dream of giving him. Most of his own people wouldn’t have given Matthew the time of day, if he asked for it. (Of course, no one had watches back then, to tell the time by.) Matthew’s real need was for forgiveness, like the paralyzed guy. Or, was it acceptance? Was it a purpose that mattered?

The young paralyzed man and his friends came to Jesus because he clearly needed more help than any human being could possibly give him. No human being could take away his paralysis. His best friends gave him the only thing they had to give by bringing him to Jesus; whatever Jesus might be.

All five young men were people of faith. They had no theologically and Biblically correct idea of who in the world Jesus was. But I think they could have said something like: “This Jesus comes from God. He comes right here to our town and he can take care of absolutely any need that anyone brings to him. Maybe he’s the king Daniel writes about, who goes to heaven on the clouds to sit on the throne with God. Who can know?”

It would be nice if the five of them knew this. But they may not have been that clear. It was only clear that Jesus was wonderful, and that he helped everyone who came to him.

Matthew had no faith. Maybe he once had a faith he had said “no” to. In any case, he had left his faith behind to work for the Roman dogs who had invaded and occupied the land that God had promised to Israel.

There’s no sign that Matthew was aware of any spiritual need at all. He as doing quite well, thank you. Matthew didn’t come to Jesus at all, let alone ask Jesus for anything.

Jesus came to him. Only Jesus saw Matthew’s real need.

Jesus came as a care giver for those in spiritual need. The healings, the miracles, the turning around of people lives, and calling them away from their old way of life (whether fisherman or taxman) was only part of the caregiving purpose of Jesus.

In the twentieth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us that he has a caregiving job to restore the world to God. The job of caregiver, no matter how big and great, is still always the job of a servant. “Whoever is great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28)

Jesus came to save an enslaved world. We are born with a need to be ransomed from the slavery of the sin of the world.

The Old and New Testaments, from that point of view, both give us servants (except for Elisha’s servant) who know how to help, and (more importantly) servants who know the root of the need.

The servant girl knew where the general could be healed. The general’s servants knew that their “father” (as they call him) needed to stop playing the hero and the great man, if he wanted to be healed. The general, after his tantrum, thoughtfully listened to the wisdom of his daily caregivers.

Because their identity as servants taught them their master’s greatest need, he became a changed man. He became a servant of the God of Israel.

The prophet Elisha had, from the very first, given the general a little task for his deeper healing. Elisha knew how to do this because he was, at heart, a servant. Elisha knowingly gave, for the general’s physical healing, a silly, repetitive, boring task, that could easily humiliate him, and enrage him.

The prophet was a caregiver, too, and was wise, like any servant of Jesus, to read between the lines and see the real need, not the obvious need. Serious caregivers learn how to look deeper, and go deeper, than others can see or do.

Jesus, from the first, gave the young, paralyzed man the forgiveness of his sins.

Two things make us forget that there is a simple purpose in forgiveness and so (if that is true) then Jesus intended to give forgiveness, plain and simple. The Pharisees turn forgiveness into a distraction and a complication.

In his effort to reach out to them, Jesus asks them to use this forgiveness to learn from him more willingly. Jesus tells them that now they know what his authority is, but that’s not why he started with forgiveness in the first place.

First, I want to explain something about authority in the Bible. There are a couple words for authority and power in the New Testament language. This one is “exousia” which cannot be passed on to anyone, although it may be shared. Exousia, in this way means “substance”. It has to be part of what you’re made of. There is a substance to being a spouse or a parent that really can’t be given to you. It must be ingrained in you, in these cases, over time, and they are never finished forming.

Ok, when it’s not part of who you are by birth, it must be learned, and you never stop needing to learn learning.

The authority of forgiveness in Jesus is a very part of him. In the animal kingdom, some animals (like wolves and dogs, maybe with the exception of poodles) are essentially, substantially predators. It’s their inborn authority to be predators.

Jesus is a forgiver. It’s as essential to the nature of Jesus as the authority of love. Because God is love. Jesus shares the nature and authority of God.

It may sound as though Jesus gives us the authority to go out into the world, but it is actually, always his authority, and not our own. Jesus’ authority is not a matter like saying that “the buck stops here”. It means that when we do what we are authorized to do, we are not doing it on our own.

Jesus is doing our task with us, and through us. Every act of our authority is a partnership, and a communion with Jesus. Jesus is being the caregiver through us.

The wisdom of the Caregiving God is working through us, helping us to see what others don’t see. The wisdom of the Caregiving God, in Jesus, is helping us to go and to do what others don’t know how to go and do.

The young, paralyzed guy needed forgiveness more than anything else. This much is the same with all of us. We all need forgiveness more than anything else.

But there was something that only Jesus could see. It wasn’t that sin or shame caused the paralysis. Forgiveness was simply the greatest need in this one person’s life. In some way his life was marked by failure that made him ashamed. It overshadowed him in a way that may not be common to most of us.

Without the wisdom of the Caregiving God, in Jesus, we might miss the need in others for simple, unconditional grace and forgiveness. We are called to be servants who serve with caregiving wisdom to forgive others with the love and grace of God.

Matthew’s greatest need was to be a servant of the Kingdom of God and not of the Empire of Caesar. Matthew needed to be the traitor and thief among the first disciples called by the grace of the Lord.

Matthew needed this, because we all need a traitor and thief to be loved, and close, and a chosen servant of Jesus. It’s by Jesus caring for the need that he saw in Matthew that we know that Jesus can call us away from being thieves and traitors; and not be like Judas.

Not everyone can come, and love, and serve Jesus as an honest man or woman. We, in order to be true servants of Jesus, need to know this. We, ourselves, need a life changing call. There are people around us who need a life changing call and purpose in life. There are people whose greatest needs may be acceptance and purpose.

We might only see those who don’t deserve such a call or invitation, but the wisdom of the Caregiver God, in Jesus, will tell us otherwise. Our own hearts will be changed by that wisdom to change the lives of the spiritually failed and loveless into the inspired and beloved of Jesus.

Naaman must have had a real spiritual need lodged underneath his outstanding competence and his ability to be recognized for always coming to save the day. The caregiver Elisha healed Naaman not only by having him wash in Israel’s river, but made him, from that time on, an undercover Israelite behind enemy lines. When Naaman led the king of Syria into the royal temples, he was really worshiping the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ, to come.

There are people who have the spiritual need to live with family and friends as if he or she is an undercover agent behind enemy lines. They may live in a world empty of the people of Jesus to love and understand them. We see their real need. We are ready to be there for them, to help them.

What benefits came to those whose deeper needs were met? Did they go on to live happy, fulfilled, successful lives?

Naaman had to live the rest of his life knowing that so much of what he did was fulfilling his duty to the wrong side. He had his troops, his treasures won in war, his palace and his servants who called him “father”, but he lived the rest of his life knowing that the world should not be the way it is. He lived knowing that he was of very little use where he was, and he would watch everything go on to the breaking of his heart. Naaman went on to become sad, but wise.

The forgiven and healed young man may have gone on to live the rest of his life as a normal, ordinary, independent human being. What a great gift that would be, don’t you think?

Malakoff Diggins, old hydraulic mine
Looking across that big hole in the round

If he and his family went on in living faithful to Jesus after the Cross, and the Resurrection, and Pentecost, he would have been a perfectly normal human being who would have to keep his priorities clear and hold onto Jesus, no matter how the persecuting world was moving around him, and maybe against him. He would be persecuted, but useful to his brothers and sisters in Christ, and possibly happy in spite of the fear, or persecution.

In the rest of his life, following Jesus, Matthew traveled with the good news of Jesus to a whole lot of places (Persia/Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and especially south of Egypt) South of Egypt is said to be where he was a very successful witness for Jesus. He was so successful that he was killed there (burned alive) for his success. We just don’t know much about Matthew and how he ended.

There are other spiritual needs hidden in the stars of the souls around us. Caregiver Jesus, calls us to be caregivers with him to these and many, many others.

We can’t merely say, “How are you,” and know what to do. We don’t know where our caregiving will take those we help or where the help we receive will take us, in life. But we can learn what servants learn when we start serving the Servant-Lord Jesus.