Set the Gospel Free - Holy Team-Work

Preached on Sunday, February 21, 2016 

Scripture readings: Ephesians 4:1-16; Matthew 9:35-38

The one year that I worked in the wheat harvest, there were only four of us harvesting well over a thousand acres. The two brothers who owned the farm drove the two combines and one other guy and I drove the wheat trucks.

Harvest 2009, near Washtucna, WA
This is not a harvest that I worked on.

A modern wheat combine essentially does all the important jobs in the ancient process we call harvest, and it eliminates the other jobs. With a modern combine you don’t need all those ancient jobs and their workers: cutting the standing wheat, gathering it into sheaves and tying the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves to the threshing floor, threshing or trampling the wheat with oxen or donkeys to break the grain loose from the stems and husks, winnowing the wheat by tossing it into the air so that the wind can blow the chaff (the stems and the husks) away, and gathering the wheat into the bins, or elevators, or granaries, for storage for food and for next year’s seed.

In my harvest work, I drove the wheat truck up to the combine when it was full, and the combine emptied itself into my truck. Then I took the wheat to the wheat bins, or to the elevator. The combines did all the rest.

It’s all very modern, and the equipment (especially the combine) is expensive and complicated, but it makes a big harvest simple. It takes long hours; but not many workers and not a lot of work unless things break down (which, of course they do).

When I worked in the almond harvest, modern machinery made it possible for a crew of four people to do what would have taken a crew of fifty to do in the old days. I heard this from the foreman who had worked in those crews of fifty in the old days.

In the old days everyone worked hard but they worked as a crew, they worked as a team. There were other workers, as well: the farmer’s wife and daughters, and the other women, who did the indispensable work of feeding that crew.

Everyone was important and, truth be told, everyone probably did everything as needed. There were lots more than four jobs and no one complained, “That’s not my job.” If you said that you would probably be out of a job.

No matter how modern the church might seem to need to be, in order to make its way in this world, we can never work in God’s harvest without staying true to the ancient values of the Lord of the harvest.

For one thing, our message is ancient. There is a God and everything and everyone belongs to this God. But that isn’t enough. The ancient truth that the world needs to know tells us that that it is all loved: everyone in it and every part of it. And that is not enough. The ancient truth is that loving sacrifice saves; perfect love saves perfectly; absolute love saves absolutely; and infinite love saves infinitely. This is the message of the cross and the resurrection. The modern world needs the ancient truth and wisdom.

There is another ancient truth the modern world has forgotten. The world is saved from destruction every year because farmers somewhere harvest food in order to feed the world.

The work of the harvest is done by a crew. In the developed world many kinds of farming don’t need big crews but, even in those most developed areas of farming, there are so few actual farmers that the farmers form a crew among themselves. They often help each other out, in a pinch.

One of the ancient principles for saving the world is a crew, a family, a community that works as one and brings the harvest home. Paul called the work of the harvest the Body of Christ.

Paul said that the parts of this body were designed to build those on the outside into the inside. That’s part of the growth. Then the parts of the body were designed to build each other up, in love, so that every part of the body could grow up into Christ who is the head. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

Paul gives us a list of harvest jobs. The list in Ephesians is a very short one. You might think, from this list, that there aren’t very many important jobs to do, but there are others lists: in Romans and in First Corinthians, to name just a couple, that are longer.

If you read each one of those lists, you will see that each list is thought out in a completely different way. In Corinthians, some of the jobs seem to be called gifts. In Romans, the jobs aren’t titles. They’re actions that serve others.

The lesson I take from these lists is that there is no single list. The lesson I learn is that there is no job where you can say, “That’s not my job.” Whatever comes up might have to be your job. But, then, notice that Paul is fully capable of calling a job a gift. When you think of it, it’s pretty wise to call any job a gift. It’s pretty wise to call the chance to do a job and the ability to do it a gift.

In the lines we read from Ephesians, Paul said that Jesus spanned heaven and earth and even the depths of that mystery called death, in order to make us into his captives and that he made us his captives in order to give us gifts. He didn’t make us captives to hold us down. He made us captives to give us our true value. (Ephesians 4:7-10)

We have been held captive by so many hard masters that hold us down: fear, anger, worry, failure, addiction, depression, jealousy, and even ambition. Jesus has made us captives in order to save us from being held captive. He has captured us for the purpose of giving us gifts. He makes us into his body. Jesus makes us a promise that the work of being a team in love and drawing others into the team of love will make us grow into him. We will have (each one of us) the gift of being perfectly ourselves and the gift of growing perfectly into Jesus. (Ephesians 4:15)

Paul gave us such a short list of jobs in Ephesians; or shall we call them gifts? There are five gifts in the list: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

The truth is that none of these jobs keeps you from having other jobs. God knows what life is like. None of you have only one job in life: man, son, brother, friend, husband, father, and worker; woman, daughter, sister, friend, wife, mother, and worker. What about the jobs of repair, and cleaning, and organizing, and gardening, and making a home or building that home?

What about musician, singer, poet, artist, aviator, inventor, designer, listener, and spectator? You know that some people are just crying out for an audience. I think that, in some marriages, one spouse is the entertainer and the other is the audience. These are all very important jobs; or are they gifts?

Paul’s list of jobs, or gifts, sounds official and formal but it isn’t. The gifts are just what you are given to do.

Apostle means someone sent on a mission. God has sent me to you; God help you! The truth is that you are all sent. You are all apostles.

A prophet speaks for God. You have all had to speak for God, or you will. Sometimes there will be no one else on the scene to do it. You are the answer to the promise of the Bible. Long ago, Moses prayed, “I wish all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.” (Numbers 11:29) Jesus died and rose from the dead to give us a life empowered by the Holy Spirit. You are the prophets Moses prayed for.

Evangelist means the bringer of God’s good news. Surely (sometime or other) each one of you have had the gift of bringing good news from God. Maybe you didn’t share the four spiritual laws, but you brought God’s goodness and help to someone who needed it.

Long ago, in the 1850’s, in the festering battlefields of the Crimean War between Britain and Russia, Florence Nightingale, the inventor of scientific nursing, was caring for a wounded soldier. He was so moved by her care that he said, “You are Christ to me.” She was Jesus, as we are all called to be. She was the gospel.

This is a mystery. You are the living evidence that Jesus can save lives, and souls, and hearts, and minds. You are the evidence that Jesus makes a new life possible; that change, and love, and hope are possible. You are the best evangelists.

Pastor means shepherd. A shepherd is a guide, a nurturer, a feeder, a protector. Spouses have to be pastors to each other. Parents have to be pastors to their children. Friends have to be pastors. Living in the middle of this world and the people around you requires you to be a pastor, a shepherd. It’s not easy. It’s not always appreciated.

Teacher means educator and I’m not sure what that means. Maybe it means to bring up or to train someone.

I was about seven when my dad taught me how to use a hammer. He had a two by four and a bunch of nails. He didn’t just tell me the facts. He hammered a nail to show me how. Then he watched me hammer a nail and gave me plenty of advice about what I should be doing. Then he left me with the board and nails. He left me on my own to do the rest of the nails. I often think he left too soon.

A friend of mine who was also an elder in a congregation that I served sized up what I did as a preacher who taught. He said, “You don’t teach us what to think; you teach us how to think.” I hope he was right.

When I started going back to church as an eighteen-year-old, the youth group teacher taught that way. He used questions to teach us how to think and how to do the work of understanding what the Bible really says, not what it’s supposed to say.

What many people don’t notice about Paul’s short list of gifts in Ephesians is that the five gifts share one common purpose. The purpose is “to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.” (Ephesians 4:12) The gifts of Christ to the list of five are the gifts of service. Sent people, people who speak for God, people who bring the good news of Jesus, people who guide, and people who teach are all people who serve.

God’s purpose is everyone to serve each other with the gifts of the five. The people of the five gifts serve so that everyone will learn how to serve: how to be sent, how to speak for God, and all the rest. Only when everyone serves will everyone grow.

When we can share that with other people, they will want it. Then they will understand the ancient wisdom in our modern times because we have understood it ourselves. We will never fully understand the cross and the resurrection of Jesus until we understand the body of Jesus (of which we are all a part). We will not fully understand the good news of the gospel until we understand what Jesus intends us to be as his body, or how he intends his body to work.

If Paul had been a modern farmer, he might have pulled out the image of the church as a giant combine filling heaven and earth with the great harvest.

I’m going to pull out another modern image with the harvest combine. Understand that I am reaching for it and jumping to conclusions, but not really. Jesus pointed at the people with compassion and he told his disciples that they couldn’t handle the harvest without prayer. I say this because he said, “Ask the Lord of the harvest.” (Matthew 9:38)

Ephesians contains wonderful prayers in which Paul asked God for his brothers and sisters to know God’s “incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead….” (Ephesians 1:19-20)

There has to be a harvest. And we can never be the body of Christ in the harvest unless we are powered by prayer and by the resurrection.

Paul’s prayer intended to connect his friends with the power of the resurrection. We must pray for that same power. The power is for us to be the harvest, and to be harvesters, and to pray for more harvesters.

As Jesus says, we have to pray for the work, and for the workers. We have to pray for the crew and not just for the members of the crew but for the work we have to do together.

Paul prayed for the work and the strength of his brothers and sisters. He prayed for their inspiration, and their guidance and direction. We have to pray not only for each other but for power, and guidance, and direction in the work we are called to do together.

Last of all, we need to understand the harvest. We are not harvesting wheat. Wheat is food. Wheat is money. Wheat is prosperity and self confidence for those who do the harvest. The harvest doesn't give the wheat prosperity and confidence. Wheat is for consumption.

People are the image of God and God is not a consumer. He does not consume those who come to him. God is love. The purpose of the harvest is to bring people into love. Jesus called us to the harvest because he had compassion on the world, and that compassion led Jesus to die for the world and to rescue it for love.

If we work the harvest because of what we will get out of it or what the church will get out of it, the people outside these walls will sense this. When they stray inside these walls they will know it for sure.

If they see that we are harvesting for our success they will refuse to be harvested. The truth is that we have to drop the idea of harvest at some point.

It will never do to think, or talk, or work on any kind of harvest. What Jesus thought about was love. We have to stop trying to harvest and we have to begin to love people enough.

We need to pray to love people enough, and we need to pray to know what form our love must take before other people trust and believe in our love. Then they will learn to trust and believe the God of love whom we all meet in Jesus.

The Highest Calling - Not a Job, But a New Creation

Preached on Sunday, November 2, 2014

Scripture reading: Ephesians 4:1-16

A six-year-old boy was whining because his three-year-old brother wanted him to play and wouldn’t leave him alone. Their mom was watching and listening, and she told the older boy to play with his brother. She said, “Always remember that God has put us here in this world for others.” The boy’s answer was, “Then what are the others here for?”

Everyone has a purpose. Everyone has a calling. Everyone has more than one calling.

At Desert Aire, WA: November 2014

These work on many levels. Sometimes we think these callings have to do with work or a job. We may be drawn to a certain kind of work so clearly that it is as if we were truly called. It is as if that work called us by name, or God called us to it because he knew it would be good for us and that we would be good to others through it. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word for calling.

God likes us to feel a calling to honest work. Paul wrote about this in a surprising way: “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.” (Ephesians 4:28)  It’s almost funny. Imagine a congregation wringing it hands over the fact that one of them was a professional thief. What shall we do? Then Paul writes to this Christian thief, telling him that he needs to stop stealing and get a job. What a way to correct a thief! And there is the “we are here for others” idea again.

There is much more to a calling than work. There is a wise saying that goes like this: “Don’t live to work; work to live.” Work is good. God loves work because he loves life. Jesus says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

God, himself, became a carpenter in Jesus. (Mark 6:3) Maybe God was a jack-of-all-trades carpenter in Jesus: houses, and plows, and tables, and chairs, and wagons. God is a jack-of-all-trades, because he makes everything.

The creation is God’s work. Our salvation is God’s work, on the cross, and in the resurrection. Our growth in the image of Jesus is God’s work by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our serving Jesus is God’s work. (Ephesians 2:10) All the infinite preparations that have been going on in every human being through the ages, and in every part of creation since the beginning, getting ready for the new creation of the new heavens and the new earth are God’s work.

The calling to work is more than being employed or running a business. There are callings to the arts. There are callings to serve: medicine, education, emergency response, law enforcement, the armed forces, public service. Making a home, nurturing a marriage and family, being a neighbor, and serving a community: these are all callings.

I hope no one feels left out. The longer I worked on this list, the longer the list grew. These are just a few of the callings that make God’s world go round. Paul calls callings gifts. God’s callings are gifts from God to the people and to the world that he loves and cares for.

There are callings in the church. Paul especially calls these gifts. He gives us the titles to five callings in Ephesians. He has longer lists in other places. There is no reason to suppose that he ever tried, or was able, to list them all.

I have to tell you something about Paul’s short list of five gifts. I have to say that it is a strange list, a strange combination because it leaves important gifts out. I also feel odd about the list because I am on that list at least a couple of times.

The two gifts on the list that apply to me are pastor and teacher. The people who will tell me to my face what they think of me have told me that I am a good teacher and a good pastor.

I take nothing for granted. Being a pastor can be very scary; but, sometimes, I like it. I like teaching, but even that can be scary.

The two callings (pastor and teacher) go so much together. Pastor means shepherd. The ultimate shepherd is God. We say: “The Lord is my shepherd.” A shepherd is a guide, and protector, and healer. Any teacher, wherever they teach, must feel some kind of great responsibility in this way, to be a shepherd.

And isn’t a family really just the same? I remember, when I was four, feeling a responsibility for my parents, as well as for my sisters (I being the oldest child).

In a small church, the elders, the worship leaders, the musicians, the people who lead classes and fellowship groups, the people who take care of the kitchen and the rest of the buildings and grounds, the people who are the contacts with the congregations and the groups that use our buildings, our treasurer, and the recorder and keeper of our official records (whom we call the clerk) are all pastors.

This means that they are all shepherds. They are all guides, and protectors, and healers. Even the so-called non-leaders of any group (whether in a family or a small church) are the same. They are all pastors, shepherds. They are all guides, protectors, and healers. Whenever we think seriously about our common calling it is only right to feel amazed, and honored, and excited, and scared: and maybe even burdened.

Think of the responsibility. Also think of the question: exactly how many jobs do you want?

This may be one reason why the church is scary. The church sounds like a job and it is so easy to be offered a job that you know you won’t enjoy.

Even in the world of work and employment it is so easy to make a job into nothing more than a job, and to take the blessing out of work. There are people who do this to themselves. There are people who do this to others. It’s a terrible thing when a job becomes a job; when the calling goes out of it.

A real calling comes from a voice. Something, or someone, is speaking to you. A calling is not an order but an invitation. It is meant to be encouragement. I was first called to the ministry when I was a shy and bullied kid of twelve, and the church was pretty strange to me.

It scared me and I didn’t want to do it, and I avoided it as long as I could do it without breaking my own heart. I have told you the childhood part of that story and, in the telling of it, it was all I could do to keep from crying: not because it made me sad, but because I still remember that it was a voice of love that scared me. It was the work of God’s love that called me and scared me. I knew the words of “Jesus loves me, this I know,” and the call came from him.

Sometimes, in our serving (even in the church), we have forgotten that voice. Or, maybe, that voice didn’t call us to that thing at all. It’s possible that even the church has work that it thinks must be a calling because it used to be a calling and now it is simply a space to be filled. It’s a job that has been made into nothing more that a mere job.

There is no grace in it. Or the grace has gone out of it.

Big churches may work in terms of programs and jobs. But a small church has to know how to how to hear a calling. It needs to know how to take off the mask of our costume. We think that being a church requires us to dress up in a costume that makes us look like an organization, or even a club.

Churches often go year after year dressed up as something they are not. It’s as if every day was Halloween, and we wear a costume that makes us scary in a way that is not holy.

In the church we need to look deeper than the surface to see what God is truly calling us to: what God wants us to do and to be. We need to hear the voice of God calling to us: “Stop doing that. Stop doing that. Now try this instead. Try this.”

There is a calling. There is a voice talking to you about what to do and what to be. It is the voice of God speaking in his Word; in his Son Jesus. The calling comes from God’s own love calling. The calling is God’s own purpose for you, and for his people, and for his mission.

Paul wrote about this calling as a mystery, in his complicated way of putting everything. Paul wrote: “And he made known to us the mystery of his will….to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.” (Ephesians 1:9-10)

When the first human beings sinned in the Garden of Eden if came from their desire to be in charge of themselves. The Bible describes it as the sin of trying to be “like God”. We have inherited this sin.

The very nature of humanity seems to carry a hereditary spiritual genetics. Our spiritual genetics makes us people who are all trying to be in charge, and we are not very pretty about it, even at our best.

Each one of us (no matter how sane we may be) has more than one set of voices speaking inside of us: conflicting motives. It is often very hard (even at our best) to be what those whom we love need us to be. It is much harder to be what those whom we do not love need us to be.

There is selfishness. There is pride. There is control. We see it in families, communities, nations, and in the whole world. We see the good and the bad of it working in every crisis. Sin has created a division of fear, anger, and conflict.

We all carry what Thomas Merton called “the seeds of destruction”. When God came to us in Jesus we see what the seeds of destruction can do. They can reject the love and forgiveness that God has for all people, and especially for those who are different, and for those whom we don’t accept as our neighbors.

The seeds of destruction came out of cover in order to hang Jesus on the cross. But Jesus took what sin did and used it against the sin of the whole world. Jesus defeated the seeds of destruction on the cross. He defeated the destructiveness carried in our human nature through his defeat of death itself in the resurrection.

By the humility and self abandonment that comes from faith in Christ the destructive seed is killed. The presence of Jesus in our lives, dealing with our sins and failures, is like having a contract with someone to spray the weeds in our yard with Roundup every week. His cross is the wholesome love and mercy that gives us life; and his cross is the poison that withers sin.

The calling of God is empowered by the cross, and the resurrection; and the Holy Spirit brings this power to us. The Spirit removes the conflict. The Spirit ties together, in peace and mercy, those who hear his call. This is the peace of a new creation. This is what will sprout under God’s care. It will flower in a new heaven and earth. But it begins with Jesus and us now.

Right now we are babies, but the power of God’s calling will create a tiny new creation in his people. If we nurture that new creation of God, we will grow up to live in that new world: but it begins in us now, together, through Christ.

It works if we nurture our calling in the way Paul tells us. “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:2-3)

The other three gifts on Paul’s list of five are: apostles, prophets, and evangelists. I am not going to be a thorough scholar here, but a brief one. The word “apostle” (at its most basic) means someone who is sent: in this case sent by the Lord. A prophet is someone who speaks for the Lord. The word “evangelist” means a messenger bringing good news.

Some people will make it more complicated, but you all can carry all three combined into one. You can all be the people who are sent to speak and live God’s good news in the world that he loves. You are all sent to speak and live the good news for God.

This world does not see Christians or the church as the bringers of good news. But we are called to surprise them. Paul surprised people all the time, and his friends had him as their model. Paul did what had never been done before in a way that no one would ever have thought of.

The Lord showed him how. Paul was a prisoner of the Romans, but he never called himself that. He made it something new and surprising. He called himself a prisoner for the Lord, and he was.

Paul couldn’t do what he wanted to do, but he found a way to do what God wanted. He found that, as huge as his limitations were, he had perfect freedom to answer the call of Jesus to speak, and to do, and to be just as he was called. It was Paul’s experience that God empowered his people to be able to do this. “Make every effort,” Paul said.

There is a calling. There is a voice talking to you about what to do and what to be. It has nothing to do with you alone. You are not called alone, and the calling can only be answered when people serve each other, and the world, together.

It was never supposed to be the list of five special callings that got the work done. They are only examples of what every part is called to do and to be; each in their own way. The Holy Spirit is able to do this.

There’s a story about a man telling some friends about a group he had come across. It was actually a Bible study and it was surprisingly good. He said, “There was no leader. None of us knew anything, and we all taught each other.” It’s funny, but it can happen.

“From him (from Jesus) the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:16)

God’s word is not something that God inspires in order to tell us what other people ought to do for us. God’s word speaks to us. It tells us what to do.

A lot of churches want other people to come and to do things that will build them up. Other people will see through this, no matter how that church tries to disguise it. It will never work.

They are not called to build us up. If anything, we are called to build them up. We are called to be the seed of the new creation in miniature. We are called to be Jesus to the world, and to save others under the real saving work of Jesus. Others are not called to come and save us.

Joining and membership make people think of clubs and organizations, but the church is the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit. We get confused because a body has members and we have transferred that idea to organizations. An eye, a foot, or a hand, are members of a body, but they do not hold office or fill a vacancy. So it is with our calling in Christ.

Let’s learn to look past our jobs and hear God’s calling to us. Let us live as his people because the voice of crucified and resurrected love has claimed us. He is speaking to us every day.

Let us be shepherds: guiding, protecting, and healing others. Then we will find ourselves becoming what the world is looking for: a people of purpose who are sent with God’s good news.

Farewell Message to Washtucna and Kahlotus - Our Common Calling

Preached on Sunday, December 29, 2013

Scripture readings: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Matthew 16:13-23

I started going back to church in the middle of my eighteenth year because, one by one, God had taken away all my justifications for being an individual and private Christian who was free to design my own creative spirituality. One by one, God had taken away my excuses to stay away from the frustrations of the church. One by one, God had persuaded me that none of my justifications and none of my excuses really counted, compared with his greatness.

Before the end of that year I made a recommitment of my life to Christ at a youth rally that our youth group went to. In the spring of my nineteenth year our pastor had taken a call to another church, and I was feeling the squeeze of God toward the ministry, that I had first felt when I was twelve. I had thought that I had safely escaped from that calling.

While we were looking for a pastor, we got an interim pastor (a temporary pastor) to help us hold steady during our search for a new minister. And I should say that that search was never going to produce any results.

Chet Marquis was our interim pastor, and I remember the title and main illustration of one of his sermons: “Marching off the Map”. The title actually came from a book by a Methodist preacher named Halford Luccock.

The title and story come from the time of the Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great. He accomplished one of the unthinkable feats of the ancient world when he pulled together all the quarreling little countries of the Greeks by conquest and intimidation.

Then he did the next unthinkable thing. He conquered the unconquerable enemy of the Greeks; the vast Persian Empire. The Persians ruled from the west coast of what is now Turkey, nearly to India.

He marched his army farther and farther to the east. Neither Alexander, nor any of his men, knew anything about this part of the world.

Finally, in the mountains of Afghanistan, his generals banded together. They were afraid of where they were going, and they were afraid to admit it. They came to Alexander and said, “We don’t know what to do next. We have marched off the map.”

Our lesson is that this is what Christians are called to do. This is what faith is about.

This is what our readings from Jeremiah and Matthew tell us. Jeremiah was a child, or a teenager, who was confronted by God to take on a task for which he had no preparation, and no understanding, and no enthusiasm. In Matthew, Jesus was requiring his disciples, his church to stop being trapped, and tricked, and defeated by the conventional wisdom of their time and our time. Jesus gives the same requirement to us.

There is a time and place to be practical, and to live with common sense and prudence. The disciples often showed sense and prudence in their work, in their ministry, in addressing the demands of the world around them. They thought about organization. They invented a new kind of leader-servant called a deacon, to help the poor and the sick. They raised money for famine victims. They didn’t entrust that money to just one person, but to a team of people who were accountable to others.

But it must be seen that, just as often as they obeyed the rules of accountability and prudence, they also defied prudence, and the conventional wisdom. They had to, by the example, and at the command, of Jesus.

The conventional wisdom told them that they (as a group) were not up to their task. They were a small, unpopular, mostly poor mission that was trying to say something that had never been said before, except by Jesus: and he had been killed for it. They were trying to do something that had never been done before. They were trying to be Jesus in this world. It was so strange a mission that the conventionally wise either laughed at them or hated them for it. Prudence and the conventional wisdom told them to stop and lie low.

In Matthew, Jesus tried to open Peter’s eyes to his greatest need and to his greatest problem. In a great surprise, Peter was able to express his faith in a way that nobody had done before, and he was able to do this because he listened to God. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17)

In the presence of Jesus and the Father, Peter was able to say, “You are the Christ (the Messiah) the Son of the Living God.” Peter was able to say this because, for a moment, he heard God; and he even listened.

Then, just a moment later, Peter was thinking like himself again. I mean that Peter was thinking like most other people again. Jesus had to say, “Get behind me Satan…. You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

This was not only Peter’s problem. It’s my problem. It’s your problem. It’s every Christian’s problem. It’s the church’s problem. First we think God’s way. Then we think our own way.

In my nineteenth year, I was reluctantly preparing to think God’s way, and march off the map. Our church was also thinking about marching off the map.

The experts and authorities (meaning the relevant presbytery committee) mostly told me that I was making a big mistake, and that I should stop. I didn’t have the people skills, or the temperament, for the ministry; and I wasn’t broad minded enough.

The experts and authorities also came to our church. They came to us in all their depth of practical experience, and conventional wisdom, and prudence. They told our church in the gentlest, and the most polite, and the most non-coercive way possible that it would be unlikely for us to be able to find a pastor who would be willing to serve us, and it would be so much wiser and simpler to stop.  The church listened to them.

They stopped. I didn’t.

Our church stopped at the edge of the map, and it stopped existing as a church. I marched off the map. I did what almost no one thought I could do. It wasn’t easy. It still isn’t.

I’m not saying that I marched well, or that I am doing so now. I see myself with the same eyes I saw myself so many years ago.

I never dared to ask for proof that I was capable of doing what God called me to do. I never dared to ask to have anything to show for it. I only asked God to keep his promises, in his own way and time.

In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians he wrote of his own calling and his sense of weakness. When Paul confronted the Lord with his weakness, the Lord said this to Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:8)

When I was nineteen, I told God that he would have to keep this promise to me. My current prayer is to have the same heart as I had then.

I invite you to that same heart and promise.

In the presence of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit gave Peter the essential faith that he needed. It was a faith that does not come from prudence, or sense, or the conventional wisdom.

But just saying this is not enough. It is in the presence of the living God, in the presence of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit that you can keep your balance and tell the difference between prudence and faith, and the difference between faith and craziness. The gates of hell are built just as much of prudence as they are of craziness, and both will lead you astray.

Both prudence and craziness can defeat faith. Prudence can turn faith into fearful and cautious self-destruction. Craziness can turn it into insensitive, loveless self-destruction.

You must make sure to lovingly stay “in the presence” of the living God and let your serving be shaped by the love of him, above everything else. You must do all your living, and you must do all your serving, as individual Christians, and in fellowship as a church, from the center of the presence of the living God.

You must pray, and pray together, and worship, and study, and listen. Listen! Don’t be afraid, and don’t devour yourself. Love God and love each other relentlessly and with infinite patience.

Even the church of the twelve disciples who were called by Jesus hardly knew who he was until after the resurrection, and even then the knowledge didn’t come easily. And it still doesn’t. Jesus is a different kind of King and his kingdom works by a different wisdom than they were prepared for. It is the same for us.

His kingdom will have no borders. It will not grow (alone) by people coming in, but by it going out.

It will not be comfortable. Nothing in the Bible gives us that hope. The Bible tells us that we will all receive comfort, but never that we will be comfortable. His kingdom is about loving God and loving a hostile world, and caring enough about both God and the world to be crucified.

The world is changing, but the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Jesus, does not change. At the same time we are wrong, most of the time, about how to participate in the kingdom. We are wrong, most of the time, about how the church works as part of the kingdom.

The kingdom of God is like a precious gift shipped in a box. The church is the box, and it is also the plastic peanuts that take up far more room than the gift. The shape of the church as we have come to love and value it most (with its familiar customs, and values, and expectations) is mostly cardboard and peanuts.

We have been wrong to think that the church and the kingdom were about people coming here, to us, and taking our places when we got old. The ancient maps had dragons painted along the edges to keep people from daring to march off the edge. We have willingly inherited those dragons, or painted dragons of our own along the edges of our map.  We have more edges on our map to march off of (in Washtucna, and Kahlotus, and Hopper, and Benge, and the whole neighborhood) than we can possibly imagine.

Most of the time, the edges of the map are these walls. It you want to be the Church of Jesus Christ in these very unfriendly and uncooperative times, you probably have to do most of your marching beyond these walls. You will have to do your marching in homes, and yards, and other places I can’t even think of.

Even the part of the world closest to you will not hear you say who Jesus is when you say it in here. You will have to say it out there.

Remember that the gates (the defenses and the weapons of hell) cannot prevail against this faith in Jesus the crucified son of the living God: especially not when that faith goes forth over the edges of the map. You have the keys. The keys are: this faith, this willingness to go out following the crucified Jesus, this willingness to live listening to the ways of God and not to the ways of this world. Do not listen to the ways of the past you that you so much enjoyed before you arrived at the edge.

We stand at the very edge of the map. Jesus (who carries the scars in his hands and feet, and side for having marched this way before) now says, in an alarming way for which you can never be prepared: “Follow me!”

Jesus Started It: The Force of Reconciliation

Preached on Sunday, April 28, 2013

Scripture readings:  2 Corinthians 5:11-21; Acts 9:1-19



Saul, in our reading from Acts, is our very own Apostle Paul who wrote so much of our New Testament. This man Saul was a devout hater of Jesus. He was a devout hater of Christians. He would have been glad to see us dead. He was murderous.

Photos Taken Around Washtucna WA in April 2013

Then he became a devout lover of Jesus and a lover of Christians. He was willing to die for Jesus, and for people like us. And that is just what he did, in the end.

Have you ever become the friend of someone you started out hating?

If you think back, you will remember a time in your childhood when the word “hate” and the rage of hatred comes far too easily. Babies and little children are breathtaking in their angers and their hatreds. Good parents, in our part of the world, carefully teach their children not to hate.

So I hope that you were unable to answer my question because you weren’t aware of ever having hated anyone. But, have you ever made friends with someone you started out strongly disliking; someone who maybe represented something that was totally the opposite of you?

There was that kid named Chris who was high up in the pecking order of my high school because he was an athlete. He was one of the guys who formed that gauntlet of hecklers in the hall. He was one of those guys who laughed at and humiliated us lesser beings who were forced to walk between them on our way to classes.

Then he needed help with his studies, and I changed from being a victim, to being a helper, to being a friend. We were even planning to go to Humboldt State University, up near Eureka on the north coast of California, to study forestry together. I had such enormous powers for evading the will of God in those days.

I remember talking, years ago, with a member of a church I served, and they were passionately complaining about another member. Suddenly they realized what they were doing, and stopped themselves by saying, “Oh he’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? But everyone is your friend, aren’t they?”

In my first church, one Sunday morning, just before Sunday school started, I handed my class over to another teacher because a drunk whom I knew pretty well came into the church to see me, and he was having a spiritual crisis. At first I didn’t realize how drunk he was. It turned out that he was so drunk that it took him about a half hour before he suddenly realized that it was Sunday morning, and there were all these kids around, and people coming and getting set up for worship.

That other Sunday school teacher was one of the main people who wanted to get rid of me, a few years later. I have always wondered if there was some connection to the events of that day.

It is not unusual for God to require me to be the friend of the most outrageous and scandalous people. God does not require my approval of what they do. God forbids my being an enabler of them. But God does require me to act as a friend out of respect for what God has made, and for what God may intend for them.

Saul, who became our friend Paul, began as a hater and turned into a friend because Jesus made him do so. This is an impressive miracle.

We may think of the appearance of Jesus as a miracle. We may think of the blinding and the healing of Saul as a miracle. But the greatest miracle was the change of Saul from a hater to a lover of Jesus and us.

Nothing prepared Saul for this surprise. He was completely committed to his hatred. He was consumed by it and he would have been outraged at the very thought of any compromise. His hatred was a righteous and clearly justified hatred against a dangerous faith and those who were spreading it.

The way of Jesus humiliated the majesty of a righteous and holy God. It was the message of a God who set aside his glory, and became a human carpenter, and took upon himself the sins of the world in the ugliest possible way (because the cross was an ugly form of death). Then the very person who started this poisonous faith came to Saul and called him by name. Jesus came and reduced Saul’s anger to friendship and devotion.

Saul and his friends in the Temple thought that they had understood what their Temple represented. They thought it meant the meeting place where sinful people found a sacrifice to pacify the anger of a holy God. Jesus turned out to be the place where a holy God reached out to sinners, and won their hearts by being their sacrifice and carrying their sins.

Jesus showed himself to Saul and won his heart. Saul, who was so devoted to being Jesus’ enemy, became his friend.

The God whose light shown brighter than the sun at noonday spoke to Saul with a voice named Jesus, and this God did not need to be reconciled to Saul the enemy. God, in Jesus, reconciled Saul to himself.

When Saul became Paul, he called this the message of reconciliation; the ministry of reconciliation. Reconciliation is the making of peace by the changing of hearts, and minds, and lives.

What we call the gospel means the good news of God in Christ. The good news is that peace does not come when we make the right appeal to God, but when we receive God’s appeal to us. It is about God reconciling us. It is about our being turned from enemies to friends.

If we understand what it means to have a God, we realize that God is so big that he cannot be himself with us (he cannot be God with us) if we try to keep him smaller than we are. We try to keep God small by keeping him under control, or by not letting him change more than a fraction of what we are; a small, pre-approved part of ourselves.

This message and ministry of reconciliation is the very heart of what God wants to do. It is very much a God-thing and it cannot be contained in only one part of any life where his presence takes root. The power to change you into being God’s friend has got to overflow into the power to change you into being your enemy’s friend, for God’s sake.

I like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase/translation of the verses we have read from Second Corinthians: “All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them.”

We see this in our reading from Acts. God, in Christ, makes Saul his friend. Then God uses a disciple named Ananias to make Saul know that the disciples of Jesus were now his friends as well. Ananias went to Saul and touched him and called him “brother” before he did anything else for him.

The power of the good news of reconciliation in Christ makes all Christians brothers and sisters. The gospel makes us all each other’s friends. Everyone knows that a real friend must act as a friend. A friends act like friends when they are together and when they are apart. Even those who are brothers and sisters in Christ must faithfully put into action with each other the friendship they claim to have with Jesus.

We are not called only to believe and receive the gospel. We are called to embody the gospel. We are called to be the gospel in every action, and in every word we say, in every expression on our face. How can we claim to believe we have received the gospel (even though we were the enemies of God) if we do not believe that we are called to give and embody the gospel to our enemies?

Heaven is the spiritual state of reconciliation on an eternal and infinite scale. Hell is the spiritual state of alienation. If we let alienation work through us, then we are certainly not letting heaven work through us, but something quite different. Who we really are, or who our actions are declaring us to be, is at stake here.

The Holy Spirit empowers the good news of reconciliation. The Holy Spirit unites, and does not divide.

This is the absolute truth. And yet, if we use this truth in order to judge others, or if we use the truth to justify ourselves as any better than others, then we are not using the truth to reconcile others. We are using the truth the way that Saul and his friends were. They were using God’s truth as a club or as a stone in their hands.

If we use the truth about Christians being friends as a weapon against others, then we are still not in the service of the Holy Spirit. We are not representing Jesus.

In college, I knew a girl named Christy who always talked about Paul’s word in Ephesians about “speaking the truth in love”. (Ephesians 4:13) She could say the most blunt and hurtful things that way. She said that, when she did this, she was only “speaking the truth in love”.

I would somewhat unlovingly tell my Christian friends that Christy believed that speaking the truth was love, and they would smile back in a similarly unloving way. I was using my own truth as a weapon, and I was just as wrong as Christy was.

We find that the Book of Acts brings this matter of turning enemies to friends into the world of prayer. Saul prayed for days. Ananias prayed to the Lord who ordered him to seek out Saul, his enemy (the enemy who might try to kill him), and call him brother, and heal him.

This reconciliation business requires a lot of prayer. Prayer is the only way to understand it, and prayer is the only way to carry it out.

It seems difficult, but it is the real thing that Jesus gave you when he gave you himself. Reconciliation is the gospel. It is salvation. This is what Saul received, when he received his sight. It was what Saul gave to others.

When you have Jesus you have the power of reconciliation in you. It is part of your hidden resources in Christ.

This power led Saul to friendship with his enemies, the Jewish Christians. Later it led him to his enemies, the Gentiles; and that means it led Saul to us.

I have not taken the time to tell you how difficult this is. After Saul changed into Paul, he wrote his Second Letter to the Corinthians because this reconciliation was not working out. It was not happening; not even in Paul’s churches, and this was breaking his heart. This is God’s word to us.

I squirmed at the very thought of asking you if you have ever become a friend to an enemy. It was not a friendly question. It was a preacher’s question. It was a parable in the form of a question.

And now I ask you to look at the power that God’s force of reconciliation has for you. How committed and involved are you willing to get in the use of that force of reconciliation? How long are you willing to keep at it?