Good News - The Story of a New Purpose

Preached on Sunday, July 15, 2018. This is the conclusion of the previous message "Good News - The Story of a New Beginning".

Scripture readings: Isaiah 42:1-7; Luke 4:14-30; Luke 24:36-49

The day that Jesus rose from the dead began a day of complete confusion for his disciples and friends. Jesus’ body was gone. They knew that. They didn’t know what it meant.

Walking around Avalon, Santa Catalina Island.
And scenes from a "touring jeep" of the island.
The end of the cruise with my cousin Christine
June 13, 2018

At first, they wondered: Had the body been stolen? But who would do that, and why? Who had anything to gain from it? Would the authorities do it in order to blame it on them, and then would the authorities produce the body to shame them, and make them a laughing stock?

Of course, Jesus had said he would rise from the dead, but they never thought he meant that literally. (Luke 18:33) His death meant an irreplaceable loss. When they lost Jesus, they lost not only a teacher, a friend, a leader, a wonder-worker; they lost their hope.

They hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah, the King. They hoped that Jesus would lead them at the head of an army to defeat the Romans. They hoped that Jesus would lead them forth to conquer the world and hold the empire for the glory of God.

They loved God, and they loved Jesus, who stood, in their hearts, very much for God and for the kingdom of God. Now this was lost and their hope had died.

When Jesus died on the cross, they died too; and that upper room, had become their tomb. Only it was a living tomb of a disappointed faith, and a failed hope, and a grieving love, and (on that first day of the week) a source of complete confusion.

They had had their doubts, all along, about Jesus’ strategy to bring the kingdom. They had never really bought into that strategy. They just liked Jesus. He was scary sometimes, but he made them happy. And he made them feel important, too; very important. They especially liked that.

The Bible is a gift by which God speaks to us. It tells us about God. It tells us about ourselves. And here we find a little picture of God’s people, the church.

It shows us how they were afraid of believing and living in faith. It shows us that they liked Jesus, but they didn’t like it when he went too far, or when he asked them to go too far with him. They felt far better huddling in the room of a building where they had had good times, and where they felt sheltered from the risks and the judgments of the powerful people who judged them, and who wanted them not to exist.

And there we are. It turns out to be a picture of us, or at least a picture of what we are always on the edge of becoming, because we like to be prudent and safe, because the world outside is a messy place (but really only as messy as we are, if only we could see ourselves as our faithful God sees us).

We don’t always feel sure about buying into Jesus’ priorities and strategies. We like Jesus a lot. He makes us happy. He even makes us feel important.

But he can be sort of scary. He has crazy ideas about love (his love for us and the love he tries to squeeze out of us for others). He has crazy ideas about risk taking for love. All those crazy ideas are just so scary.

Instead of leading an army, Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world, and for our sins. Instead of ruling a world government from Jerusalem, Jesus rose from the dead to give life to the world, and to us.

This seems an odd way to build a kingdom. What kind of kingdom could he have been thinking of? How could his death and resurrection be a sane strategy for us to follow him and work for him?

Death and resurrection were the first part of his strategy that didn’t make any sense. The second part of his strategy didn’t make sense either. This strategy required him to show us that he is alive and victorious in spite of reality.

Faith means seeing a different reality. His strategy required him to make us sure of what he did, knowing that he had definitely done it, and that he had done it for us and for everyone else who would trust him. Jesus’ strategy requires us to know that death and resurrection are his plan for us. It’s his plan for us today, every day, and forever.

Once we see the glory of those scars that he got because he loved us (a strange kind of glory), and once we know from personal experience that Jesus’ kingdom works through his death and his resurrection, he puts us in charge of gathering the world to this strange kingdom. Then he disappears.

Well he doesn’t exactly disappear, but he sure doesn’t leave traceable footprints or fingerprints. The only prints left on the scene now are our own. But he shows himself the same way to each one of us. He has to.

The love of a God who became human in order to die for the sins of the world, and in order to rise from the dead, is supposed to bring the kingdom of God by changing hearts, and minds, and lives. God’s power in the cross and the empty tomb ends old lives and starts the new life of being born again. This change is his death and resurrection taking place within us.

The whole world is supposed to recognize that it needs this kind of love to empower the change of death and resurrection within us. We are supposed to realize for ourselves that armies, and laws, and education, and technology (though they have their place) will never change what really needs change that comes from the death and resurrection of human hearts, and minds, and lives, from their old selves to their new selves.

The new life shows us a God who loves us more than we love ourselves. It shows us a God who loves the world more than we do, and who loves life more than we do, and who has the power to set us free to live well and not be afraid: a different reality.

In the kingdom of God there is the power to be truly free. This is where the forgiveness of sins takes us. This is resurrection, too.

Jesus not only makes this possible; he makes it a promise. Jesus makes you the evidence-givers of change and freedom. He makes you and me his witnesses. The purpose of witnesses is to give testimony. Testimony can take the form of words, but the best kind of testimony is solid evidence.

So, your purpose and mine, as Jesus’ people, is surely to be the solid evidence of the dying and rising of Jesus. We are to give solid evidence of repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

So, when do you intend to start? When are you going to repent and change? When are you planning to forgive? I know, this means me too! It raises a lot of questions.

Repentance is a kind of change. Forgiveness is a kind of freedom. It is a kind of liberation and healing of the heart. Repentance and forgiveness are both ways of making a new world and setting things right.

Sometimes we make repentance and forgiveness into purely spiritual things. This is wrong. Jesus describes his mission in a way that includes everything in life, everything in the world, and not just what we consider to be spiritual. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and acceptance.” (Luke 4:18-19)

Jesus created the kind of change and freedom that deal with every kind of problem. He didn’t only deal with spiritual blindness. He gave real blind people sight. Jesus didn’t only deal with the spiritually poor. He fed the hungry. The repentance and forgiveness that Jesus authorizes is not just spiritual help for people, but passionate help for all the kinds of problems that people have.

There are prisoners of the mind, and prisoners of abuse, and prisoners of addiction, and prisoners of depression, and fear, and anger, and lust, and pride. And there are prisoners in prison. Jesus’ mission applies to them all.

Jesus gives us the job of being his solid evidence to them all.

The idea of witness has another side to it. A witness is a kind of extension of an event. A witness is a kind of extension of another person. Jesus makes us into extensions of him in this world.

What Jesus does for us is not supposed to stop with us. Jesus wants to play through us. He wants to extend himself through us to others.

He extends himself to each one of us in our hearts. He extends himself through the way we relate to the other members of his family, the church. He extends himself by stretching us, as his church, out into the world. His work becomes our work.

We become the extension of Christ to the world, as individuals and as the church of Christ. He extends himself through us in order to extend himself through those we touch: through them to others, still; and on, and on.

What are we to do?

In the Christian life, there is a basic issue of faith. We are nothing if we don’t believe that (one way or another) the Lord is the creator of the heavens and the earth. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1) Faith means living like people who believe that the world belongs to God.

In the same way we are nothing if we don’t believe that the Lord is the creator of a new world of grace through the cross and the resurrection. We live like people who believe that the old world has passed away and that a new world has come; and is coming.

New rules apply. The old rules (which the citizens of the old world believed were important, and smart, and successful) no longer apply in the new creation. Faith requires us to live believing that what Jesus stands for are the things that matter. That is part of the repentance we need to show as evidence, as witnesses.

Jesus said that repentance and forgiveness of sins are to be preached in his name; that is, in the Christ’s name, the Messiah’s name, the King’s name. The idea of doing something “in his name” is easy to understand.

It’s as easy to understand it now as it was when we played cops and robbers long ago. When we were the cops who yelled, “Stop, in the name of the law” it meant that we had authority to say “stop”. Our order carried weight; the weight of authority.

As the people of Jesus, you carry weight with me, you have authority in my life. I may not do what you want, or what you say; but I care about what you want and I care about what you say, because I love you and I know you are children of God. You are loved by Jesus. That has to carry weight with me.

We don’t always do what Jesus wants or says but, if we love him, he carries an immeasurable weight with us. The authority of Jesus sending us on his mission as his witnesses weighs upon us, even if we don’t listen or respond.

If we run under his weight, or mass, then that weight becomes part of our momentum. It budges us. It moves us. If we stay still under his weight it will just squeeze us. It will crush us.

I’m not proud of being a pastor. I’m not proud of my service to him. But Jesus’ calling carries weight with me.

When I tried, a long time ago, to ignore his calling and not run with it, it made me very unhappy. You can’t love God and expect to be happy if you don’t do what you know he wants. There are a lot of Christians who, if they were honest with themselves, would realize that their spiritual dryness and sourness comes from not doing one special thing they know very well the Lord wants them to do. They are avoiding something, and they pay for it.

But you have to understand that I am not talking about the guilt that comes from neglecting a duty. I am talking about the weakness that comes from ignoring a grace.

What God wants from you is the willingness to discover a special grace that will only come from crossing the line that you refuse to cross for Jesus’ sake. The unwanted calling that comes from God always has grace in it. It is always a new discovery of God’s power and love.

You have a mission to the world in the King’s name. It may be the world at your doorstep. It may be the world around the world. The mission of Jesus does not stop with you.

Then you must know that you have the Father’s promise, the power from on high. (Luke 24:49) For one thing, the word “promise” means that you are people of promise. You need to know that, as the old saying goes, “God don’t make no junk.”

Dependence on God alone is not powerlessness. Confidence in God alone is not a lack of confidence. When I see a child fumbling around with a ball, or plinking tuneless notes on a piano, I don’t see imperfection and failure, I see promise, and that is how God sees you, as people of promise.

The Lord promises you his Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, you will receive the gifts and you will bear the fruit you need in order to be the glorious children of God: witnesses of the cross, witnesses of the resurrection.

When Jesus talks about the “power from on high”, “power”, here, translates the basic Greek word “dunamis” from which we get our word “dynamite”. We are people of promise because God has given us dynamite for doing good.

Hear this! There is something you cannot see or hear that wants to go to work through you. The life of the Spirit is not just talk. God is God, and God is supernatural in his power. But the supernatural work of God goes on in disguise. The work of God goes disguised as you and me, and as the Body of Christ.

You may fret and grumble, but there is a power that is able to work beyond your ability, and beyond our very best plans. People may come to see something in you, and in us, that you don’t see in yourself, or in us. People will come to see in your words and your actions, and in ours together, something pointing to God.

The Holy Spirit is the most secret and invisible aspect of God. The Holy Spirit is the most humble aspect of a carelessly humble God, who is not afraid to sweat, and bleed, and die. This Holy Spirit is a gift of the Father and the Son. The power from on high has the freedom to work in every follower of Jesus, because Jesus’ death and resurrection has given you a new, risen life and, therefore, you are fit (and we are fit together) in the Father’s sight, for the fullness of his power.

The Holy Spirit was present in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the Holy Spirit is present in God’s recreation of your new life. The Holy Spirit is present in the new creation taking place in others when you bring Jesus to them in your words and actions. Trust the promise of the Father. Trust the promise of Jesus: “I am with you always.”

Jesus’ kingdom is a strange kingdom. He rules by means of death and resurrection. He rules by means of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Jesus is ready, willing, and able to perform the major surgery of his own actual Jesus implant in you and in me. Because of our Jesus implant, we die and rise daily, and we will win God’s victory.

We will know the change of repentance and the freedom of forgiveness. We will have something worth giving to the whole world. We will be his witnesses empowered from on high.

The Blessed Heritage is the Blessing Heritage

Preached on Sunday, July 1, 2018

Scripture readings: Deuteronomy 10:12-22; 1 Peter 2:9-25

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
May 2018

A mother came into her kitchen and found that it was being destroyed by her young children. They were definitely up to something. There was a mess of flour, and milk, and eggs everywhere it shouldn’t be. “What on earth are you doing?” she yelled.

The youngest answered first. “It’s almost America’s birthday, and we want to make it a birthday cake!”

It’s a good thing to want to celebrate this birthday. There are a lot of good reasons to do this. Birthday’s celebrate hopes and dreams, and they celebrate the heritage of the life carried in a person, or in a community, or even a nation.

Our nation’s birthday was an important day in my family, growing up. In his later years, my dad lost enough weight to fit into his old Navy uniform again, and he would put it on first thing in the morning and march out of the house, carrying the flag, and setting the flag in it’s bracket on the front of the house and saluting the flag at attention. My mom liked to spend part of the day watching Jimmy Cagney play George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, which seemed to be on TV every Fourth of July. By the time I was twelve, I took over setting fire to our fireworks.

The dog and cats celebrated the evening of the fourth by hiding. Some of the neighbors fired guns loaded with blanks, just like they would do on the stroke of the New Year.

The Nez Perce tribe in Idaho celebrate Independence Day in the middle of their summer powwow. The last week in June and the first week in July they celebrate what they call Talmaks. It’s also called “Presbyterian Camp Meeting of the Nez Perce Indians”. They’ve been doing this since 1897.

The Nez Perce were the tribe that sent messengers east to the settled lands of the United States, back in 1831, to ask for “the white man’s Book of Heaven”. Their mission was to ask a wise man to come to their people and teach them the message of the Bible.

A lot of Nez Perce people have long considered themselves to be a Christian tribe. The Nez Perce Wars were fought by the part of the tribe that didn’t want the Book. That part of the tribe is still fighting, to tell you the truth.

As the Presbyterian Camp Meeting would tell you, the most important part of the powwow is worship, study, and prayer.

The next most important part of Talmaks is the Fourth of July. A lot of the Nez Perce men enlist in the armed forces and become veterans. Independence Day is a big day for them: serving their country as warriors along with celebrating their identity as a Christian nation.

Well, they like to call their tribe a Christian nation. The truth is it doesn’t always look that way. As a nation, there's some debate among them, but a lot of them do their best to make it so.

That’s sort of like us, isn’t it? I remember the days when, if you asked someone if they were Christians, their answer could very well be: “Of course I’m Christian, I’m an American!” Although, back in the day, I was learning how to be a Christian in fellowship and not alone, and my most valued fellowship consisted of people who didn't buy that logic. On that point we might not have been any better Christians than they were, or anybody else, for that matter.

By the way, did you know that, legally speaking, Christ is the King of Poland, and the Virgin Mary is the Queen of Poland? It’s in their constitution, but I wonder if they’re doing a very good job following their King and Queen.

We want our nation to be truly Christian, and that means we want our nation to act in the spirit of Jesus doesn’t it? We want our nation, in this world, to have a role like the role Jesus has in this world. Then, as old as I am, I take a look at what I’ve wanted our country to do in the past, and it didn’t always seem very much like Jesus when it was all done. It’s hard to be a Christian nation if that means being a nation where the people see to it that their government behaves like Jesus.

This shouldn’t surprise us, though, if we know even a little about the Book of Heaven. That Book regularly tells us that even when God himself makes a collection of people into His Chosen People, it’s very hard for them, with all of God’s help, to live up to that.

There are certain themes and ideas that run all the way through the many books of the Bible from cover to cover. From cover to cover, the Bible is the love story of God for his broken creation from birth, to failure from the start, to the sacrifice of God, in Jesus, on the Cross. To the wedding and the happily ever after in the Book of Revelation. That’s one theme that runs through it all.

Another theme is God’s proposal of marriage, over and over again, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, to Joshua, to David, to the prophets, to the disciples of Jesus (which means us). This is our engagement, as disciples of the Lord, to be his bride, to be his people, to be his nation and kingdom.

Well, the Church could become the heart of a Christian nation. But it’s awfully hard to be that kind of heart of a nation without being heart sick.

Our readings from Deuteronomy and First Peter tell us a bit of what it’s like to be God’s nation, God’s people. Our Bible readings tell us, in that sense, what our heritage is when we celebrate the Church’s birthday on Pentecost. Our readings tell us, as the heart of our world and as the heart of our nation, what our heritage is. It tells us the heritage of how we go about helping our nation celebrate its life as we beat quietly, deep inside it, as any healthy heart usually does.

The first clue, in our scriptures, to our God-given heritage, if we stand in our nation and in our world as its heart, is that this heritage is a miracle. The miracle, as Moses puts it, is that God chooses us to be his people even though he could have chosen anyone else. How could God have chosen Israel, or us?

Although everything in heaven and earth belongs to the Lord, “Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers, and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all nations, as it is today.” (Deuteronomy 10:14-15) What a surprise, that God would settle for us. Earlier in the Book, the Lord and Moses tell Israel that they weren’t chosen because they were great (7:7) or good (9:5) but only as a demonstration of the Lord’s powerful faithfulness (Deuteronomy 7:8-9 and 9:29).

Peter means the same thing when he writes this: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (2 Peter 2:10) We “are a people of God, that you may declare the praises of him who brought you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (2:9)

There is no light in us, but there is wonderful light pouring into us from Someone who is not us, but who loves us perfectly in spite of who we are.

That is, surely, a wonderful light. Isn’t it?

No nation, and no church, is chosen by the Lord because it is great and good. It is chosen because God is love, and God’s love is absolutely faithful. God has never, ever, left his people. God has never left Israel. God has never left the Church. God has never left his violent, broken world. The history of the Chosen People of Israel as a rebellious nation is told in the Bible. The history of the Chosen People of the Church as a rebellious nation is told to us in history.

It’s the same story, the same history, the same heritage. It’s the same story here with us.

Knowing this is a very great relief. Thank God, we are not in our own hands alone. We are in the hands of the perfectly faithful Lord. It’s a great and perfectly humbling, humiliating miracle. It’s all about being love. Apply this to yourselves. Apply this here and now, in this place. Apply this to our nation. This is a heritage worth celebrating.

We were a small population on the shore of the Atlantic; colonies of the greatest naval power in the world of that day, and God saved us. George Washington and the small, poorly trained and poorly paid colonial armies lost most of their battles. When they won, it always seemed like an accident, like luck, or like the intervention of God.

Our heritage of somehow being brought into being from outside ourselves, to belong on the inside of the center of the history in this world flows from this. Our nation seems to have a purpose from God for changing this world for good, though we were once so small and weak, at the start.

Now we belong. We are insiders, and this should remind us that we were once outsiders. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. It means our heritage is a God who loves outsiders and loves to make them insiders.

The method for getting into our heritage as a nation in God’s hands is described when Moses and the Lord tell his people that part of their obedience is to love God by imitating him. “Walk in his ways.” “Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.” (Deuteronomy 10:16) Our heritage is not an itemized check-list of rules, but a matter of the heart.

Walking in the Lord’s ways is like being a little child following their father in the snow. The child sees their father’s footprints and jumps to make sure that their feet go into those big footprints.

The last thing the child wants is to miss a single step. You might call this a fear, but it’s the fear motivated by love. You bite your lip at every step you take, and every good step is joy.

At every step gone wrong, you don’t stop but you try for the next step. It’s more like a dance than a walk. It’s all a matter of the heart and, with God, your alien heart has become a child’s heart and new every morning.

Our heritage of being the outsider brought in is the heritage of an alien finding a new, safe, free, beloved home. This has the strange power of not making you selfish about coming home and wanting to keep home for just yourself. You love the hospitality of the Lord, and this is part of the path of his footprints that you are jumping into, step by step, in a dance that is bigger than you are.

You and I all live in the hospitality of God, and your own heart becomes a place of welcome. You become the welcomers of outsiders. We know that the church is not only for us but, most of all, for others. We know this.

Those who have a Latin/Spanish culture have a saying: “Mi casa es su casa.” (My home is your home.) When the outsiders come to your house, they are not guests, they are family. If they are family then they aren’t held to the standards of guests. They are better than guests.

When outsiders come to your church, they are not guests. They are family who are welcome to make themselves at home-church with you, and they graciously share their ways with you and it is part of the joy you feel because they have come inside from the outside, and you know what it is like to do the same. With God you are strangers who have found a home.

Peter says the same, only he says to show the same hospitality to outsiders when you are with the outsiders outside your own house, or outside this house. You know you are an alien, so that they don’t feel like aliens to you. You and they are the same and this is a great miracle. But this is not a miracle that you indulge in by living down to it. You stoop down to lift others up.

You don’t just go along with everything. Peter says: “Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.” In other words, don’t use your friendliness as an excuse for going against the Lord’s values: remember that you are still an alien yourself for God’s sake. “Live as servants of God.” (1 Peter 2:16)

When the church has the heritage of hospitality built on the sympathy of your own alien experience, then the church will go outside itself. We will volunteer to be aliens in a world of people who feel perfectly at home without us, and who don’t realize that they are aliens who do not know yet what’s so good about coming inside God’s love.

They might well see something wrong with you, and they will see you as the aliens with themselves as being the ones who belong as insiders. But something will click and they will see something good behind you and come in before they know it. “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)

Goodness, in the languages of the Bible, has nothing to do with a daunting list of rules. True goodness doesn’t earn a gold star on a chart.

True goodness is experienced as thriving. True goodness is like serving chocolate gelato (like ice cream but much richer) to someone who has never eaten it before. True goodness is having someone smile at you when they have put a bowl of chocolate gelato in your hands.

That’s what a servant of God wants to do. That’s the heritage of a church that is being a servant. How can we find a way to give chocolate gelato to our neighbors and to the communities around us, so that they glorify God with us on the day of his coming? How can we give them something richer than they have ever tasted before?

You know that if you pass your neighbors some chocolate gelato over the fence, they will likely come to your door. If the Church could pass out that chocolate gelato, we’d have people coming in. But it’s got to be something surprisingly stunning.

Our nation is like a big bowl of chocolate gelato in a painful and desperate world. We should be so glad about this, as a nation, that we would also enjoy those who come knocking on our nation’s door. It’s the real meaning of disciples, the church, and the blessed nation being a city on the hill.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14) Some people think that the city on the hill is simply visible to all: that it is simply an example to others, and not their actual destination for arrival.

Jesus was really saying: “You are the new Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was the city on the hill. You could see it in the distance, for miles and miles. But Jerusalem was much, much more than visible. Jerusalem was a destination. It was the place where people would love to come and stay for the purpose of worship and offering their sacrifices and themselves to the Lord. In message of the Old Testament prophets, the nations of the world were all going to come to Jerusalem. All the old enemies and destroyers would come there to worship. “In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.” (Isaiah 2:2)

When a nation truly has a heritage from the Lord, it will be like a temple where all the nations will want to come. It’s a great blessing. In the story of the whole Bible, from beginning to end, a nation belonging to God will draw all the nations in. That’s the heritage that those who hunger for a Christian America will discover. We will just be too good.

Under God, we are blessed to be a blessing. The Lord said it to Abraham, and it applies to the Church, and to any people of God. “You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

Now, I’m going to quote a politician of yesterday.

In his “Farewell Address” Ronald Reagan took up the theme of the city on the hill, and he got it right. He was a good, smart, decent guy. Here it is.

“I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.

That's how I saw it; and see it still. How stands the City?

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.

And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the Pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

Our heritage is not always something you are born with. A heritage may be a gift given in hospitality by those who were there first. But our heritage, as the people of God in the Church, is the heritage of being aliens who have come home. We give to other aliens, as they come to us, the same heritage that the Lord has given us in Jesus. We make people who were not a people into our own people, in the church. This is sacred. This is the gospel; that we are saved by gift, saved by grace, and saved as we come home by faith. In the Church of Jesus, the Bride of Jesus, we welcome the aliens home.

Any nation that would be a Christian nation will have the same heritage as those who belong to Jesus. That nation will do for others what Christ has done for us. Every church that that loves the gospel, the good news of Jesus, will be eager to welcome outsiders. Every nation that loves the good news of what God has given their country will be eager to welcome outsiders. The church that enjoys the blessings of God will bring people in. The nation that enjoys the blessing of God will bring people in.

The church has to be like Jesus: welcoming wandering outsiders home. We have no choice besides this one, or (if we do have a choice) we have a choice of heaven or hell. The Church, or what seems to be the Church, will live or die by this choice. “For you were like sheep, going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25) How we give grace to those on the outside will be the sign of our belonging (or not belonging) to the Shepherd who welcomed us aliens from outside.

In the day when God visits us, all nations will live or not, according to the heritage they asked for and chose for themselves.

The Bible tells us about the heritage that belongs to those who were outside and welcomed in. That’s the only heritage that God can give us. Let that be our heritage, as a Church and as a Nation. Let’s live by that.

Paul's Prayers - Empowering Our Teamwork - Super Bowl Sunday

Preached on Super Bowl Sunday, February 4, 2017

Scripture readings: Proverbs 3:5-8; Romans 15:14-33

Walking along the Columbia River at Desert Aire/Mattawa WA

Once upon a time there was there was a town with a church football league. One of the teams was in their Sunday school classroom that they used for their locker room, while the coach gave them a pre-game pep talk. He wrote the words “Being on Jesus’ team”, and he said, “Always remember, men, there is no “I” in Jesus, but there is an “us”.

By the time I was in high school, in P. E. class, I had earned quite a reputation in sports. The team captains always fought over me, to keep me off their team. I think my un-coordination skills were without equal in the whole school.

I was a geek. I was a nerd. I seemed to be the only real history geek in my class, so, in order to spend time with other kids like me, I became a science geek. It really wasn’t that hard. I liked science too. So, I spent my free time at school in the science room.

But even when you get to talk and play together with chemicals and with the strobe light in the back room you don’t learn a lot of social skills in the science room. Neither was there any science club where we might work together as a team to win competitions with other schools.

Along the way,
 I got adopted as a mascot for one of my favorite teams:
The Dogs

So, I was known as the quietest kid in my class of sixty kids: the shyest kid of them all. Even if we had a science team, I would have been too shy to join it.

I had one cool friend, named Chris, who asked me one day, “You’re a lone wolf, aren’t you?” Even though I was seventeen I really wasn’t familiar with that phrase. I asked Chris what it meant. He told me. And, so, I knew myself in a new way: yes, I was a lone-wolf. I still am.

I had made a commitment of my life to Christ when I was about nine years old; while watching Billy Graham on television. I loved Jesus, but there were problems with the church. We stopped going, and though I read the Bible and prayed lot, there was something missing that I have told some of you about before.

I went back to my old church when I was eighteen and I went with the youth group to a youth rally at one of the county fairgrounds. Toward the end of the speaker’s message I knew that the Lord expected me to go forward to make a new commitment up front. But I was too embarrassed to do it.

I prayed with agony and struggle to get out of this, “Lord you know I love you more than anything!”

The Lord was very firm with me. I felt that he was talking to me from the cross, as he said in my heart, “Are you willing to be someone who can say ‘no’ to me?” This almost knocked the breath out of me. I couldn’t face being a person who ever said ‘no’ to Jesus on the cross. I had to go forward.

The counselor up front coached me to pray things that I knew very well how to pray. I had known for years what God wanted me to be and how it is that we come to him and let him come into us. I still commit my life to Jesus every day.

That coaching in a prayer to commit to, and to receive, Jesus as my Lord and Savior was not God’s point that night. The point was that I had to surrender what ruled my life. I had to surrender my fear and my shyness. I had to surrender my way of life as a lone-wolf. I’m still a lone-wolf, but I’m a “surrendered-to-God” lone-wolf.

Just as alcoholics can find the freedom of sobriety by surrendering in every way to their higher power, still that sobriety depends on their ability to say, “I’m an alcoholic”. This is a kind of surrender of one of the deep and powerful things in their lives.

There is a surrender that destroys you, and there is a surrender that gives you life. This surrender gives freedom, and strength. This life comes from that Higher Power which is God. But it also comes from joining a team where you take care of each other.

A couple of my nerdy-geeky friends were also surrendering to Jesus in their own ways. By going forward in front of other people, including the members of my youth group, surrendering my shyness, my fear, my awkwardness to Jesus, I became an honest and a self-surrendered lone-wolf before God.

I joined a team of honest and surrendered followers of Jesus. You could call it “The Jesus Team”. It’s been playing and praying together for over two thousand years. This Jesus Team is a group of people who aren’t afraid to be honest, and humble, and surrendered with each other. Everyone on the Jesus Team comes from the same place and we all know how to say, “Hi! I’m Dennis, and I’m a sinner. Hi! I’m Dennis and I’m rescued and made new by God’s love and grace alone given to me in Jesus. I’m rescued and made new by his life in me.”

To be able (all of us) to say such things together is a sure give-away that however different our lives may be, we have prayed, pretty much, the very same prayers, and made the very same deep offerings of our heart, and soul, and life to God.

At one time that offering of ourselves cut so deep that it seemed like a human sacrifice of ourselves: almost like an amputation. But now we see that this offering is the greatest thing we have ever done; and, far from losing ourselves, we have gained a new self we would never part with, because we see that our life has become a gift from God. God has given us our new selves as his gift, through the cross and the resurrection; through dying and rising again.

It isn’t only Jesus who dies and rises. Now we can do it with him, in our heart and mind. Now we are free and whole, because we can die to ourselves, and rise in the love of Jesus every day.

For me, this particular lone-wolf became part of a team; the Jesus Team. That team meets and struggles together in a lot of places, and the Jesus Team meets here, right now. Prayer is a necessary part of this.

We are a team partly because we have all needed to say much the same kind of prayers for much the same reasons. We are also a team because we all take care of each other through our prayers for each other. We pray for our performance in the most important game in the world.

Paul shows us this kind of team prayer in his request to his team members in Rome. He asks them to pray for him, but not just for anything. Paul asks them to pray for his ministry: to pray for Paul as he carries out his mission, his program for the game, for the team.

Paul has a difficult and dangerous play ahead of him. Paul is running to a part of the line where he will draw their fiercest opponents to himself.

There was talk of a famine in the land of Judea. The Christians there would see the worst of this because those with the biggest resources to give to those in need would refuse to give that relief to Christians. The biggest resources to buy food and other aide for the famine victims were kept in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Christians were considered heretics and traitors, and they would receive no help in Judea.

Paul was going where he was very well known as one of the team captains of the heretics and traitors. Both he and the money, or the bank receipts he brought with him (in the form of a scroll, or a tablet of wax or clay) were huge prizes in this game.

Paul was running willingly into danger, and he needed all the will-power he could muster. Paul had been imprisoned, and shackled, and beaten, and tortured, and nearly killed more than once before. If you ever had a surgery that really didn’t make you better, and your doctor was recommending another try at that same surgery that hurt you so much and never helped you, then you would look forward to that surgery just like Paul was looking forward to running to the relief of the Christians in Jerusalem.

So, Paul asks for prayer. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me. Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there, so that, by God’s will I may come to you….” (Romans 15:30-32)

“Join me in my struggle by praying to God for me.” The way that this is translated, here, teaches us that our team, with our teamwork together, gets strong when we pray for other team members for their work on the Jesus Team. Prayer makes us sweat together for our teamwork.

On this team we take care of each other by praying to God for the work, and for the effort that the others are doing for the team, and for Jesus, the captain of the work.

Imagine that you’ve been assigned to be a member of a team of two. Your other team member needs you to take care of them because of some weakness in their health. Your part, on that team, is to play the care-giver position.

It’s a common experience that the care-giver grows closer and closer to the one needing care simply because of their devotion to care-giving. Prayer-giving is care-giving that strengthens whatever weaknesses our other team members struggle with.

But the translation could be better. Paul is saying something like: “Agonize with me in your prayers for me.” I remember, when I was in high school, going by the football field in August, when the temperature was often close to one hundred degrees, or more, and I could see the football team working out. I knew something about the agony they were going through because P. E., in September, would find me playing football in gym class, and sometimes September was hotter than August in my home town.

That team was sweating together. They joined with each other in the same agony, and that made them a team: sweating together. They were becoming more and more the team they needed to be in order to play their game and win. Their sweat and their sore muscles were building team work.

As the Jesus team, we have important work to do. Taking care of each other in our sacrifices together, and in our sacrifices for each other, through agonizing prayer, helps us to grow strong together. This prayerful agonizing together makes us the team we need to be in order to play with Jesus and win.

There’s a team word hidden from us by our English language. It’s the word about the contribution to God’s people in Judea. The contribution to the poor Christians on the Jesus Team in Judea wasn’t merely financial.

In Greek, the contribution is called a “koinonia”. “Koinonia” means communion. It means fellowship. But those are old English words that sound strange to modern ears, and to those who don’t know the slang and lingo of Christians. Koinonia, communion, and fellowship can mean “partnership”.

The contribution was the teamwork of the Jesus Team. To work as a team, they needed to agonize with Paul. To work as a team with the poor in Judea, they had to agonize with them as well. Doesn’t that sound terrible?

I was never on a team willingly until I joined the Jesus-team and, even then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with it. The Lord told me, when I was twelve years old, that I had to be something like a pastor on this team, and with all my heart I wanted nothing to do with it.

That’s what was really wrong with me, until God asked me for something that I couldn’t refuse. I had to be a person who would no longer say ‘no’ to God. It went against my very nature, and against everything I had learned by experience.

I had to take the position in the line that I feared most. I had to take the position of agony. I had to play a position in which I would agonize for the team in order to become a member of the team.

At the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, every September, there would be a football game between the married students and the single students. That was unfair in itself because, obviously, the married students had to be more studly than the rest of us. And there were more married students than unmarried ones, so they had a lot more team members to choose from.

Fred Halde, one of my best seminary friends at the time, was our captain. Fred put me in the line opposite Dave Ulum, who had played college football before coming to seminary. It was one of those tiny, Christian, Liberal Arts Colleges that you find all over the Midwest, but Dave was still a big kid. The lines would hit each other, and I would hit Dave as hard as I could, and hitting Dave would always send me flying through the air backward flat on my back. Over and over again, I would hit Dave Ulum so hard that I would just fly; fly through the air backwards.

This bothered me a lot. I asked captain Fred to please let me take some other spot on the line, but Fred said that I was the only one on the team that could free up the better players to play at their best for the team. So, I went back to face Dave.

Dave looked at me and his voice almost cracked as he pleaded with me, “Please, Dennis, please, go somewhere else!” Dave was a softy despite having been in college football.

My answer was, “Sorry Dave, I have to stay here.” And, so, we played on, until the Singles lost to the Marrieds.

Dave was a friend too. I know that he was praying about this. That would be just like him. And I was praying too: a very agonized prayer. And this is what builds us together as a team for the work ahead.

You have work to do on the Jesus-team. This work is much more than church-work. You have Jesus-work to do.

Church-work is important, but it’s designed for the support of the Jesus-work. Our church-work can be a place where we can sweat together because it’s one part of our training places. It’s like the weight room is there.

We’re glad if we can do our church-work together, but the church-work is for the sake of the Jesus-work. Sometimes church-work makes it possible to give the hospitality that we want to offer the community around us, in Jesus’ name. And church-work is like the locker room where you do the team-work of psyching up together for the game, or the cooling off for half-time and for later.

My position in the line-up requires me to take care of you in such a way as to strengthen you, and train you, and teach you whatever you may need in order to do your Jesus-work, not by yourself but bringing in the whole team, praying for each other because we know and share your Jesus-work just as well as you know and share our own.

If we do this we can cut against the grain of so much that the conventional wisdom tells us. The conventional wisdom of our time tells us: “Go your own way. Take care of yourself. Be a lone-wolf. If you happen to be a Christian, then be a Christian lone-wolf, but not a surrendered one. Be a hold-out lone-wolf, not fully stuck to God, not fully stuck to others.

Let’s learn to tell each other what the Jesus-work is that Jesus is calling us to do on the team. Then we can know how to pray for each other. Then we can know how to build our line of the team in Desert Aire and Mattawa. When we know everyone’s position, then we can plan our next play: and the next, and the next. And we can hit our work and fly through the air with it: only forward and not backward.