Lord, Who Am I in You? – Equipped and Under Orders

Preached on Sunday, May 5, 2019

Scripture readings: Genesis 1:26-31; Matthew 28:16-20

There’s a friend of mine who has told me that he became a Christian when he held his first baby child in his arms. He knew, in his heart that he, as he was, was not the man to raise this child. He needed to become a new man. So, my friend gave his life to Christ, so that he could be a wise, loving, faithful father.

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA
Late April, 2019

The truth is that my friend was raised in a Christian home and seemed to belong to Christ already. But, his baby daughter became the witness commissioned by Jesus to go to the nation of Washtucna and make a disciple out of her new father, teaching him to observe all the Jesus had commanded her.

Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 RSV) My friend became a new man for a new world: the new world of fatherhood. By the way, my friend’s wife was always a saint. She must have seen his future when she said, “I do.”

My friend saw his old world passing away. In the bigger sense our whole world is passing away, ever since Jesus died and rose from the dead. (1 John 2:17) A new world has begun because of Jesus.

To us, this world still looks like a dying world. We will only see that new world of Jesus when he comes again. We live in a new creation and we, who are in Christ, are a new creation, even though we don’t look anything like new.

We are called by the Lord to live as his new images in this new creation. We know there must be different rules and a different calling than we had in the old creation, when we were trying to make ourselves in our own image, in those bad, old days in that bad, old world that was turned away from God.

God gave my friend a new calling, with his new heart, in the new world called fatherhood. This new calling was what we might call a covenant; a fancy Bible word for a holy promise bringing and holding God and human beings together.

The last few lines of the Gospel of Matthew are such a covenant, such a holy promise, that brings us and holds us together. Through this promise, we have a relationship of grace and empowerment with the Lord Jesus.

Jesus begins his new promise like this: “Behold, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” And Jesus completes his new promise like this: “And, lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Jesus places himself at the beginning and at the completion of the promise to show that he is the one who holds it all together, for us, from the beginning to the end. The grace and the empowerment promised to us by Jesus is very clear, here.

What Christians commonly call “The Great Commission” is our calling and mission in the world that has been claimed by the authority of Jesus. Jesus came into our old, broken, rebel world from the throne that he shared with his Father in heaven. He dispensed with his heavenly authority for a while: while he was growing up, and working, and journeying toward the cross and the tomb. Jesus became truly human for us, in order to claim us from the inside out.

The classic way for an explorer to claim a new land for your own nation is never by gazing at its shoreline through binoculars and saying some magic, claiming spell. You have to set your own foot inside the new land and raise your nation’s banner.

Jesus set his feet inside the broken world of the human race, in flesh and blood, as though he was making himself a citizen of the place. Then Jesus raised the banner of the cross and claimed us for his kingdom.

Jesus built the only kind of human life in which we can follow in his footsteps. He built this new shape of human life for us when he was baptized for our repentance, and received the Holy Spirit, just as we all must baptized for repentance and receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus opened the door into what we must all receive, in order that we may be washed clean in our hearts, and be moved, and enabled, and directed by the Holy Spirit in our own lives. So, Jesus moved in first, into the new world of repentance, and baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus claimed authority over our transition from our old life into our new life.

He did this before us, and he did it for us, so that we don’t take those alone. Our repentance, our baptism, and our life in the Holy Spirit are just as good as his, because he walks with us through it.

Jesus pushed his authority further when he made his way to the center of our hearts and took our sin and rebellion upon himself, on the cross, and made our lives stronger than sin and stronger than death in the resurrection.

Jesus reclaimed human dominion in this world when he reclaimed us in birth, in life, in death, and in resurrection; and defeated the powers of Hell and the Devil. In Jesus, there is no longer any place for us to go where he hasn’t been already. He is with us always, in so many ways, until all the ages and all the places of creation are brought together for the new heaven and earth.

Now that he has created and claimed the new earth and our new life, Jesus has sent us on a mission a bit like the mission of Adam and Eve in the old creation. They were commissioned to “dress and keep the earth”; or to “work it and take care of it”. (Genesis 2:15 KJV and NIV) This was the dominion of Adam and Eve. It was their rulership over the earth: to work on the earth and take care of it, to be servants and guardians of it.

The Great Commission of Jesus for us doesn’t take the First Commission away. Instead, Jesus adds the mission of partnering with him to care for and protect the new human world by bringing our living witness to Jesus wherever we go, into all the nations, or just into our own nation.

We are to go to all nations. If we don’t go to all the nations, then we go to all the people around us.

We take part in the Lord’s work of recreating everyone who will listen, and be moved, and follow. Everyone is beloved by the Lord, and the Lord’s greatest joy is for them to become new creations where the old has passed away.

This is where being in the image of God comes in. The image of God is not having a face, and hands, and feet, and internal organs. The image of God is not some spirit, soul, mind, and body thing. God’s image isn’t even a matter of being a person of self-awareness and purpose, although that comes a lot closer. God’s image is intimate relationship. God’s image is intimate, faithful love.

The idea of a mirror comes into this, in the Bible: “seeing in a mirror dimly, and then face to face (2 Cor. 3:18)” or looking into “the law as into a mirror (James 1:23.” Human sin interrupted the faith that comes from looking into the Lord. Human sin interrupted our ability to look at any time and see all that God is; and caring for all that God cares about. In Jesus, God has stopped and untangled this interruption.

Because of this, you can pay good attention (quality attention) to everything that matters most to God in your life and, yet, center your attention on God at the same time. You can play with your kids. You can pay your bills. You can work at your job, and your art, and your garden. You can work on your check book or online banking site. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

You can write a book or read a book. You can watch television and hear the news. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

That’s what being the image of God is about. Then, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are saying, whatever you are doing is what God would do if God were you. Then people will look at you and see God: see Jesus, see God in Jesus Christ, in you. They may not know it. But they may crucify you for it just as easily as they may praise you for it.

That will be one of the ways you can measure your competence, your abilities, your success. For better or for worse you will play and fit the role of Jesus. You will spread the new creation for the new world; the new heaven and earth that are coming.

Making disciples means bringing people into the image-changing and image-making that comes from this intimate relationship. You learn from Jesus by listening and watching. You learn from Jesus by following, which means going where he wants to go: not to the righteous but to sinners. You will be the good physician. You will be the good nurse to those around you.

To baptize them means to give them a good, Christ centered death and resurrection in Jesus. They will die to themselves and live in Christ.

Teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded you means bringing them all back to your own calling. Wherever Christ has found them, that is the starting line of their part of the race in the image-of-God relay.

They will love taking care of and protecting the least of the people around them. They will love bringing others into the life that makes us the image of God by intimacy: looking and listening and following the presence and purpose of God. You teach others to observe all that the Lord has commanded you by sharing your life’s work and your life’s discoveries and your greatest loves with them.

Then the whole business spins around, and around, and around. It goes from generation to generation, family to family, country to country. It’s like a country folk dance, or a square dance, passing under the over-arching arms of the ones who are smiling at you through the lands and the ages of the kingdom of God.

There was a man whose name I can’t remember, and whom I have never met, but Christians in my home town used to talk about him. He came to my home town, from South Korea to America, because God called him to be a missionary to us.

The Americans had brought their faith to his country. Now the Lord called him to bring his faith to ours.

He was smart but, most of all he was humble and childlike. He was in a new world, for him, and other Christians helped him as they could. By helping him, they learned to grow in their own faith through him. Non-believing Americans understood the good news of Jesus better for having known him.

I don’t remember what became of him. It’s only one example of how The Great Commission works. It’s how the sacrifice and the resurrection of God in Christ creates the new creation around us, as we live face to face with the presence of Jesus.

Jesus holds us together, through the strength of his promises, for as long as the ages and worlds gather together in his kingdom. Jesus is with us always, as we go with him into this bold new resurrection world.

Kingdom of the Caregivers - Power in the Scars

Preached on Sunday, January 13, 2019

Scripture readings: Psalm 38:1-22; Matthew 4:18-25

I’ve never preached from Psalm Thirty-Eight before. And, now’s the last time I can say that.

A Walk near Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
Dec. 2018

The truth is that I have read this Psalm every year for many years, but (for this sermon) I was reading it for you, so it was important. I opened the door to the Psalm, and stepped into the shadows, and, all of a sudden, I found myself falling down, and down, into a three-thousand-year-old brain. Well that kind of thing happens all the time, when you read the Bible.

I asked this three-thousand-year-old brain what was going on. As you can guess, it was hard to understand him.

The page in front of me (at verse nine) said, “I groan in anguish of heart.” But the three-thousand-year-old brain was screaming something like: “My heart is feebly sighing itself away, and I roar in pain at the mere sound of it.”

Verse four reads: “My guilt has overwhelmed me.” The ancient brain seems to say: “I’m in way over my head. I’ll never climb out this. I’m buried alive.”

Do you like crawling under a house? The ancient brain in the Psalm feels like he’s trapped in a passage under a house and can’t get out.

Verse four reads: “My wounds fester.” The ancient voice seems to say: “My body’s a stinking puss-ball.”

Well, there’s quite a bit of that going on here, as usual. The ancient guy cries that this is because of his sins. It’s because that sin made him so stupid, and made his life such a disaster. Nobody wants to go near him. You know why. They’re all saying: “I don’t want to remember him like that.”

This is what he’s talking about. The funny thing is that he never tells us a single thing about what he’s done wrong.

What sins could go so wrong as his have? He doesn’t say. I probably wouldn’t want to say what I had done either. Sometimes my sixty-seven-year-old brain does that.

The best thing I can say about the ancient brain is that: “This guy needs help.”

To shorten up this sermon: What this ancient guy really needs is for someone like Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John to come by and be the fishers of men that Jesus told them to be, and please, please fish him out his mess.

After all, that’s what Jesus wanted them to do. Jesus was starting up his kingdom. He was starting to fix the whole world. Jesus was fixing to start a whole new heaven and earth. He’s not finished yet, but it’s our job to help Jesus, as disciples just like the first ones: fishing people out of their messes, until the kingdom comes. “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19)

Jesus is pretty smart and he must have deliberately looked for the fishermen first. If Jesus had found Matthew the tax-man first, I don’t know what we would do with the concept: “Follow me, and I will make you tax collectors of men.”

The concept of “fishers of men” is such a strange thing because there’s something in it that makes us sure that we know what Jesus must have meant by it. But it certainly doesn’t tell us what to do with the people after you have hooked them, or netted them, and pulled them into your boat, or in to shore.

Once you’ve got them, can you ever be done with them? No! Jesus never works that way. Fishing the guy out from under the house comes much closer, because it really gives you a story that you both will share a part in as long as you live. You can always relate to the guy you fished out from under the house.

Jesus and his kingdom (which the church is part of) is about much, much more than seeking, and finding, and pulling people in. The next time we hear about the kingdom of God, the context is this: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23) For Jesus, fishing for people was more about helping them out of their old life and into a new life.

Scholars argue over whether the main problem of the man in the Psalm was his sin or his sickness.

Maybe it was neither one. In the end of that Psalm, the guy seems to say that his suffering and his sin came from trying to do what was right. “I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin. Many have become my enemies without cause; those who hate me without reason are numerous. Those who repay my good with evil lodge accusations against me, though I seek only to do what is good.” (Psalm 38:18-20)

This strange state of affair gives us two basic options. One is that this man has come down to lying rather than confess his actual wrongdoing. But I know that God gave us this Psalm here for a better reason than that. Most of us know that it’s not so hard to do the right thing in the wrong way and completely screw everything up: including those you wanted to help the most.

I go with that one.

To be a fisher of someone like that; to try to help someone who doesn’t know what to make of his own actions; someone who has struggled so long that they have given up on themselves and they just want to wait until God helps them know what to think and what to do: that’s what it means to be a fisher disciple.

Everyone else seems to have failed him. Everyone has put their two cents in and thrown up their hands and left him to himself. What will you do if you are a real fisher?

The sin-sick guy of the Psalm is a person of faith who just needs God’s help. He needs the kingdom of God to come to him and give him a new chance, and a new life, and wisdom to live by. Speak Lord. “Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Savior.” (Psalm 38:22)

Someone who belongs to the kingdom of God (like Peter, Andrew, James, and John; and you and me) needs to come and fish this guy out (whatever that happens to mean), and that could mean anything.

Any of us can feel like someone trapped under a house and taking forever to find their way out. Any of us can feel like a puss-ball. Even believers can spiritual go to a place like that when they get worried, or fearful, or cocky. We go out on our own and we shouldn’t be surprised at where this takes us.

Being a disciple means helping people in their need. Their need can be not knowing who God really is. Their need may lie in their not knowing that God, working in Jesus, on the cross, is what gives us a new life and all the help that the love of the family of Jesus can give.

The Lord’s Supper is the gift of the Lord to call us to come to him for forgiveness, life, and every kind of help we may need.

If we’ve ever been trapped under a house, that makes us experts of going in and fishing anyone out from there. Our having been trapped is like a certificate of qualification for helping others in distress. Jesus earned his scars on the cross, in order to save us from Satan himself, and sin, and death. Carrying and dying on the cross is hard, dangerous work (like burrowing under a big, big house) that qualified Jesus to rescue us when we are stuck under such a place ourselves.

By the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, our own scars can be made into our certificate of qualification to be an official helper of others in their need in the kingdom of God, signed and sealed with the blood of Jesus. The scars of the sins of others may bring the strongest help of all, just as the scars of grief are the strongest comfort to others.

Jesus is building a kingdom full of Spirit-empowered little Jesuses running around and blessing people with the help they need. If this is not true, then his church is not being his church.

God, in Christ, comes to us. He comes to the whole world wherever it hurts and wherever it is going wrong. There, the Lord bears the hurt and the wrong and makes us new people.

Jesus goes straight to our need and gives us what we need. Jesus goes to our need and makes us what we need to be for love’s sake. Because this love of Jesus knows no limits, we ourselves can go to other people’s places of need. We can go to the world’s places of need and bring what’s needed as only the wounded God, and the fellow-wounded of Jesus can do.

Things Invisible - Don't Go to Hell

Preached on Sunday, April 29, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 57:14-21; Revelation 20:11-15; Matthew 25:31-46

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

What is God like?

Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So, what is God like?

Sometimes we read that God is like a hand.”

David said this to God, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (Psalm 63:8)

Hebrews says this about God, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

What does it mean that God is like a hand?

Sometimes we read that God is like fire.

When the prophet Isaiah received his calling to become a prophet, he had a vision of God enthroned in glory surrounded by flaming angelic creatures called Seraphim.

The name seraph means burning one. They are all fire, and wings, and eyes.

Isaiah was in agony with the fear of his own sinfulness, so God sent a burning seraph to do something important with fire. “One of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth, and said, ‘See, thIs has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. “(Isaiah 6:6-7)

After the resurrection of Jesus and his departure to heaven, the disciples were waiting for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit, and this is how it happened: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit….” (Acts 2:2-4)

So, the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus is like fire. The Holy Spirit enables us to follow, and serve, and be the witnesses of Jesus. The Holy Spirit enables us, as the followers of Jesus, to demonstrate the love shown by Jesus on the cross to take our sins away. So, this is like fire. Those who follow Jesus are filled with something like fire.

In Hebrews, again, the author wants us to be hopeful and excited in our faith, and so he says: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28) Security in the love of God and his kingdom is like fire.

So, what do we think that God is like, when we are told that God is like fire?

What do we think that God is like when Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) What do we think when the apostle John writes that: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

We can see the connection between Jesus and love. Then we hear Jesus say: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

If God is like Jesus, what is God like? If God is like fire, and if God is like Jesus, and if punishment is like fire, then what is God like, and what is Jesus like?

I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible always says exactly what God wants it to say, exactly the way God wants it said. And the same Holy Spirit inspires the hearts and minds of those who read the Bible to receive exactly what God wants to tell them, so long as they are ready to hear whatever God wants to tell them, exactly the way God wants to tell them.

I don’t believe there are any contradictions in the Bible. I do believe that it is perfectly possible to understand the Bible and to make sense of it. I don’t believe that anything about the history of the words of the Bible and how it may have been written and passed down to us take anything away from its divine authority.

Jesus, the Living Word, is truly human and truly God, and so he is able to give us everything we need as human children of God. In the same way, the Written Word of God, in the Bible, is truly human and truly divine, and, (because of this) it is able to give us exactly what we need.

There have been many people who have spoken and written about the geography of Hell, and the temperature of Hell. There seem to be many Christians who are perfectly happy to believe that there is a Hell and that some people are going there. There are Christians who have a very clear idea of exactly who is going to Hell, and they can hardly wait for that to happen.

I want to say something about the mentality of Hell and, at the same time, I also want to tell you: “Don’t go there!”

It’s clear that Hell has something to do with punishment. But I don’t know if we even understand punishment that well.

I don’t. But perhaps you understand it on the basis of your experience as a parent, or as a spouse, in family and marriage.

In my experience as a kid, I think kids talk with each other and make plenty of comparisons about how they are being raised. The 1950’s were the years of the final flowering of the spanking. My friends and I were amazed when one of us shared that when he did something wrong, his dad would get out a heavy leather belt, and pull down his kid’s pants and underwear, and whip him on his bare bottom.

We knew that some of our own parents had been raised like that. We were genuinely glad that this was a thing of the past.

Let me tell you about the punishment my dad gave me. My dad, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, would get mad. But my dad wouldn’t scream, or yell, or raise his voice. He didn’t use bad words. My dad spanked me. He spanked me so that it stung, and I would cry.

But by the time I was about eight years old, I realized that although his spanking stung a little, it didn’t really hurt at all. I suddenly realized this right in the middle of getting a spanking.

I realized that it didn’t hurt. This almost made me laugh, right in the middle of that spanking. I tried not to laugh, but I think I snorted and gave myself away. That scared me for a second, because I wondered, in that second, if it would make him madder.

I remember, at that very moment, how my dad immediately stopped the spanking. He never spanked me again. After that, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, my dad wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t use bad words. My dad would simply look me in the eyes with anger and with a terrible, terrible disappointment.

His eyes, that were normally brown, would turn green for a minute. And I couldn’t stand that.

I mean, I wished that he would spank me. In those days I would have rather been spanked so that it hurt, at least a little. I would rather have had a spanking, than see that look in those eyes. I think my behavior improved a lot when the only punishment I got was that look in those eyes like an angry, sad, green fire.

With human beings, I don’t think that plain and simple punishment does any good. OK, punishment may stop bad behavior. But punishment will also open up a whole new world of trying to get away with things without getting caught.

With my dad, that look in those eyes left me helpless and I had no motivation to try to get away with things without getting caught. There were more things in that green fire than anger, there was disappointment, there was expectation, and there was love.

Punishment alone, plain and simple, never touches the heart, and never makes you better. Good parents know that punishment, plain and simple, is never their job.

Their job is to give their children everything in their heart. Their job is to bring children to life, and give their children more and more life, and give their children the capacity to receive more life from God, and from the love and faithfulness of others.

The parents’ job is to teach their children to use the lessons of the love they’ve received to become givers of life and love to others, in their own right. Parents want their children to be givers of life, especially to those who need it most: to give that life and love most of all to those who need spanking, because they may have children of their own.

The Lord says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” But this is not about punishment, plain and simple. God is not about punishment and reward.

God is about creating life. God is about giving to his created children the capacity to thrive in a life that is learned from God and gifted by God. God is about creating and raising children of his own.

In the Bible, fire has strong associations with the holiness of God. Fire often appears when holiness is broken and when punishment becomes the order of the day.

We think of holiness as a standard of perfection, and we think of perfection as never making mistakes, and never breaking rules or laws. Holiness is actually an ability to be devoted to a purpose, to have a goal in view and never letting go of it. Holiness means the capacity to focus on your goal and not deviate from it, ever.

God’s goal is not law keeping. God’s goal is life and love. God’s goal is thriving, and joy, and appreciation, and thankfulness, and praise. God’s goal is to say to every one of us, as creatures who have spread the beauty of goodness: “Well done good and faithful servant.”

Holiness is only one characteristic of God that we call an “attribute”. What we might call God’s moral attributes include holiness, justice, and love, and a number of other very fine qualities.

If we say that punishment is part of God’s attribute of holiness, we are right. But God is never just one thing at a time. God’s holiness never exists in the absence of God’s justice and love.

Imagine that you have, in spades, the attribute of intelligence. You would never want that attribute of intelligence to function without the attribute of wisdom, or else you would end up being too smart for your own good.

It’s no good to go around being less than you are. You want to be ready to be everything that you are all the time.

And if you have the attribute of being right all the time, or at least being right more often that other people, do you realize how much harm you can do, and how hard you will make life for others and for yourself. Never let your attribute of being right elbow your attribute of love out of the way. Some people do that. But, you never want to be less than all that you are.

Back to parenthood, and marriage too: you never want to reduce yourself in what you have to give. You never give enough unless you are ready to give everything.

So, when your child goes wrong, becoming The Avenger won’t do any lasting good unless your child can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes. Even if your husband or wife messes up, never get mad unless your partner can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes and in your voice.

Justice is an attribute that goes beyond rewarding and punishing. Justice creates a system where goodness is enjoyed, and flourishes, and where badness fails, and breaks the heart of even the guilty.

And love,” Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8) And God is love.

And God is a consuming fire. And Hell is an eternal fire. In the Bible, fire is, first and foremost, an image and expression of God. Fire is the expression of who God is and what God is like.

I always loved fire. When I was a kid I loved to build fires. It became my family job. We had a fireplace, and I built the fires. When we camped, I built the fire. When we barbequed, I built the fire. When there was trash to burn I loved to build the fire.

I grew up with incinerators in the back yard and burn piles on the farms. Fires were never about punishment. Except that it feels like you’re being punished, when you’re the one who has to build and manage that fire in the summertime, in the Sacramento Valley, when the temperature is 100 degrees. Fire is light, and warmth, and food, and heating water for washing. It’s for cleaning up the yard or the field. If fire were punishment, it would only be the saddest use of a beautiful thing.

Even Jesus says, in his parable of the sheep and the goats, that the fire of Hell wasn’t made for us. It was made for the Devil and his angels; not for human beings. (Matthew 25:41) It was made for cleaning up the creation of God.

God hates us trying to turn him into something less than everything he is. That’s why the Ten Commandments forbid us from making any image of God. No image can show all that God is. So, when the first and foremost expression of who God is, and what God is like, makes God look like Hell, we can trust that this can never be true.

Something else is true. All of the attributes of God are always present. Everything that is true of God is always at work, all the time. Where we see the fire of punishment in the Bible, there is much more at work than punishment. There is holiness that holds to the devotion of its purpose to make us the thriving children of God. There is justice, that creates a system where what is good grows stronger, and more and more joyful and thankful. There is love, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never, never ends.

There was a time, many years ago, when I was betrayed. People who knew more than I did told me later that they should have warned me. It damaged me for a long time. But, soon after that betrayal closed in on me, I preached a sermon about absolute forgiveness. At the end of that service, I was told by one of the ambushers, that my sermon about absolute forgiveness was the most negative messages they had ever heard. That same morning, I went to shake the hand of another one of them and, as I reached out my hand, their face got dark and grim and they pulled their hands behind them and backed away from me. I was not being what they wanted me to be at the time.

Forgiveness and grace can be an enormous punishment and pain for those who refuse it. Love can become darkness and fire for those who want to make themselves less, in their attributes, than God created them to be, when they don’t want to combine the fires of holiness, justice, and love.

In the story of the sheep and the goats, neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of doing anything for Jesus. They had only seen the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger (which means alien, like the Samaritan who was an outsider and an enemy of God’s people), the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. These were among the types of people that the God who looks like Jesus tells us to care for. He cares.

The sheep were people who went where Jesus would go in order to love those whom Jesus would love with all the attributes of God. The sheep were the people who shared the attributes of Jesus. They would refuse to be anything less. In a real sense, they had no idea what they were doing, but they did it anyway.

The goats never went near the people with whom Jesus identified. They were content and they led perfectly happy lives being less than what God created them to be. They were never anywhere near where Jesus would be, and so they never really did anything for Jesus.

The sheep must have often found themselves in places where they were very uncomfortable, and yet they were on the road to heaven. The goats led their comfortable lives and never even started up that road. The life of the goats turned out to be all about themselves. Their souls shrank as their holiness, justice and love shrank. In the end, they were held forever in the arms of what they had refused to be. The unwanted fire of love will never end.

If a child is pouting or having a tantrum, the thing they hate most is to see you moving in toward them to love them, smile into their faces, and tickle them. This is the way to make them really howl. Love can be Hell. If you love someone who wants to be less than they were created to be, or love someone who is happy to be less than they were created to be, and if you try to love them into being something more: know that you will make them miserable.

But don’t stop. You want to be careful about this. Never let anything or anyone make you consent to be less than you were created to be. Never dream of being any less than Jesus. To choose to be les is the mentality of hell. Don’t go there!

In the beginning of the Book of Revelation, when John first sees Jesus, among the many details he notices is something about those eyes. The eyes of Jesus look like fire. For those who know Jesus, a different form of fire tells us who God is. This world, and the best institutions and laws, and all the people in it, punished Jesus for being all that he is. The punishing fire took the form of a cross, and nails, and a crown of thorns, and the wounds of a whip, and a spear in his heart.

There was much more hanging on the hell of that cross than punishment. The fire of God burned there. The fire of holiness, and justice, and love burned there and took the punishment and the curse of our sins. As our hearts give way to that flame, we die and rise with Jesus. The light in Jesus’ eyes becomes his power and fire in us to break our hearts for change and a new life. Let’s live in that fire forever.

Passionate Jesus - Hope for the Hopeless

Preached on Sunday March 11, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 34; Mark 5:21-43

Walking along the Columbia River
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
February and March, 2018

I know a woman here who can raise the dead:

Provided that they are houseplants.

That woman’s name is Ruth Naser.

She’ll have to tell that story here sometime.

In the Gospel, the woman whose hemorrhage had been getting worse for twelve years, even though she had spent all she had for physicians’ care, and folk medicines’ cures, and healers’ prayers, had come to believe that Jesus could do anything. She needed someone who could do anything.

Jairus (whose twelve-year-old daughter was dying) was ruler of the synagogue in Capernaum. This means that he wasn’t a rabbi. He was a layman. You could say he was “lay-president” of the synagogue. You could say that he was like Rodger York, because a Presbyterian Clerk of Session is like that.

Jairus had also come to believe that Jesus could do anything. Jairus now needed (and his daughter now needed) someone who could do anything.

Jesus can do anything. The truth is that Jesus always wants to do even more than we ask. The way Jesus answered the hopes of these two people shows us what Jesus really wants, because his methods show us the heart of God, where Jesus comes from.

Jesus once said, “He who has seen me has seen the father.” (John 14:9)

This would have been true before the creation of the cosmos. Even now that Jesus had become a human being on earth, it was still true. What Jesus said, how he said it; what Jesus did and how he did it; whatever happened to Jesus, and how he responded to it all worked to reveal his Father. It all worked to tell us who God is and what he made us for, and what God wants, and what God promises, and how he gives it to us: the life of God on this earth.

The everlasting Son, who dwelt among us as a human being in Jesus, the whole course of his life and every day of it, as told to us in the Bible, was designed to reveal who God is and God’s relationship with us.

In one single day in the life of Jesus, in Capernaum where Jesus had based his ministry on the shores of Lake Galilee, two desperate people spread themselves flat and face down on the ground in front of Jesus. Their state of mind was almost identical but, otherwise, they were nothing alike.

They both received answers to their prayers, but the answers were substantially different from what they thought and hoped to receive. Having their prayers answered required a great deal from them for Jesus’ answer to run its course, the answers of Jesus filled them with fear.

The woman had a sickness that made her physically and spiritually unclean. She had a female hemorrhage.

It was a matter of blood. Blood was holy. Blood represented life. The blood of animals was shed as a sacrifice to show that sin and evil could only be overcome at the price of a life.

Mark, and the other gospels, tell us that the blood of Jesus (his blood being both truly human and yet coming from Word Made Flesh (“And the word was with God and the word was God,”), living a human life, had such a power that it could make the unclean clean and pure. Christ dying for us, the body of Christ wounded and tortured for us, the blood of Christ poured out for us is the giving of a life that can take away all the sin of the world.

But the blood that comes from purely human activities and life, or that comes from wounds or sickness (because wounds and sickness represent the fallenness of the world) represent what’s wrong with our world. Such blood represents what is unclean and contaminated in our world. Such blood was taught to be a sign to the people of Israel of the sins that contaminate others; because sin and evil can contaminate us.

So, this woman who touched Jesus’ robe was untouchable (almost as bad as a leper). She wasn’t allowed to touch anyone. And no one could touch her without being contaminated until the end of the day. If she was going to be around people, she needed to be very sneaky. If her sneakiness failed, then she would get in a lot of trouble. She would get the whole town after her.

The man Jairus was a leader. He was popular: popular enough to be elected as lay leader by the big, rich congregation in Capernaum. He probably had lots of money. Maybe he was elected because people thought he would be more likely, that way, to pay money out of his own pocket to repair a leaky roof on the synagogue.

Jairus dressed well. He was prosperous enough to have a real bath in his own house and so he was cleaner than most people, and you couldn’t track him down by sniffing the air. He always washed his hands, and you could shake his hand, or pat him on the back, without wondering where he had been and what was rubbing off on you. Most of all he was devoted to doing what was right and clean in God’s sight. He was clean, and the opposite of the unclean woman.

He was also devoted to his twelve-year-old daughter, and she seems to me to be like an only child. A year, or two, or three after her twelfth birthday she would be leaving home to get married. They did that so young in those days: usually to a man who was about sixteen years old.

She was growing up. Everybody knew it. But she was daddy’s little girl. Let’s call her Talitha, since Jesus called her that. It would make a very pretty name.

Here, again, this was the opposite of the unclean woman. She had to live the past twelve years away from her family, at least not in the same room, and never closer than an arm’s length.

I’ll try not to say anything more about them than I need to. I was going to call the unclean woman and the very clean man both hopeless, but one commentator stressed that they weren’t hopeless, only desperate. I guess it must be better to be desperate than it is to be hopeless. Do you really think so?

I don’t think that Jesus would make a difference between the two states of mind, any more than he made a difference between the unclean woman and the synagogue-man.

Once, Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.” (Luke 17:6) Some preachers say that if you want to get your prayers answered, you have to build up your tiny, tiny faith until it’s at least as big as a tiny mustard seed. But the point is that, even though Jesus knew (and everyone knew) that there were smaller seeds, the mustard seed was the poetic symbol for the tiniest things. Jesus meant that, even if you have the smallest faith in the world, God hears your prayers and grants them according to his will, and his will doesn’t always work by our standards, all the time.

Jesus said a wonderfully gracious thing to the healed woman. “Daughter your faith has healed you.” You could say she had enough faith to touch Jesus’ robe, and that’s true. It’s also true that she didn’t have enough faith to ask Jesus for healing.

What would we normally say about someone not having enough faith to ask the Lord for help in their great need? I believe that Jesus praises her faith by completely different standards than even God’s people (or church people) use.

We make rules about what God will or will not do, and we jack up Bible verses under our rules to make them look good to ourselves and to others. You are the daughter, or you are the son, of Jesus and you can come to Jesus any way that Jesus leads you.

Just come to Jesus, he knows you’re there. His power goes out to touch you and meet you in your need. He doesn’t usually follow the rules that his own people set.

I’ll tell you where her faith came in. It was only just about to come in.

Jesus asked her to do a terrible thing. Or it seemed terrible to her.

She had to come out of hiding. It was only when Jesus healed her that she was required to do what she never would have done on her own. She had to confess what her treatment by others had done to her. She needed enough faith to confess her own sneakiness. She needed enough faith to point to what Jesus had done for her without her telling him. She needed enough faith to hear herself being set free by Jesus.

She wasn’t healed so much because of her faith. She was healed for the sake of her faith. She was healed because she would be given the real faith that she needed so badly if she were going to live a truly new and healed life.

Jesus looks ahead. He always does.

Don’t let your present ideas about Jesus (and about life) keep you from him. Don’t let your thought habits keep you from whatever it is that Jesus asks of you now.

Maybe that is another kind of faith that Jesus is looking for. Surprise yourself. Let yourself be surprised by Jesus. That’s the key to the gospel.

Jairus, the synagogue-man, had the faith to bow at Jesus’ feet and ask Jesus to answer his desperate prayer. He had enough faith to ask; and this was a hard thing for someone like Jairus to do. It was very risky; especially because he was on the same leadership team as people who were thinking about whether it might be a good idea to kill Jesus.

That leadership team was motivated by their concern for their own authority, and Jairus was openly going against them. Jairus had some power in that synagogue, and in that community, but they outnumbered him by something to one.

Jesus said “yes” by following Jairus up the road to his house. Then, suddenly, Jesus seemed to be distracted by an interruption. Jesus took his own sweet time to deal with an invisible person in the crowd. Jesus had to out-wait the woman’s fear, and then encourage her confession. We don’t know how long that took.

For Jairus, it felt that Jesus was taking forever. The woman was an interesting case. Jairus, himself, might have sat in a synagogue trial to judge such a woman’s case.

And then it was too late for Jesus to answer his prayer. The time was up. It was too late. His little Talitha was dead. She could no longer be healed. Why trouble the master any further? So, Jesus asked Jairus to do something much, much harder than to have enough faith in Jesus to trust him to heal his sweet, sick little girl.

As things stood, it was no longer possible for Jesus to answer Jairus’ prayer with a “yes”. Jesus, in effect said no to healing Talitha.

Jesus intended to do a rare thing, even for him. In all of the gospels, we only have a record of Jesus bringing three dead people back to life from the dead.

There could have been cases that were not recorded. The whole world couldn’t hold the books to tell all that Jesus has said and done. But other kinds of miracles definitely outnumber his raising of the dead. And no one ever seems to have thought to ask Jesus to raise anybody from the dead. We never read of that happening.

Jesus decided to do what Jairus never seems to have heard of Jesus doing before (although there is one case that may have happened before).

If we’re not aware of the Lord ever doing a certain thing, chances are that we won’t even think of asking for it. We can’t ask for; we can’t pray for; something that we don’t even know about. But Jesus can answer such a prayer without our being able to ask.

The unclean woman didn’t have the faith to ask. Jairus, as smart as he was as the synagogue-man, didn’t have the brains to ask. Not because he was stupid: Jairus simply didn’t live in a world where the knowledge of what Jesus intended to do existed.

Jesus took Jairus beyond his personal boundaries of the possible, even though Jairus was a man of faith who was willing to stand up for his faith in defiance of the power of other people who could easily remove him from his position. Jairus had faith, but now he had crossed into new territory for himself, where he couldn’t do anything but feel afraid.

Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe.” In a sense, Jairus had to close his mind to fear. That is one of the hardest things to ever have to do. Jairus’ success at closing his mind to fear couldn’t have been very successful in the face of the loss of his little girl.

I believe that Jesus knew that he was going to raise Talitha from the dead, and that Jairus’ fear wouldn’t and couldn’t stop him from raising her.

Jesus only wanted Jairus to be able to take it easy. It would simply be easier for Jairus if he wasn’t afraid. Jesus isn’t really tripped up, or incapacitated, by our fears.

Jesus is not afraid of our fears, just as he isn’t afraid of what we fear. Jesus had watched evil, and ugliness, and grief, and death rule the earth for ages and ages, while he sat in heaven in fellowship with his Father there. Now he had come, in flesh and blood, to heal many people like the unclean woman and to raise just a few people like little Talitha.

Jesus’ intended mission plan was to heal some people, and to raise three people on earth from the dead, and then go on to heal the whole world by letting the world do its worst to him, and then to defeat this world while he was tied up in all the chains and ropes of this world that bind us, but which could not bind him.

Jesus was going to raise Talitha from the dead, then he would die himself and raise himself. Jesus was not afraid. That was his answer to Jairus; an answer beyond Jairus’ comprehension.

This is beyond our comprehension, but this may also be Jesus’ answer to you, and me, and our fears.

The Lord’s Supper is beyond our comprehension. We have so many prayers for Jesus’ presence, and power, and compassion, and here he comes to us as pieces of bread and little cups of grape juice that we call wine. But you have to admit that the power and reality of what we are offered here, and what we receive here, at this Table, is also beyond our comprehension. It's beyond anything we can understand well enough to ask for.

Jesus is not afraid to give us bread and wine and tell us that this is the way for us to come together to him and to receive all that he is and all that he does, at this table. Jesus’ answers are often like this, but this is only the beginning of where he will take us. This is only the beginning of what we will learn from him. Because he is able to be here, in this way, now, Jesus can do anything.