Faith's Underbelly - Our Wedding Jitters

Preached on Sunday, August 13, 2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 19:1-19; Hebrews 12:18-29

Seeing that I’ve never been married, it might not surprise you to know what I think about this part of the Exodus. When I read this story about the promises made at the foot of Mount Sinai, between God and his people, it reminds me of a wedding.

Mission San Diego de Alcala
San Diego, CA
June 2017

Yes, it does. Actually, this is a very Biblical idea. The Old Testament has lots of references to Israel being the Lord’s bride. And the New Testament is full of references to the Church being the bride of Christ.

We believe that those two marriages are the very same marriage. But think of that idea: the idea of getting married to God; because that’s exactly what we are.

In Exodus, though, we see a problem with this marriage. We see a lot of fear and caution before the wedding. How crazy is that: feeling fear before your wedding? How could that possibly happen, when weddings are about love?

Maybe there are reasons to be afraid. You might find yourself wondering if you are actually capable of being a good husband, or a good wife; and, later on, wondering if you are capable of being a good parent. Perhaps, just as with the process of getting old, these things are not for the faint of heart.

Promises can be scary, can’t they? Maybe this shows our deepest need for God. It is the nature of God to make what’s called a covenant with his people. The promises we make in marriage are promises of the covenant kind. For me, that defines covenant as a relationship based on promises, which we find scary.

Some people define a covenant as a contract. I don’t think that’s right.

Contracts tend to be conditional. Marriage might be more of a contract when it includes a prenuptial agreement. But I don’t like hearing about that kind of marriage.

It’s true that the covenant between God and his people seems to have conditions. It sets conditions of obedience, but it really only has conditions for happiness. Obedience, or submission are necessary conditions for happiness. God’s people broke those conditions constantly. That’s the lesson of the Old Testament. That’s a lesson for us, because the Bible is a picture of God, and a picture of us.

The Lord began the covenant with his people on his own initiative. The only condition his people met, at that time, was that they were in great need of help.

Up until this point in the story of God recreating a human family for himself, all of the basic, fundamental promises, and qualifications, were made on his side. At the foot of Mount Sinai, the Lord told his people how he had started the next level of his promises. He said: “I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” (19:4)

God was starting the wedding by acting and proposing unconditionally. This is what brought them through the desert to Mount Sinai.

God knew what would follow. The wedding would follow. His people would say “I do”. They would make the promise: “We will do everything the Lord has said.” (19:8) But they never kept their promise.

Surely the Lord was not surprised by this. The Lord was well prepared enough to see to it that the happiness of the marriage would be conditional, but that the marriage itself would be unconditional. That’s how it worked out in the course of things. Marriage with God is like that, all through the Bible. In our marriage with God, there are conditions set for our happiness, but our marriage itself is unconditional. It will go on.

In Jesus, God won our hand in marriage by his death for our sins on the cross. There is the condition of saying yes, I do, but to truly see Jesus on the cross, unable to kneel at his proposal to you only because of the nails in his hands and feet: to truly see this, robs your heart of the power to say “no”. And you know that it’s always unconditional when you see that there is nothing you can do to adequately repay him for it. Your gifts to him can never equal his gifts to you.

Marriage is a new life for those who undertake it. In marriage, something has got to give; and, in this way, we could compare marriage to faith, as faith is shaped by Jesus. With Jesus, something within us has got to give. In Jesus, we die to ourselves and we rise to a new life.

It’s another way of looking at what Jesus meant when he said: “You must be born again.” (John 3:7) But I don’t think we understand what it means to say, “I’m born again,” unless we can say, “I’m married to Jesus.”

Are you married to Jesus? Can you remember if you got the wedding jitters before you went through with it? Have you exchanged vows with God?

Here’s one of the questions I ask the bride and groom in a wedding. The words are the same for both, except for the personal pronouns. “Will you pledge your loyalty to him, in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness, to live with him and cherish him, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” Are you married to the Lord? Are you married to Jesus?

The problem is that, in Exodus chapter nineteen, something seems wrong with the proceedings of the wedding. There was fire on the mountain, and a dark, gathering smoke, and the flashing of lightening, and some sort of trumpet-like sound that got louder, and louder, and louder. The ground shook. Scurries of rock clattered down the sides of the mountain above them. The Lord was coming to their wedding! What does this say about God?

There’s violence in the long course of this story. There were the plagues in Egypt, and the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red sea. God’s people have had to fight battles, and face thirst and hunger. It’s been a hard journey, so far, and there’s so much more to come. God has gotten angry with his people. God has gotten angry with Moses.

We don’t know what to think of this. God’s people didn’t know what to think, and it terrified them. Then they and we, both, think of the same thing. We think that God is dangerous, and that following God is dangerous. We think of God’s anger. That fire and lightening could turn out to be quite effective weapons.

Jesus seems like an antidote to the anger of God, but even Jesus got angry, and not just with the money-changers and the Pharisees. Jesus got angry at his own disciples. When Peter protested about the inevitability of the cross, Jesus got mad and said, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:23) But we hope he’s gotten over that, now that he’s been crucified and resurrected.

When I was five, I stuck a wire coat-hanger in a wall socket and got a painful shock, and I screamed really loud. I remember my mother running from the kitchen, and she saw what I had done, and then she screamed at me, and then she hugged me, and then she scolded me, and then she got ice to put on the burn: the big red welt that ran across my hand.

Her screaming and her scolding were a part of her love for an endangered and accident-prone child: which I sort of have been all my life.

There were many other times when I did something I knew I shouldn’t do, when I deserved to be screamed at, or yelled at, by my parents. They did this because they loved me.

The whole story of the Lord freeing his people from slavery, and leading them through the desert to the Promised Land, is a story of love. In spite of his frequent anger with them, and his punishment of them, the Lord never left them. The Lord saw them through to the end of their journey, and beyond. The Lord is with his people, Israel, still.

What other tiny nation of people has maintained its existence for four thousand years? It’s a miracle. It’s love.

God is with us in the same way.

The Letter to the Hebrews (meaning the Hebrew Christians) talks about two mountains. It tells of the scary mountain of Moses, in the Exodus, and the happy mountain of Jesus, called Zion.

It’s very strange that one of the happy things on the happy mountain is also a very scary thing. The scary thing is blood. The blood of Jesus has gotten on everyone who enjoys life with Jesus on that mountain.

There was a time when Mount Zion had crosses nearby, and Jesus hung on the cross. There wasn’t smoke, but there was darkness. Mount Zion shook, just like Mount Sinai, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us there. It was scary, but it was love, and it was a miracle.

We live here on Mount Zion with our spouse, Jesus. And we live here reliving that scary thing. We meet with Jesus as he now is, crucified, and risen, and full of glory, and we receive him into ourselves. We eat and drink, and he comes into us through that eating and drinking. Jesus says that we take into ourselves his body and his blood in the Lord’s Supper; and, so, we live the good news because of a scary thing. We die and we rise with him.

Saint Augustine, back in the late fourth and early fifth century, said that this is a miraculous food. Everything else that we eat and drink we change into ourselves. The food and drink of the Lord’s Table, the body and blood of Jesus, turn us into him.

This changes us. Something gives way. There are so many ways and opportunities to get more of Jesus and grow in our union with him: our marriage with Jesus; two lives growing together, two hearts beating as one.

The love of God is like the sun that shines upon our world. There would be no life without the sun. But the sun is dangerous. It can make you sick. It can even kill you. The sun can blind you, because our eyes are too weak to look at it, and truly see it, and survive.

Only a total solar eclipse can enable us to look into some of the mysteries of the sun. But, even then, the sun will destroy our sight, unless our eyes are properly protected.

Love thundered, and lightninged, and burned, and smoked on Mount Sinai, but it was all love. Perhaps the smoke made it possible for God’s people to see a bit more of him than other ordinary people. The smoke was like the moon that shields us from the sun in its eclipse.

We think that we want love, and we do. We are made for love that never ends. We are made to experience miracles of grace and love. We are made to love, and to be loved, forever.

But our love is weak. We often know this in the marriages and families that form our lives. Love requires great emotional, spiritual, mental, and even physical efforts from us. Sometimes we rise to them. Even when we do so, we see that giving more would be better. Sometimes we know that we have not, or cannot, meet the needs that call to us. Our love may prove very strong indeed, but our fall from what we were created to be has made our love too weak to see, face to face, the holy love that has created each one of us. Our fall has made our love too weak to see all of the love God wants to give to others, and to our world, through us.

The warnings against getting too close were not warnings of anger, but warnings of love. It’s as if the sun could speak, and thunder, and shake us, so that we knew better than to look straight at it.

There are discoveries and understandings that we are not ready for. God, in his love, has the power to give us what we need (and what we are ready for) in knowing and seeing him. That’s why we are told, in another place in Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

The dangers of our going too far in, or seeing too much that we’re not ready for, are like the dangers of a baby who has immune deficiencies, who needs the shelter of a bubble, and the parents can only hold their child with gloves that are extensions of the bubble, through which they put their arms and hands. It’s what their child needs, and so they do it. Jesus is like the gloved hand of God reaching through and holding us; getting as close to us as our current health will allow.

But there’s more. The message of Mount Sinai had the power to warn and to teach God’s people, and that message was a gift of love and grace. It’s grace to have good warnings and good learning. But learning may not transform us. The message of Sinai could not transform God’s people, and they showed this all the way through their history.

God becoming one of us, in Jesus, his living our life in our own flesh and blood, his living as a servant, his sharing the darkness of death, his dying for our sins, and conquering sin and death for us: this is the grace that enters us, and changes us.

Only grace can complete us, make us whole, fulfill us, and bring us to what God has created us for; what God has in mind. The old mountain is actually a good place, a good covenant, a good promise, but the mountain we live on with Jesus is so much “better in every way”.

Grace enables us to approach and serve. Grace empowers us to be bridges and mediators of grace to the people and the world around us. That’s what it means to be “a kingdom of priests” like Jesus. Priests are mediators. They are go-betweens.

Grace, in the blood of Jesus, bridges the gap we could never cross by ourselves. It empowers us to become what we could never fully be on our own.

There was a wedding at the foot of Mount Sinai. It was a wedding of God with his people. Well, it was not the full-fledged wedding. It was only one of many rehearsals for the real thing. We have the real thing in Jesus, the real wedding that gives us a new life.

The truth is that the wedding still isn’t finished. We are just in the process of making our vows. When God’s plan for this world is complete, Jesus will step over to us and lift the veil for a kiss. Then all the jitters will be over.

Right now, it can still be awkward. We’re in the middle of our vows. But this is the time for us to say: “I’m doing it! We’re doing it together! We’re getting married together.”

We’re marrying Jesus now. Let’s get into it. Let’s live into it.

Lenten Reflections on the Catechisms: The Ten Commandments

"Lenten Reflections"

Alternating during the Wednesdays of Lent, I am taking turns with the local Lutheran pastor preaching or guiding meditations and reflections on themes from the catechisms.

Shared on Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Scripture reading: Exodus 20:1-17

The giving of the Ten Commandments was a moment of extreme fear. If we read on, this is what we find: that God spoke these words out of something like thunder and lightning, darkness and fire, and smoke on the mountain.

The voice of God spoke directly to his people, and the people were almost scared to death. They were surprised that the God who created everything, and who rescued them from generations of slavery endured under the system of the world’s great powers, and who defied the laws of nature, and who took care of them in the wilderness; that such a God could speak to them and that they could hear his voice and live.

What if the storm was much more than the face or the presence of God? What if the fire and smoke were the face of what God was giving to them in his words on the mountain?

Perhaps God’s love for us, and our true love for God can be like a storm. Perhaps our true love for others and the ties that bind us to them can be like fire and smoke. Could there be fear in such things that could almost scare us to death? Or could there be great dangers, or great gambles, or great and daunting demands in such things?

What if the honoring of parents, or being involved in the death of another human being is like a storm? What if guarding the truth or envying what others have is like a storm? And, so, what if the love of God Himself is nothing less than a storm?

QUESTIONS:

If that were so, then what purpose do the commandments serve in such a storm? How might the commandments help us?

The Ten Commandments begin with a kind of introduction: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” There are two words in the Hebrew language, in the Old Testament, that we translate as Lord. One of those words means “the boss”. The other word, spelled in four capital letters, covers the special name of God (Jahweh, Yahweh; which, in the past, English speakers also used to translate as Jehovah). This is the word or, rather, this is the name that’s used in the commandments and the law.

This word “LORD” is not a name like Sam or Suzy. It describes the mystery of all personal identity: I am who I am. That’s the name for Lord used in the Commandments. This name of God asks us to personally know (or to learn) who God is: by experience, by prayer, by how we live, and by how we respond to life and to other people.

QUESTIONS:

How might these Ten Commandments enable us to learn about the God who created us and who loves us? How might the Ten Commandments help us to learn who God is?

The introduction also told the Israelites (and it tells us) something more about who God is. The God of the Ten Commandments (the God of the law) is the God who rescues us, who sets us free, who delivers us from forces and circumstances that seem too big for us to deal with, who changes our lives in ways that are not humanly possible. This, from the very start, is the God of grace, the God of gracious self-giving and love.

QUESTIONS:

If we belong to such a God as this; how does this enable us to understand what God is after? What God is looking for from us, in the Ten Commandments? How are the Commandments designed to produce the results that a God of grace and self-giving love would want?

When we talk about the Ten Commandments, it sounds as though we were talking about rules and orders. A better translation would replace the term “The Ten Commandments” with “The Ten Words”.

This doesn’t soften the commandments. This doesn’t reduce them to being only the ten suggestions.

In Hebrew, the whole idea is that words are powerful. Human words have great power. The saying that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” isn’t true. Words can hurt, and words can bless. Words weaken and words empower.

God’s words do this infinitely more than this. God’s words make things happen. God’s first word was, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God’s words have created everything that exists. One day, they will create a new heaven and a new earth.

God’s words can recreate anything. They can recreate you.

QUESTIONS:

How might God’s words in the commandments change you? How might they recreate you?

In some ways, you and I, in our lives, are living words of power. With God, this is infinitely true. The Gospel of John tells us that the God who speaks into being everything in creation is something like a word. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God… All things were made through him… And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth….” (John 1:1-14)

We know this word as Jesus. In Jesus, God became one of us, and (for a time) lived among us as simply as any another human being. Then the word, this word called Jesus, started recreating those who paid attention to him. Jesus, the living word, began to recreate them through his way of living, and through his spoken words. So, they followed him and stayed with him.

Then this word called Jesus took upon himself the sin of the world, which is our own sin, and died for those sins.

Something like this had to happen, because our sin comes from so deep within a human nature that has separated itself from perfect reliance upon God and, therefore, we always fall short of his commandments. We are never quite in step, never in true harmony, with the life God that wants to speak into being through us.

Great harm comes from this; greater harm than we know. This, after all, is where God’s law and our relationships give us the fears and the dangers that are greater than those that come from storms, and smoke, and fire.

Our nature, separated from God by sin, runs too deep to be changed, or reshaped, by mere words alone. God’s word had to become flesh: as solid, and as real, and as lived out as we are. God’s word had to become a real part of us: as real as our own brains, and hearts, and flesh, and blood.

So, this word, that we call Jesus, became one of us, and stood in for us, and died for our sin, and carried that sin away from us. Jesus buried that sin in his own grave, and then he rose from the dead to give us a life of resurrection, in which our sins die daily, and we rise daily to a new life; a holy life. Holiness means a life in tune with God’s harmony: a life in keeping with God’s purpose for us; God’s word to us.

QUESTIONS:

How do we receive that new source of life through Jesus, in which we live the gracious words of God?

How do we maintain that new source of life, through Jesus, in which we live the gracious words of God?

May the mercy and peace of “the word made flesh” in Jesus dwell within you. May the law of God become, for you, not only a word of fear, but a word of grace and love.

Christmas Hopes - God's Intimacy

Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2015

Scripture readings: Genesis 32:22-30; Luke 2:1-7

“The time came for the baby to be born, and Mary gave birth to her firstborn. She wrapped him in clothes, and placed him in a feed trough.” (Luke 2:6-7)

Christmas Decorations
Riverside Community Church
December 2015

We know that this wasn’t all that Mary did (or that Mary and Joseph did together). We know they must have found water to wash the baby; and they must have held the baby too.

What we call “swaddling clothes” (in the old translations) were a square of cloth with another long, long narrow strip of cloth. The square went around the baby diagonally. The long strip of cloth was wrapped around and around the baby, up and down, up and down. It kept the baby from moving much.

Swaddling clothes seem sort of inhumane to me. Have you ever thought about that? And, yet, everybody in that part of the world, in those ancient times, began their lives wrapped up tight in swaddling clothes.

In another way, in my profound ignorance about babies, I imagine swaddling clothes as the primitive technology for a permanent hug: a hug that never let go. Perhaps it was like a hug that made a baby feel almost permanently safe and cared for. But, surely, Mary also hugged Jesus a lot.

Orphanages found, long ago, that the little babies who came to them needed to be hugged often, or else they would probably die.

I remember how, when I was small, I loved to give and receive what I learned to call “bear hugs”. I remember giving my mom bear hugs when she would come and tuck me in at night.

I remember when I was four years old, and it was evening on my Aunt Lorraine’s and Uncle Henry’s front porch in Toledo, Ohio. I remember hugging my dad and telling him I loved him. And I can remember him teaching me, then and there, not to do that any more. He told me that boys don’t hug other boys or tell them that they love them, and that I shouldn’t do that with him either. And that was the end of that.

I was in my forties before my dad suddenly, and unexpectedly, started to hug me and tell me that he loved me. But the old, original lesson to a four-year-old was hard to unlearn.

I have to admit that it never came easily for me to hug my dad back when he started hugging me in my adult life. It always seemed strange.

I think it was because, for a four year old, my father was like a runaway from me, although he was always there.

The human race is a species of runaways. In the Garden of Eden we ran away from God. Adam ran away from Eve, emotionally and spiritually, when he blamed her, in the presence of God, for his own betrayal of God. We are a race of runaways.

We try to find someone to love us and hug us, but even believers often choose whom to love without God’s help and blessing. So many people are looking for love in all the wrong places. Even though they seem to be looking for love, they are also running from it at the same time.

Today we have more and more people looking for love without giving and receiving the promises that are the only way to make true love possible. We are runaways from all promises and vows, and we have forgotten that true love loves to make promises.

Promises are like a hug of words that come from the heart. Vows from the heart are the heart seeking to give and receive faithfulness. Promises and vows from the heart are intimacy. So in a world that pretends to have intimacy all the time, without rules, we are really runaways from intimacy.

Such is the world we live in. It explains why human beings can do what they do to each other all around the world. This is the real identity of what we call sin.

Sin is not something you can make a list of, although such lists do exist. Sin is everything that we do to run away from love and faithfulness towards God and towards others.

There seems to be no cure for this runaway life of the human race. Except that the one who is greater than us wants to give us the hope and the experience of intimacy.

Intimacy was the gift to all humans in their creation. Intimacy is the gift that God came, in Jesus, to give back to us.

But we see a picture of this God much further back in time. We see this God coming to the runaway named Jacob, to wrestle with Jacob in the dark.

It was no accident. And although Jacob thought that the mysterious wrester was trying to get away from, that was not the wrestler’s intention at all. God held Jacob in his arms, against Jacob’s will, so that he could bless him, and give him a new name, and a new identity.

In the fullness of time, this God went so much further, in the beautiful story that we remember at Christmas. God became our mysterious wrestler in Jesus.

God was born as a baby who was swaddled and hugged in order to grab, and hold, and hug this world of runaways and not let go however much we struggle. God was born as a baby to hug us, and give us a new name and a new identity, and to help us be wrestlers and huggers of the world he loves so much.

Some people are looking for intelligence. Some people are looking for enlightenment. God is looking to have a hug with us. Maybe it is the infinite and unconditional hug of God that provides all the intelligence and enlightenment that we need. The hug of God gives us a new name and a new identity; a new heart and mind.

Remember someone reaching out their arms to hug you? After your inner picture of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, and after the many other pictures we may have of Jesus in our hearts, the great picture of Jesus with his arms stretched out on the cross is the great picture of God reaching out to hug us and the whole world.

Both the manger and the cross are God’s promise of the intimacy. It is the intimacy that comes from grace, and from the forgiveness that gives us a new heart. This makes us ready to be genuinely loved as God made us to be loved.

The Lord’s Supper is also a part of the intimacy of God’s heart. Here God reveals himself as the one who can come inside us, and feed our souls, and give us the life that comes with everlasting intimacy.

The preacher and author Timothy Keller wrote this: “Christmas is an invitation to know Christ personally. Christmas is an invitation by God to say: Look what I’ve done to come near to you. Now draw near to me. I don’t want to be a concept. I want to be a friend.”

Now, all that is left for us to do is to receive him. Let’s hug the one who was born in Bethlehem; the one who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, and the one who died on the cross, in order to hug us and make us new. Then we can hug, with Jesus, the world that Jesus wrestles with and loves.

Know God - The Power of Love

Peached on Sunday, June 7, 2015

Scripture readings: Hosea 2:12-23; 1 John 4:7-5:5

Many years ago I would be talking to my Baci (my Babcia, my Polish grandma) or writing to my Polish Aunt Genia, and I would make some observation or other, and the response would be, “You say that because you’re Polish.” Maybe that was wishful thinking on their part. I could never understand the pattern of thinking that they called Polish. They saw a family resemblance.

White Bluffs, Opposite the Hanford Reservation, WA
Columbia River, April 2015

Many years ago, some non-Polish relatives were visiting me in Oregon: my Dad’s brother Uncle Don and my Aunt Joyce. We got into a conversation about God, and what God did by coming into our world in Jesus, and dying for our sins, and rising from the dead.

The conversation went on and on, and it was very lively and exciting. Most of the interaction was between my Uncle Don and me. My Uncle Don, for years, had raised big barriers between himself and the Christian faith as it is commonly understood and explained.

I felt like I was making progress, but my Uncle Don kept raising objections. Finally he seemed to try to get off the subject by saying, “Do you know why I don’t go to church?”

We hadn’t been talking about the church. We had been talking about Jesus, and why we needed Jesus. I felt like he was trying to worm his way out of what we were talking about. So I said, “I don’t care why you don’t go to church.”

My Uncle Don’s eyes got large. Then he beamed a big smile, spread out his arms, and looked up on high, and he said, “Spoken like my brother’s son.”

My Uncle Don told the truth. This is how the Evans men all talk to each other. Of course there aren’t many of us, and maybe that is one reason why.

It’s all about family resemblance. It’s not just about a resemblance of eyes, and noses, and chins. (I have a double cowlick and that’s from the Polish side of the family.)

The resemblance can be seen in how we move our bodies. I put my hands on my hips like my grandpa Evans. I do a thing with the little finger on my right hand that comes from my grandma Evans. So those things have been going on for more than a hundred years. If I had kids, I might have passed these things on to succeeding generations.

I have an Irish side to the family. Some of us came to America about 1850, and some of us went to Australia, about the same time. We have been writing, off and on, ever since. It’s a family habit that has gone on for well over a hundred and fifty years. It’s a family resemblance. Enough of that!

There’s a God resemblance that gets inherited by the people who are born by grace and faith into God’s family. It’s the resemblance of love.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) It’s a spiritual genetics that points to Jesus. It’s a resemblance that perpetuates Jesus physically in this world.

Think what this means. Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world on the cross (John 1:29), and then he rose from the dead. That is the kind of love with which we are to love one another.

The Apostle John made this love part of the center of his teaching. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love…This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:7-12)

There was a woman who occasionally attended a church I served. She confessed to me, one Sunday morning after worship, that she had trouble feeling God speak to her in a sermon when the preacher wasn’t preaching fire and brimstone. (Yes, she really said that.)

Well I have just done that for you. You ought to be shaking in your boots right now, and so should I. Didn’t you hear it? Didn’t you smell the fire and brimstone? “Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.” And John says it again, “If anyone says ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar.” (1 John 4:20) A Liar! And John says it again, “Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:21)

But who is my brother? Someone asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” And that question is just another way of saying, “Who is my brother?”

To answer that, Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan who helped a member of the people of Israel who had been attacked, and robbed, and left for dead on the road. The Samaritans were deeply hated enemies of the people of Israel, and they hated Israel right back. The story Jesus told them gave the lesson that we are to love our enemies. (Luke 10:25-37; see also Matthew 5:44)

We are to show the family resemblance that we inherit when we are born into God’s family by grace and faith. John says that God loves those who don’t love him, and that God sent Jesus and came down in Jesus to be a sacrifice for our sins that would atone for our sins.

Atonement means unification. It means reconciliation. It means bringing together those who have been alienated and divided. It means making them one. God loves those who do not love him and so we need to love our brothers and sisters, even when they are our enemies and do not love us. It’s in the Bible!

In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, the people of God, stopped loving and trusting God. They went on, and on, and on worshiping other gods, because they thought it would get them somewhere. They thought it would make them happy.

They became what is called, in fancy theological language, apostate. Apostate means, among other things, leaving and denying a relationship with God. It means denying the faith. It means living life in contradiction to the faith.

In the Book of the Prophet Hosea, God never stops loving those people. In the Old Testament, apostasy was considered spiritual adultery. It was as if Israel was married to God by the promises that God had made. God had promised to be their God and to make them his people. His people betrayed those promises of God. They had mated with other gods and loved them better.

The Lord told Hosea to marry a prostitute to symbolize what the relationship between the Lord and Israel had turned out to be. He told Hosea to do this deliberately because that is what the Lord had really done by making his vows to Israel. When the Lord made his covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, it was clear that this is exactly what he was doing.

God’s love, perfect love, can be angry for a long, long time and never stop loving. The Lord described all the things he wanted to do to Israel in his anger, and then he says: “Therefore, therefore, I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14) The desert, in the Old Testament, is the place for intimacy with God. The anger of God would end in everlasting tenderness.

Eventually this prostitute left Hosea completely, and became the slave of another man. Hosea had to go and buy her back. He didn’t have enough money so he had to empty his cupboard. He had to pay part of the price with his own food. (Hosea 3:2)

The Lord told Hosea, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites.” (Hosea 3:1-2)

Hosea and his unfaithful wife had children. He had to wonder if they were even his own children. One was called “Not Loved”. Another was called “Not My People.”

In his anger God gave these children terrible, terrible names to reflect his anger and his separation from his people. In the end, God in his love tells Hosea to change their names, because “Not Loved” will be loved, and “Not My People” will be God’s people. (Hosea 2:23)

The New Testament describes this same love that Hosea writes about, and the New Testament tells us that this same love also belongs to us. It belongs to all people who love God and who love others. Paul says this in Romans: “What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy whom he prepared in advance for glory; even us, who he also called, not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles? As he says in Hosea: ‘I will call them “my people” who are not my people; and I will call her “my loved one” who is not my loved one.…” (Romans 9:23-25; see also 1 Peter 2:9-10)

We all share the same story of being changed by the love of God. We are all “God’s loved” and “God’s people”.

We inherit the story and the spiritual genetics of love. Love is as necessary as faith for our life in God. God loves the unworthy, and the outsider, and the enemy, and even the apostate redemptively, because that is the only way to make them his children and to make them our brothers and sisters.

If we are God’s children, then the family resemblance holds true. We love the unworthy, and the outsider, and the enemy, and even the apostate redemptively, because that is the only way to make them God’s children and our own brothers and sisters.

I’m not making this up. God did it first. It’s in the Bible.

If God’s love (which means God’s kind of love) is not in us then God is not in us. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

The Lord gave Hosea a seemingly impossible task. It would take all of Hosea’s life to work it out. This is God’s task with you. This is God’s task with the whole world.

The Lord gave Hosea a seemingly impossible task: to make someone who was not God’s person into God’s person. He gave this seemingly impossible task to Hosea in order to show God’s own seemingly impossible task: to take a whole human race that was not his people and make them his people.

In the end, this required death on the cross by Jesus, who is God made flesh. (John 1:14) In Jesus, God died in order to love those who did not love him. In Jesus, God died in order to love those who were his enemies.

Paul says this in Romans chapter five. “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life.” (Romans 5:10)

There is a Christian thinker who wrote this: “When God sets out to embrace the enemy, the result is the cross.” (Miroslav Volf, “Exclusion and Embrace”, p. 129)

Love is hard. Love is sacrificial. Some Christians don’t want their life with other Christians to be hard or sacrificial. When I see this happen and when I don’t have God’s love in me; that makes me mad. When I see this happen and when I do have God’s love in me when I see it; it sometimes makes me afraid. But God’s love is also meant to deal with my angers and my fears. God’s love insists on taking anger and fear away so that it is possible to love others no matter who they are, no matter what they have done.

I am commanded to love others with God’s love; which means that I am commanded to trust God’s love. When I know God’s love, then I trust God’s love to work in those who are unworthy, and in the outsider, and in the enemy, and in the apostate. We are not called to fear or to anger. Perfect love (God’s love) casts those out.

Can you live like that? Can I live like that? We better, if we want the love of God to live in us. We better try to live like that, or else we will prove ourselves to be liars. There’s the fire and brimstone again, but it’s not my words. It’s John’s words.

We are part of this world, but God came in Christ to overcome the world. (John 16:33) There is a holy discipline in this matter of love, and that discipline is faith. We struggle and we trust. We struggle and we trust. “This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” (1 John 5:4-5)

This means that we believe that Jesus is more than a teacher or a holy man. We believe that Jesus is the face and the resemblance of the living God. When we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. (John 14:9) When we have seen the love of Jesus, we have seen the love of the Father. When we see it, we will resemble it. We will live it.

If we don’t live in love it is because we have never truly seen love. Or we have seen it and not responded in kind. By faith we see love and we die with Jesus on the cross, and we rise with Jesus from the dead. We trust and live in the love that Jesus came to show us.

“If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him, and he in God, and so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” (1 John4:15)

We are God’s people and we have been born by grace and by faith into God’s family. We have been born to act as the power of God’s redemptive love in this world.

The Great Story - Wandering: Our Road to Life Is a Detour

Preached on Sunday, October 13, 2013

Scripture readings:  Numbers 13:1-2, 13:17-14:4; Deuteronomy 30:11-20

Around the Palouse River, September 2013

For many years when I was a kid, my family owned a 1957 Ford Ranch Wagon. It was a station wagon with an extra seat that could be folded up in the back. At first it was our only car.

When my mom learned to drive it became our second car. It became the car my dad drove to work.

When I got my driver’s license it became my car. By that time it shimmied a lot, if I drove it fast. So I didn’t drive very fast in those days. I make up for that now.

While the car was still good enough for adults to drive, it was our family outing car. When my Uncle Don and Aunt Joyce came over with our three cousins, we could squeeze all ten of us into that car. We would go for picnics and sight-seeing together, and we would sing while we drove.

  C                                                              G7
I love to go a-wandering along the mountain track
                     C                      G7                     C
And as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back
            C          G7         C         G7          C
Chorus: valderi, valdera, valderi, valder ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
         G7       C       F                  G7    C
valderi, valdera, my knapsack on my back.
(By Friedrich-Wilhelm Moller)

It’s a song about a happy person who hopes to wander until the day they die. “Oh may I always laugh and sing, beneath God’s clear blue sky.” It’s a happy song. It’s a song about the love of God’s creation, the love of people, and the love of life.

When my family sang this song we were in the same good spirits. We were loving life. We were lively. We were happy wanderers.

In our reading from Deuteronomy, God tells his people to choose life. “See, I set before you today life and good, death and evil (or life and prosperity, death and destruction).” “Now choose life.” (Deut. 30:15, 19)

He means life with God: life that leans on the covenant and the promises of God; a life of love with God. The truth is that the other kind of life is not truly life; not fully alive. To choose something other than a life of love with God is to choose death.

The danger that God’s people were in was that they were not happy wanderers. They had not truly chosen life.

Yet they were on the brink of entering the Promised Land. It was the land where they would have the freedom to live fully as the people who were faithfully loved by God. But they wanted something else.

They were loved by God, but they weren’t happy with God; at least not unless they could change him into the kind of God they wanted him to be. This is part of the reason why, all the way to the Promised Land, and all through their long detours, they were not happy wanderers.

The great story of the Bible is full of wanderers. Abraham and his family wandered around the edges of the Promised Land, but never really entered in to make it home. But they wandered the edges of home, as if they were spying through the windows of someone else’s house. They had been told that the house would belong to them, someday. They did their spying while they wandered with God, in faith and hope.

The evidence is that they were not always happy, but they always remembered that they belonged to the God who described himself as belonging to them. He was the God who was never ashamed to call himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”. When they were restless and unhappy it was only because they dearly wanted to see the promises of this God come true in their time.

The people of God who wandered through the desert with Moses were restless because they dearly wanted to go back to their lives as slaves. They didn’t want the freedom and the risk that comes through faith, and they wanted to be owed something by someone.

That is why they were attracted to idol worship. The gods represented by the idols were gods you could bargain with. They would owe you something if you gave them something.

The first time God’s people stood on the border of the Promised Land they got scared. The freedom of a land of faith was almost within sight. But God gave them no other way to enter that land except by the risk that seems to come with faith. They were too scared to choose faith and the life that comes with it.

The land itself was a covenant. It was a promise. They had to enter the promise as if it were a gift through faith, and not as the gift of something that was owed to them. They would have to choose to live their way into that land, and not just walk into it. They would have to choose life.

Instead they chose fear, and grumbling, and anger. They would prefer to choose the life of a slave: the fear of the lash, the grumbling under a task-master; and the anger of injustice and being forced to be, in some essential way, less than human, less than themselves, less than alive.

The only good thing about slavery was that it didn’t demand you to go forth and live. It didn’t require faith, or hope, or love.

The odd thing about human nature is that, according to the Bible, we went wrong, back in the beginning, when we wanted to be like God. We wanted to have the knowledge of good and evil so that we could choose our own standards and choose our own way in the world.

The wish to be a god doesn’t seem like the wish to be a slave, but the desire to be free from the need to have faith in another, or hope in another, or be bond in love to another is a kind of slavery. Doesn’t it ring true that being your own god is the same thing as idol worship? And they did worship idols when they were slaves in Egypt? (Joshua 24:13)

Running away from the choice of faith, hope and love based on another (the choice of commitment) is a way of running from life. It is a way of choosing death.

I think that the people who seem to wander away from God and from others (even when they seem to choose to live with an intense and ferocious freedom), are often simply reacting to something. They are reacting with a kind of fear, or grumbling, or anger at what they think that a relationship with God or with others might require of them.

I don’t understand wandering very well. I never rebelled against my parents, and so some people may be right when they see me as a perpetual pre-adolescent. I was never a rebel at all (although, for most of my adolescence, I tried to love Jesus at the same time that I wanted to not listen to what he wanted me to do with my life).

In the Bible, choosing life means choosing faith that works through love and loyalty. If we simply look at what happed to Israel, we see that fear and faith are enemies. Choosing to serve their fears instead of choosing faith and life required God’s people to take a detour. It required them to go back and learn forty years of hard lessons, and still not be very good at the life of faith. Fear was a real obstacle to entering into faith and life.

I am shy. I’m timid. Fear is a problem for me. I can see how fear has stood in the way of my choosing life. I merely lay that before you.

For Moses, the problem proved to be anger. In a story that we have not read this morning, God’s people were being led through a part of the desert where there was no water.

Even though God had taken care of them in thirsty places before, they were afraid, they were angry, and they grumbled. They said they wanted to go back to slavery.

God told Moses to take his walking staff, and speak to a big rock, in the name of God. He promised that the rock would open, and a spring would flow for the people and their livestock. Instead of talking to the rock, Moses got mad and said to his people, “Do you want me to give you water? I’ll give you water! Take that!” (Numbers 20:11) He struck the rock instead of speaking to it. God told him that, because of this, he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land.

This seems harsh. Moses had been angry many times. The truth is that he had always been angry for God’s sake (for the love of God). He had never taken the fear, and anger, and grumbling of his people personally; at least not out loud.

Suddenly, something in Moses snapped. He became angry for his own sake, not for God’s sake: not to honor God, not in faith. I think he must have been keeping this bottled up inside him for some time. Personal and loveless anger and a lack of faith often go together.

God meant to give his people the grace of water. Moses, in his anger, did not give them grace. Moses responded in a way that did not give his people life. So he did no choose life. He chose anger. He chose death.

Anger can stand in the way of life. It can stand in the way of our being what God wants us to be. It can stand in the way of doing what God wants us to do. It stands in the way of the promises of God, to us and to others.

I have known of people in the ministry who did not love their people. They harbored anger in their heart towards God’s people.

Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I try to find refuge from my anger in being willing to simply be confused and mystified. Better than that, I try to find refuge from anger in faith and love. I think, so far, I have succeeded.

Grumbling is the other thing we see so much of in the People of God who were with Moses in the wilderness. With fear and anger (and the people were often angry at Moses, as he was at them), grumbling was part of the cause for forty years of detouring from their arrival at life.

Grumbling is a form of self-brainwashing. It is a way of conditioning yourself and others. Grumbling is like never opening the curtains on your windows.

I like music set in a minor key. That music can be grand and strong and wild and fierce. It can also be sad. Sometimes I have to be careful about my choice of music. Grumbling is like listening to sad music all day long, day after day, and making others listen to it as well.

Grumbling is a subtle way of carrying your independence from God under the radar. It seems like a little thing. There is no drama to it. You can’t see that you are actually doing anything bad or wrong. No one can accuse you of anything directly.

Grumbling is just an absence of love. It’s an absence of hope. It’s an absence of faith.

It is the determination to not be happy. It is the determination not to be fully alive or to choose life.

It stops good things from happening to you and to others. It stops you from being what you could be, and from doing what you could do, for faith, for hope, for love; for God; for others.

God was never far from his people. They always could see his presence. God was never far from them, but they were far from him, in their attitudes, their thinking, their heart and will.

The surprise is that, when they didn’t want to go where God wanted them to go, and when they wanted to go back to slavery, God did a third thing. God led them by detour. Instead of going forward, God circled with them. He led them forward by leading them back.

God led them by delay. God led them by reversal. God, in his grace, may lead us away from life because of our fears, our angers, and our grumblings, but he is always ready to steer us back to life if we will let him; if only we will see what we have lost and surrender our fears and angers and grumblings to God, in faith.

The fact is that, when God’s people wandered, he kept wandering with them. This is in his nature, because God’s love is faithful. This is something that we can see. We can find him wandering with us in our wanderings. He quietly puts up with us over, and over again.

This is what our life in this world is about. Our world was made for life with God, and we vandalized the human heart so that it became our nature to shut God out. When we vandalized our heart, we also vandalized the world we live in. So God changed our world from being a main road to life into being a detour to life.

The history of the world, ever since the human race became a rebel race, is all about God winning us back by coming to wander with us, and living in us by grace. The whole history of the world, as we know it, has been one long, horrific detour on the road to life.

When I am taking a detour, it isn’t strange for me to wonder whether I am really on the right road. I wonder if one of the signs is missing, or if I have missed one of them by mistake. We need to know that this is the way of a faithful God, to make our life in this world a detour that we can take with him.

This detour is the road where we must learn to choose faith, or not. This detour is the road on which we learn to choose life or death.

This is what God showed us, when he came down from heaven to show us his face in Jesus. He took the same detour as the whole human race. He became a wanderer in Jesus, even more than when he wandered with Moses and Israel in the desert.

Jesus said this about himself. “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20)

In the end the only places where God, in Jesus, could lay his head were a cross where he was willing to be the sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the world, and that niche inside a stone tomb where he let sin and death do all they could. He laid his head where all human wandering would lead us, if not for him.

Then he got up again. He got out. Even though he sits on the throne of heaven, he also continues to wander with us, through the power of his Holy Spirit. He lay down his head in the midst of our sin and separation from God, where we were so determined to shut him out, so that he could get in and stay with us wherever we may go.

Where does Jesus want you to go? If you stopped choosing fear, where would he lead you? If you stopped choosing anger, how might he change you? If you stopped choosing grumbling what would he give you to do?

I have obstacles that stand in the way of my choosing life, even when I live with a crucified and risen savior. So do you. Maybe we have these obstacles in us as a church: fear, anger, and grumbling. Maybe we all share fears, angers, and grumblings that blind us to what we could do together, if we were willing to choose life by choosing faith, and hope, and love.

We need to repent and surrender to the life that only God can give us in Jesus. Only through what God has done in Jesus can we be free from our obstacles to life.

Then we can become the happy wanders; full of life. Then we can wander with a purpose, until God leads us home.