Faith's Underbelly - Trusting a Faceless God

Preached on Sunday, August 20, 2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 32:1-24; Romans 1:18-25

Do you know what Moses did when he saw the golden calf?

He had a cow.

The Golden Calf is the start of a very long and complicated series of events that takes three chapters to tell. Even the language is complicated, in the process of translation. I will get to that in a little bit.

One thing is clear. God’s people did something wrong. The Lord, himself, puts what they did in the simplest possible terms. This is what he told Moses: “They have been quick to turn away from what I have commanded them and have made themselves an idol in the shape of a calf.” (32:8)

August 21, 2017 Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
The Day of a Partial Eclipse.

But, in Hebrew, a bull could be called a calf for the first three years of its life. Truth is, a three-year-old calf is all bull. That young bull is the very picture of energy, strength, and male-fertility (meaning that he can generate life). In the ancient world, a young bull or a mature calf was a common picture for the gods.

What the people of Israel wanted was a god that they could picture. They wanted a god with a face. They wanted the God who saved them from slavery in Egypt, and who brought them through the desert, to have a face. So, they helped make an idol.

There are plenty of Hebrew words for idols. The Golden Calf points back to the Ten Commandments and the word “graven image”. Once again, it’s an image, a picture, something with a face.

According to Aaron, he pronounced the calf to be a picture of the Lord, even though making such a picture broke the commandments. Aaron declared a feast to the Lord, to be celebrated at the altar of the Golden Calf. He told the Lord’s people to celebrate, because he had given them what they wanted. He had given the Lord a face: the face he thought most fitting for the one God.

The people seemed to ask for more than one god. The Old Testament language about God presents a different way of thinking from ours. It’s a problem of translation, and the tradition of translation, and it involves concepts that we take for granted.

There’s even a problem with the word “Lord”. In our thinking, the term “the Lord” generally means something like saying “the Boss”. But it’s not usually that way in the Old Testament.

Usually, in the Old Testament, you see the word “LORD” in capital letters. Whenever you see that, it is there to translate an almost indecipherable phrase that means “I AM”. I am what? Just “I AM”. Perhaps we could think of “I AM” as God saying, “I AM whatever I want to be and I AM whatever you truly need me to be.”

The word translated as God is almost always a plural singular noun. “God” is, in Hebrew, almost always, the word “gods”, but the verbs, the action words, describing what God is and what God does, are almost always singular, but not always. The term that calls God “God” is a plural of majesty and fullness; like the royal “we”. God is One, but God is a bigger One than words can hope to express.

So, our problem in translating, and even in understanding the Old Testament, is judging, from the context, whether the Old Testament is talking about the one and only true God, or about more than one god, because they’re both plural. Did the people want Aaron to make them lots of pictures of lots of gods, like those worshiped in Egypt, or did they want a picture of the one Lord who brought them out of Egypt?

I was reading in the Book of Nehemiah, recently, and found him praising the Lord for not abandoning his people in the exodus. He says this: “Therefore you did not desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, ‘This is your god who brought you out of Egypt….” (Nehemiah 9:18)

It stayed light, but the light changed.

In Nehemiah, both the English and the Hebrew versions cast God in the singular “singular”, and this tells us that Nehemiah thought that they had made an image of the one God who brought them out of Egypt. They made a statue, an image, a face of the Lord who was with them always, but never showed his face.

I’m glad that most of the Bible is not so technical and tied up with linguistics and ancient traditions of translation. But this story is.

So, what is it about faces? It’s about knowing, and bonding, and belonging, and loving. Babies study faces to bond, to belong, to know, and to love.

When the family of travelers used to be allowed into the waiting areas at airports, and you flew by plane to visit them, wasn’t it great to see their familiar faces, right there, just when you got off the plane. It was happiness, reunion, love, and comfort too: yes, comfort. You got comfort from their faces.

A familiar face gives you the comfortable message that you know what you’ve got. You know what to expect. There might be faces that give you the opposite message, and those make us uncomfortable.

Strange faces present us with an adventure. We don’t know what role a strange face may play in our future. Familiar faces offer us predictability and stability. Children may enjoy adventures, but they like predictability best. They want you to read their favorite story over and over again, and never try to change the words. They like family traditions and they like to participate in those traditions year after year. When someone goes missing from those traditions, we all feel the loss.

Shadows turned to eclipse shaped crescents.

So, when God’s people wanted to give the Lord a face, they wanted something we can all understand. We may wonder, deep down, why such a thing would be forbidden.

In our life with God, we want to know exactly who he is. We want to read his thoughts. We want to read his motives. We want to know what to expect. And we really expect predictability and stability. In a way, we want faith to be our anchor.

You remember, though, that faith isn’t pictured as an anchor. Hope is the anchor. For faith, hope, and love: love is a heart, hope is an anchor, and faith is a cross. The cross of Jesus is very comforting, but the cross you take upon your own shoulders to follow Jesus may not be comforting, and it’s certainly an adventure, to say the least.

The people who surrounded God’s people were people who had many gods, and each god had a picture, an image, a face. You could look at their image and see what they were there for. There would be a god of agriculture and food with a scythe, or a sheaf of wheat, or a basket of fruit. There would be a god of wealth and money with some symbol of treasure. There would be a god of fertility and sex with an appropriate pose. There would be a god of the home with a roof, or a cupboard, or a hearth with a flame.

If you were those people, you knew what your gods were for. You knew what to expect and how to get it. Their faces told you so.

Actually, we have the same gods today. You can see them in magazines, and in commercials, and on the internet. Those gods offer us ways to get what we want.

The Lord’s people often envied the people who had it simple with their gods. All those other people had an element of predictability and stability that God’s people weren’t allowed to picture and see, in their God. And their life of liberation from slavery, and their wandering in the desert, were not reassuring. They were actually well cared for, all along the way, but they didn’t feel safe. They never knew what to expect next.

Right there, you have a whole different level of faith required. It’s a challenging faith. It makes faith into an adventure at its best; maybe an extreme adventure. The parting sea, the pillar of cloud and fire that led them, the smoke and lightening on the mountain were the signs of the God of adventure.

There was a Promised Land that was promised to them. But they didn’t have any idea what that would be like, or when it would happen to them. The way to the Promised Land was the way of adventure and faith.

God’s people weren’t satisfied with that. It was too much for them. They wanted much less. They want what other people settled for.

This is the place to lay out the words of the Apostle Paul. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” (Romans 1:20-23)

Photo of the Eclipse: by Laura Swift Engel
West Richland, WA, August 21, 2017

God’s people knew that their God was strong and always with them, but they wanted something less. They wanted something less overwhelming. They wanted something simple, and they weren’t getting it. The Golden Calf was simple, and easy, and it was fun.

When I say goodbye to kids, sometimes I tell them, “Have fun and be good.” I say that because, if they’re trying to have fun, then also trying to be good will hopefully keep them in line.

When God’s people tried to give God a face, they deliberately made him out to be less than he was. If people make you out to be less than you are, how does that make you feel? We read that God was angry.

We know that God’s people knew that he was more than whatever the young bull, or the mature calf, imaged to them: energy, and strength, and creative potency. Their God was so much more. They knew this, and yet they created an easy lie with a face.

How do parents feel when their children tell lies? When I was a kid, lying was one of the worst things I could possibly do. My parents rewarded my lies with anger, and that anger came from love. Lies are a breach of faith, and you can’t have a life of loving and thriving with lies and betrayals. Children need to learn that, and how do you teach them?

It’s the same with God’s people. It’s the same with us. If we make God less than he wants to be for us, if we design God to be our technique for getting what we ask for and what we want, if we design God to be our technique for safety, then we aren’t talking about faith. We aren’t even talking about God at all. We are talking about ourselves.

If we were to read through, into the next chapter, we would find a new kind of faith: the faith of Moses. “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.” (33:11)

Photo of the Eclipse: by Laura Swift Engel
West Richland, WA, August 21, 2017

Now this says that it was face to face, but it was also God seeing Moses’ face, but Moses not seeing God’s face. Moses knew the Lord almost the same way as his people did, in terms of faces. Up to this time, all that Moses ever saw was the fire, and the cloud, and the smoke on the mountain. Moses had the faith that comes from being seen, and yet also from being the friend of someone who is something more than you can ever see: something without a face. That is the adventure which God wants for all of us.

When the Lord presented his anger to Moses, as from one friend to another, Moses knew something more than he was seeing or hearing. He heard the Lord called the Israelites “Moses’” people, and not his own, but Moses knew that there was more to God than this. He spoke to God after God’s own heart, which he knew by faith. Moses knew, by faith, that his own people were still, and would always be, God’s own people.

The Lord spoke of blotting out the people of Israel and making a new nation out of Moses’ offspring. Moses knew, by faith, as one friend knows another, that there was much more to the Lord than this.

Moses offered to let himself be blotted out, as the punishment for the sins of his people. Here Moses shows the faith of knowing more of the heart of God than you can see (as one friend knows another). Moses knew that one person might give himself as an offering for the sins of many.

There was no other way for Moses to know this than by faith. We know it was in the heart of God to enter this world as one man, in Jesus, and to offer himself for the sins of others: for the sins of the world. Moses knew something deep, deep in the heart of God that was infinite love. Even though he didn’t know the name of God as Savior, in Jesus, Moses belonged to that God, in Jesus.

Photo of the Eclipse: by Laura Swift Engel
West Richland, WA, August 21, 2017

The faceless face of God, for Moses and his people, shrouded in cloud and smoke, was love like lightening, or like looking into the face of the sun, even in eclipse. For people like us (such as we are in this world), with weak eyes and weak hearts, that faceless love was too strong, and too holy, to see and survive. But God would acquire a face of his own choosing, in his own time.

The Gospel of John says this. “No one has seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” (John 1:18; New International Version)

Of course, we don’t know what Jesus’ face looked like, either. For us, by faith, Jesus looks like not what we want, but like what we truly need. And this is what Moses knew, and this is what God’s ancient people, in the exodus, needed to know. This is what we need to know.

There’s an author named Frederick Beuchner, who wrote this about belief and unbelief, and it’s not a stretch to apply this to faith. He says: “Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.” (Frederick Beuchner, “Whistling in the Dark”)

The God without a face, who chose a face in Jesus, is our adventure. This God is the God who is visible to the eyes of a level of faith that knows that God is much more than we can see or hear. He only has no face because he is both our Promised Land and our Adventure.

There’s a poem I love, and I’ll end with that. The poem is “Christ Who Is Our Life” by Adah Richmond. Knowing that God is like this is what faith is about. The poem goes like this:

“Christ Who is our Life”

“I AM.” Who art Thou Lord?

I Am– all things to thee;

Sufficient to thine every need;

Thou art complete in Me.

I AM- thy Peace, thy Joy,

Thy Righteousness, thy Might;

I Am– thy victory o’er sin,

Thy Keeper day and night.

I AM-thy Way, thy Life;

I Am– the Word of Truth;

Whate'er thy lack, I Am– to thee

El Shaddai, enough.

I AM-thy Life within.

Thine everlasting Bread;

Eat of my flesh, and drink of My blood

I AM– what dost thou need?

-Adah Richmond

Faith for Life - Hope for the Whole Person

Preached on Sunday, February 5, 2017

Scripture readings: Isaiah 35:1-10; John 5:1-18

Whenever I read this story about the man healed by Jesus, at the pool of Bethesda, I don’t know what to think. I can’t help asking, “What, on earth, is wrong with this guy?”

Along Lower Crab Creek, Desert Aire/Mattawa WA
January 2017

Of course, there was something physically wrong with him for a long time. John, the author of the gospel, doesn’t tell us exactly what that was. In Greek, John tells us that he was “dried up” and that would suggest that he was withered or atrophied, but we don’t know why. He seems to imply that he was barely mobile, and perhaps couldn’t walk at all.

We don’t know what caused this. The thirty-eight years of his disability probably meant that he had been an invalid for most, if not all, of his life.

Some people think that he had only himself to blame for this. They think that he had done something wrong and that this had happened to him as a result.

Here’s the reason why they think this. It’s because, later, in the Temple, when Jesus found him for a second time, Jesus said a strange thing. Jesus gave him a warning. Jesus said, “See! You are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” (5:14)

Some people think that Jesus was saying that the man’s long suffering was also because of sin, but Jesus may not have meant that at all. Jesus was saying that the man was currently sinning, perhaps even as Jesus was there speaking to him.

Maybe it wasn’t an old danger, but a present one. The sin that Jesus warned him against may have been whispering in his ear ever since his healing.

There was something going on with him. There was something wrong with him.  I believe Jesus was saying that there are worse things in life than to be an invalid, or even to be paralyzed, for thirty-eight years.

Jesus was able to see what was going on in people’s hearts. (John 2:25) He knew what was going on inside of them, just as he still does with each one of us. Jesus warned the healed man because of something in the man’s present, not only in his past.

Yet, maybe there was something wrong with the man that had been going on for a long time: not in the past before his illness but maybe there was something wrong in his heart during that long, long time of suffering.

The clue to this may be in Jesus’ very first words to the man: “Do you want to get well?” We may see what was wrong in the man’s own answer, when that man didn’t answer Jesus with a “yes”. He didn’t say that he wanted to get well.

There are a couple of things we need to know about the world of the man at Bethesda Pool. One fact is that he had to be a beggar who made a living from his suffering. Passers-by would give him money in order to participate in the mercy of God, and to be partners of compassion with God. He probably did very well with this, because he showed a talent for tugging at the heart-strings of those who came to him.

He tried to do this with Jesus, not so much to get well as to make a decent living. And, next to the Jewish Temple, which was practically right next door, he had one of the best locations for the begging business in the world. The Jewish Temple may have been the number one best location, but the pools of Bethesda had to come in second.

It was a spiritual landmark. Bethesda was a phenomenon. Something would happen with the water. The water in the twin pools would suddenly move in a strange way and the first person in would be healed. Some people said that an angel moved the water and gave it miraculous power. When the Romans destroyed the Jewish city of Jerusalem and the Temple, in 70 AD, and then rebuilt it as a pagan city about fifty years later, they restored the pools and they built a temple beside them dedicated to the pagan god Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. Asclepius was the same god who had the winged staff with the snakes that you see as a symbol for doctors and medicine today. Even in the days of Jesus, the pools of Bethesda were a holy tourist trap.

If Jesus healed the man, the man would lose his means of making a living and he would have no skills for supporting himself. He would have to start from scratch at the age of at least thirty-eight.

What would he do? Would anyone with such a history dare to truly desire to get well? If you wondered what might be wrong with the man, and the reason why he didn’t say that he wanted to get well; it might have its roots in that. Even after he was healed, his healing may not have been what he wanted most in life.

His answer to Jesus’ direct question was to avoid giving a direct answer. “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” (5:7)

For one thing, there had to be someone who was available to carry him to his reserved spot at the pools (probably a relative or a family member) and to take him home at the end of the day. That’s how this all worked.

But there was something that sounded like a plea for pity in his voice. He had spent many, many years seeing other people healed, and knowing himself to be passed by. He may have started out wanting to be healed. And yet he found himself being used by his own family. We can only imagine.

As I read the story, I wonder if there was something more there than self-pity. I wonder if there was something much worse going on that could lead to something worse happening to him.

I wonder if his answer to Jesus was the sound-track of his life. I wonder if those words, and more words like them, were constantly running in the background, in his head, all the time, and even when he slept. If that were so, those thoughts would have become something like a poison; something deadly, like anger and judgment, always accusing others, and the world, and himself.

Sometimes I think I have a subtext in my life; of hurt, anger and judgement. My temptation, my sin, is to play that subtext over and over, and I rob myself of life by doing that. Jesus gives me life, every day, abundant and free, and I let the opposite of Jesus drip, and drip, and drip into it. It’s something like the voice of that man by the pool.

I pray about this. I pray to the King Jesus who is so much the king that he refuses to limit himself and what he has to give. Jesus doesn’t hold himself back from people like me. He gladly gives us life. He dies to do this and, even though there is this vein of sin that kills him on the cross, Jesus is the king who is so much stronger than what I have in myself that he can rise from the dead and keep on giving and not be defeated. I need the life from Jesus that is stronger than my sin. I need the life from Jesus that will not let itself be defeated. In this strange healing, we have read the story of this determined King Jesus.

Simply having read the story we have been told something that I haven’t said anything about yet. That is, the man who was healed had no idea who Jesus was. The man who was healed didn’t know that he was in the presence of a healer when Jesus said, “Pick up your mat and walk.” He couldn’t have had faith in Jesus, because he didn’t know who Jesus was. Even when he knew, he didn’t understand.

There is one other person like this man in the Gospel of John. In the ninth chapter, John tells us about the time when Jesus healed the man who was born blind. (John 9) The blind man didn’t know who Jesus was, either.

All the blind man knew was that someone put mud on his eyes and told him where to go in order to wash it off and, when he washed the mud off his eyes, he was healed. Jesus also went looking for him, and told him who he was, and the formerly blind man bowed and worshiped Jesus. (John 9:38)

When the lame man who was healed at the pool was found by Jesus, Jesus warned him that he was in terrible danger from a sin that lurked in him. He responded by going away from Jesus and reporting him to the authorities.

John tells us, in the twentieth chapter of his gospel, about his purpose in writing it. “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

Christ means king in the sense of a very different kind of king than one who is a head of state. The Christ is the king of the kingdom of God. Jesus rules a kingdom that he creates by dying for the sin of the world, so that those who believe in him become truly alive in a way that no one who belongs, heart and soul, to this world is alive.

The Prophet Isaiah, pictures the kingdom of God as a place where all harms are healed. All barrenness is replaced by fruitfulness. “The eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”(Isaiah 35:5-6)

It’s a new world. The Bible calls it a new heaven and earth. This world, with its rebellion, and darkness, and selfishness, and violence, and injustice, and hatred, and victimization (and all of that) is a world that God plans to replace. And God wants to make us into people who belong, heart and soul, to that new world, beginning as soon as we begin to know him, and trust him, and follow him. Jesus is the king of this new life, and Jesus, dying on the cross and rising from the dead, is the way to this new life.

The man born blind was healed when a king he didn’t know came to him in the darkness and gave him sight and light. He got in trouble because of Jesus healing him but, being found by Jesus, and learning who Jesus is, gave him joy and life.

The man who was an invalid for almost forty years was given strength and motion when a king he didn’t know came to his place of begging and ordered him to his feet. His life changed forever.

Like the blind man, he also got in trouble because of Jesus healing him. He was judged and sort of put on probation (probably) and, being found by Jesus, and knowing Jesus as his healer and the giver of a new life, and being warned by Jesus of the dangers of not entering into that life, he chose to go to the judges who condemned him so that he could get off the hook.

He sided with the judgers and the condemners of healing, instead of siding with the giver of healing and life. He sided with judging, instead of siding with compassion. He went to the rule keepers, instead of following the grace giver. He went away from Jesus, instead of worshiping him, or following him. He knew Jesus as his healer, but not as his Lord and Savior.

Jesus gave to both men a grace so perfect and complete that they didn’t have to know anything at all. They didn’t even know enough to have the thing we call faith. It was enough for the king to be faithful to them, and to keep faith with them, even when they couldn’t meet whatever requirements you would think to be necessary for entering God’s kingdom.

The man at the pool is a warning to us. There is a temptation that exists for those who receive wonderful gifts from Jesus.

The temptation is to not enter into the spirit of the gift; to not enter into that grace. The temptation is to choose the old world left behind. The temptation is to go back to the old life, and the old ways, and the old rules. The invalid chose to live a life where he could win points and enjoy a status that he could get by joining the angry, and by joining the judgers.

But I don’t want to judge him. I only want to be warned by him. I see that Jesus is willing to bless anyone, absolutely anyone, whatever that person may deserve. Jesus even loves those who will never love him back.

I want to love Jesus back. I want to be thankful for his grace. I want to be thankful for a life I cannot earn or deserve.  Jesus has died for me, and for the whole world, in order to give to us all a love that is infinitely strong. As the king of that life, Jesus may warn me but never condemn me.

This world is ruled by judgers and condemners who do enormous evil. Anger and hatred are symptoms of this judging and condemning world, which is opposed to the kingdom of God as we see it in Jesus.

The world, as we know it, is a scary place and, even though we know the love and grace of Jesus, we are tempted to revert. We are tempted to go back into that angry, and judging, and condemning world; and we are tempted to live by its rules, even though the power of Jesus offers to set us free and give us that new life.

Jesus is God as the seeker of the lost, the wholeness giver, the healer. Jesus is God as the judge who turns judging upside down, and turns the judgers into the judged. Jesus is God blowing our minds by giving grace to the undeserving, and calling us to blow other people’s minds because we do the very same thing. This is what it means to have life in his name, and to share it with the whole world. 

Faith for Living - Jesus and the Transformers

Preached on Sunday, January 15, 2017 

Scripture readings: Isaiah 25:1-9; John 2:1-11

There’s a “Transformers” movie series which begins when a young guy buys a used Chevy Camaro that proves to have a mind of its own. It turns out that the car can transform itself into a super-intelligent, super-strong robot from another planet.

On that Walk between Live Oak CA and the Feather River
December 2016

It’s a member of an alien race of robots who can transform themselves into mostly motor vehicles of various sorts. Those are the transformers.

There are all kinds of books, and videos, and programs out there that promise to turn you into a transformer. They don’t promise to give you the power to change yourself from one thing into another, but they promise to teach you to change yourself into a different person than you currently are. They promise to teach you to transform yourself into someone smarter, more physically fit, more confident, more successful, sexier, or richer, or some combination of these.

Some of these programs may actually work. They may turn people into transformers.

When I was in high school, my grandma Evans believed that I was in serious need of transforming myself into a different person. So, she gave me a copy of “The Power of Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale, in hopes that I would take it to heart. She hoped that, by taking it to heart, I would become a more confident person.

I gave it a half-hearted try; even though I clearly understood that the book warned me that half-heartedness was doomed to failure. I experimented with it, and I soon felt that it was a program that could only succeed if I hid myself from myself. My experiment only worked when I pretended to be someone else (someone I was not), and I found that I couldn’t really eliminate my old self.

In the end, I gave it up. I didn’t become a transformer.

A couple years later, when I was eighteen, I received an experience of transformation without ever becoming a transformer. The people who knew me as a kid would be able to vouch for this. They noticed the transformation, at the time, and they said so.

My secret of transformation is that I gave up. I had loved the Lord for as long as I could remember. I remember loving God (loving Jesus) when I was three, but there was a lot of understanding that I needed to grow into; and I had to learn to say “yes” to God about those things. When I was eighteen I realized that I had not been saying “yes” to the God I loved.

There’s a common phrase among Christians about “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior”. And I don’t know how well even Christians understand this phrase.

“Savior” is a word we seem to take to mean that Jesus is the source of our forgiveness. Jesus died as a sacrifice for our sins on the cross. That’s true. I had officially accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior when I was about nine. I did this while I was watching Billy Graham on TV, all by myself, at home in our family den.

Actually, I believe I knew something about this long before. That was part of the reason why I loved Jesus.

“Savior” also means rescuer. Jesus is the one who saves the day. He comes to our rescue, and this goes infinitely beyond sin.

When I was eight I almost drowned. And, when I say that I “almost drowned”, I not referring to the time when I really did drown. I really did drown when I was seventeen, in the sense that I wasn’t breathing and I had turned purple when they got me out of the lake.

When I was eight, I only, almost drowned in a swimming pool. When this happened there was a kid who jumped into the pool, and grabbed me, and swam me back to shallow water.

Boy was I ever mad at him. I yelled at him. I told him that everything had been just fine and that I didn’t need his help. That boy was my savior from drowning, and I refused to admit it. I didn’t accept him as my savior, which would have meant admitting that I was in trouble like he said.

Christians accept Jesus as their Savior from the sins that are really bothering them, but they aren’t very open to admitting everyplace where they truly need forgiveness, because there are places where even the best of us don’t want to accept responsibility or blame. Letting Jesus saves us from our sins doesn’t go very far, unless we are willing for him to save us from ourselves.

When Christians accept Jesus as Lord, sometimes it seems that they only mean admitting that Jesus is the big guy, and that he has the power to answer their prayers, if they pray the right way. But the word “Lord” means that he’s the boss. It means that we always say yes to Jesus, and that we never, never say “no”. The best of us have trouble with this.

When I was eighteen, I was faced with a choice of whether I was willing to say “no” to anything Jesus said. I felt, from the depth of my heart, that I couldn’t face it any longer. I could no longer face being someone who said “no” to Jesus.

To the best of my ability, I have stopped saying “no” to Jesus. If you catch me saying “no”, please confront me about it.

For me, positive thinking can only be the willingness to say “yes” to Jesus; and not say “no”.

There is really only one transformer. That one is Jesus.

The Gospel of John tells us that changing water into wine was the first “sign” that Jesus did. The word “sign” means more than a miracle. Sign means identification. A sign is a signal. The signs of Jesus signify his identity. Jesus’ signs are the signals that he sent to tell others who he is.

Wine is a sign for what God does. So is water. All through the Old Testament, God sometimes provides water as needed. God provides water because water is life-giving. God is the life-giver: the maker and protector of life. Water is a sign of God.

The Old Testament also shows God as the wine-maker, or the provider of wine. (Isaiah 25:6; Jeremiah 31:12; Amos 9:13-14; Hosea 2:14-23) When God brings the wine, it’s the sign of joy, and promise, and abundance. When God brings the wine, it is part of the celebration of the union, or the marriage, between God and his people, or even between God and his creation.

In Isaiah, God brings the wine to celebrate the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of a new world where there is no more doom and gloom. There is no darkness. There is no death. There is no grief.

The wine is for everyone who has trusted in God. The wine is for everyone who has been brought by the love of God into that new world that will not end. It is a world where all people are married to God.

It’s a world where all people have been transformed by the transformer God. “The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth.” (Isaiah 25:8)

It also needs to be said that, through the Old Testament, wine also serves as a sign for blood. (Isaiah 63:1) The truth is that the power to transform sinners and the power to transform the world were pictured and foreshadowed by the blood of the sacrifices in the temple for the forgiveness of sins, and by the predictions of the prophets about the great bloody battles that would come at the end of time for changing the old world into the new world.

The blood of the cross became the power to transform people, and to bring a new creation to life. In the gospel, the bearer of the cross brings the wine.

Jesus turned the water into wine in order to show that he is the one who brings the wine. He is the bridegroom of the new world. He is the transformer.

Toward the end of the Gospel of John, John tells us his purpose for choosing to write what he wrote. “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31) John chooses every episode, and every talk of Jesus, in order to show us exactly who Jesus is, and in order to show us how he gives us life.

At the marriage in Cana, Jesus shows us that he is the transformer. He turns water (which is a symbol for life) into wine (which is a symbol for abundance, and celebration, and union).

Jesus shows us that his power can transform our limitations. Jesus shows us that we can live with his abundance, and celebration, and union in our ordinary lives in this world. Jesus shows us that we can live in this world without anger or fear because he will use his power to change this needy world into a new world, in his time.

In the time and the world of Jesus, everyone in town, and people from miles around, would attend any local wedding. The whole world went to your wedding. And they were all supposed to be wined and dined by you.

Your honor depended on this. Shame would follow any failure of hospitality for your part. That shame would follow you all your life.

The family that ran out of wine was probably a poor family doing the best they could, and they were failing. Their failure would not be forgotten, and no amount of positive thinking could prevent it.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, noticed the trouble they were in, and she feared for them. She decided that something needed to be done, and she was sure that Jesus could do it even though he had never given any sign of being able to do something like that before. She had a good reason for knowing this.

In some ways, Mary was the first Christian. She was the first person to have their life changed by Jesus. Doesn’t this make sense? Mary had a God-given identity and calling that came totally by the grace of God in Christ.

Mary was a person of grace who saw that others had a need for grace. She saw that they needed something that only Jesus could give them. She saw them with the eyes of one upon whom the Holy Spirit had come. (Luke 1:35) When the angel told Mary that she had “found favor with God” (Luke 1:30), the word translated as favor is the same word that is translated as grace.

Mary spoke to Jesus on behalf of this young couple and their family. It was one of the first prayers made to Jesus. Jesus sounds like he was surprised by it, and not quite prepared to do anything about it.

Doesn’t this show us something we already know? We may not always be sure that Jesus is prepared to come to the aid of others for whom we pray. We may not always be sure of what he intends to do. It’s true that he might have other plans. So, it isn’t strange that the people who knew Jesus the best felt the same as we do.

Jesus didn’t really answer Mary clearly at all. Mary still had faith in him, and she told the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” (John 2:5)

This is the mystery of not saying “no”. Refusing to say no is not a way of getting what you want from Jesus. It’s simply the only way that we can really trust Jesus as Lord.

Jesus was, and is, the transformer. In a way, Mary (as the first Christian) became a transformer, too. She saw a need. Her heart spoke to her. Her heart was the same heart on whom the Holy Spirit had come. Her heart was the first heart to beat side by side with the heart of Jesus. Timothy Keller writes: “There’s a direct relationship between a person’s grasp and experience of God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice.”

This is what God’s justice is about: confronting a world where (over and over again) we see that the wine has gone. Mary spoke from the experience of a heart that knew this. She spoke to Jesus. She also spoke to the people who needed to be spoken to. She got people to listen to Jesus and not to their own common sense. She got other people to do what they would never have done without her initiative. She played a part in getting the water turned into wine. Mary set it up.

We live in a world where there is love and hope and yet there is not enough of something missing to see it all through. No matter how much we have to love and celebrate, we live in a world where the wine is gone, and we are called to see and confront this, with Jesus’ help, and with prayer, and with the will to do whatever he tells you, and with the will to persuade others.

We live in a shrouded world: shrouded by the sin that is so destructive that it leads to death. Jesus came to bear all that sin and death on the cross and to kill its power by resurrection. Jesus came to take away the shroud and raise the world, and us, to life.

We don’t have the power to turn the water into wine, but we can bring to others our service to Jesus. We can be like the servants, who were the only ones at the wedding who really knew everything that was going on. We can bring out to the world whatever Jesus wants to turn into wine.

Our story can become the story of Jesus and the transformers.

The Incarnation - The Homecoming

Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20; John 1:1, 14-18

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and made his dwelling among us) full of grace and truth….” (John 1:9)

Houses around Desert Aire, WA: December 2016

“The Word” is God speaking to us. It’s God’s self-expression, in which we hear and see his glory, his grace, and his truth at work.

We call this Word the only Son of the Father. It’s deep. It is also the love that lives within God making itself (or himself) real for us. It’s deep. It’s much bigger than us.

The Apostle John, who wrote this gospel, was a well-to-do Jewish fisherman who lived by the Sea of Galilee, in the north part of the Holy Land. There were a lot of Greek speaking people around there, and so John is good with Greek. He writes a very simple, plain spoken form of Greek; but he’s a simple man who is also an intelligent man, and he writes deep. And he writes out of the thoughts of generations of his people.

So, the Greek word he uses for God, the Word, dwelling among us harks back to the Old Testament, when the Jewish people wandered around the desert and lived in tents. It especially takes us back to the Exodus when the people of Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt and traveled through the wilderness to the promised land. John uses a Greek word that could just as well say that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”

I like that because it reminds me of happy things in my family: that tent-pitching thing. Pitching our tent was always a classic time in my family, when I was growing up.

We went camping every summer for a couple weeks. Plenty of other people had campers, but my Dad always said that it wasn’t really camping unless you had a tent.

For my family, like for the people of Israel, that time of tents was a time of escape. For my family, our time in tents was also the Promised Land. For Israel, it wasn’t the promised land, but it was the time when they were most themselves, for better and for worse, walking with the Lord in the desert.

There was a special tent that was pitched every time they stopped. It was the Lord’s tent. The priests of Israel would pitch the Lord’s tent, as God had commanded, in the exact middle of the camp ground.

In Jesus, God has pitched his tent right in the middle of us. He pitched this tent without anyone’s help, except for the help of Mary and Joseph. You might say that all of human life is not a sturdy house, but only a tent: whether you recognize it or not.

The Lord has his tent right in the middle of wherever we are. Do you know that the Lord is right in the middle of wherever you are?

Jesus is God with us. The fact that we are all tenting together is not an escape. It’s the fact that we are on a journey together. And camping means living where the basics are pretty obvious and they take a lot of work.

God pitching his tent with you, and you knowing it, helps sort out the basics. When you really know that God has pitched his ten right in the middle of where you are, you realize that you’re not on an escape and you pay more attention, like most of the old-timers did, to the things that are really important.

For my family, camping was when we were all the most real and, in some ways, we were at our best. All of us are at our most real, and at our most authentic, when we pitch our tents where God pitches his. There’s no real privacy and, when you’re camping, that’s OK. Everybody sees and hears, and everyone knows, including God, and that’s OK.

The tent in Exodus was the place where God’s glory came down, and you could see it. John tells us that the place where God’s glory is really seen (much more than in that tent in Exodus) is the tent we call Jesus. In Jesus, we see that God’s true glory isn’t the cloud of smoke, or the pillar of fire, or the roar of thunder and lightning on the mountain.

God’s glory is to be one of us. God’s glory is to be a baby. God’s glory is to be a craftsman. The Creator was glad to become a carpenter. God’s glory is to sacrifice for people he loves. The Creator, who gave life to the universe, was glad to die to save sinners, and make them a new creation.

The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are full of trouble. If we don’t see this, it’s only because people have gone out of their way to dress up those stories, in books and on the screen.

The gospels tell us plainly about all the trouble of Christmas, if we pay attention. Luke tells us that it was orders for a tax census by the Roman Emperor that took the Holy Family away from their home in Nazareth so that they could be counted in Bethlehem. Matthew gives us King Herod’ command for his soldiers to slaughter the babies in Bethlehem.

John only tells us that there’s a struggle with the darkness. He tells us (in verse 5 of chapter one) that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome it.

We know what it feels like to wonder if the darkness is overcoming the light. We seem to be entering in one of the most unsettled times of the past one hundred years. We live in a time of growing fear, and anger, and doubt, and confusion about the truth.

Jesus grew up to tell us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43) and we can see how far our world has gone from that. We know how hard it has become for us to do it. Yes, the darkness tries to overcome us all.

In Jesus, we have an antidote to the darkness. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” And we read that he is “full of grace and truth.”

The truth of God is a fact, but the truth of God is more than facts. Truth here is just as much about what we mean about trueness when we say that a person is “true blue”. God is true, meaning he is faithful through and through. Jesus shows us the kind of God we can count on.

And grace is about forgiveness, but that’s only because forgiveness is a beautiful gift. A good dancer moves with grace, and that is part of what the Bible means by God’s grace that we see in Jesus.

God, and what God has done in Jesus, is simply beautiful. Jesus is beautiful: in a very manly way, but, also, he is beautiful in a way that can touch the hearts of men and women, boys and girls.

This is the antidote to the world as it is. And the darkness has not overcome it.

They say that all babies are beautiful: so, what about God in the manger? Nowhere else has the ultimate reality become a baby, and a man on a cross. What normal human being would have thought of it, or taken it seriously. We believe this is the real grace and truth that come from God. We believe that this is something that only God could think of, and only God could pull it off. What do you think?