Passionate Jesus - Rip the Veil and See

Preached on Good Friday, March 30, 2018

Scripture readings: Mark 15:21-40

I don’t know where all the pictures in my head have come from that show me the stories of Jesus. I’ve got these pictures in my head. Some of them are moving, talking pictures of the crucifixion.

Some Stations of the Cross
Our Lady of the Desert Parish
Mattawa, WA
Spring, 2017

I see Jesus struggling to breathe, and he raises himself up on the nails in order to take each and every breath. In the end, he’s trembling when he lifts himself to take his final breath. He shouts a loud shout, and I think he says, “It is finished.” Finished means that he has accomplished what he came for.

Then the earth shakes and cracks open in places. The rocking of the world moves the Temple, perched high on its terrace on what they used to call Mount Moriah.

This shaking does something spiritual and miraculous. By the hand of God, the curtain or veil that covers the entrance to the Holy of Holies is ripped open from top to bottom. The Holy of Holies, in Jesus’ time, was an empty room where God concentrated his presence and his attention.

Centurion means the commander of somewhere from eighty to one hundred men in the Roman army. Because it was supposed to have a hundred men, a centurion’s unit was called a century. That would make him the equivalent of something like the captain, or the major, of a company in the United States Army or Marine Corps.

Maybe there wasn’t a whole company or century of soldiers at the cross. Maybe the centurion brought some smaller detail to do the job of the crucifying and guarding of the convicts. But Jesus was a kind of security risk to the province and to the Temple. They were on alert because of Jesus.

I was surprised, this year, comparing the four gospels. I found that it wasn’t only the centurion who came to a strange, miraculous conclusion about Jesus. Matthew says that the whole detail was shaken from their mission and from their dice game.

In just a moment, they took it all in. They found themselves saying a bunch of stuff at the sound of the shout and the earthquake. Probably the whole scene came through for them, along with the uncanny darkness of the sky. What they had heard and seen of Jesus, how he conducted himself, and how the crowd (and how nature itself) responded to his execution.

Together, the detail became a military jury rendering their verdict: “This was an innocent man. This was a righteous man. Surely, this was the Son of God.”

Something grabbed them and changed them. They had done many, many crucifixions in this rebellious province. They weren’t overwhelmed by the cruel and boring detail of crucifying criminals. Jesus made this long, tedious day different.

With a body that was beaten and torn into a bloody pulp, Jesus heaved himself up on the cross to take his final breath. With that breath Jesus bellowed, and dropped, and hung still as the corpse that he was, upon the nails of the cross.

His shout seemed to shake everything. The earth itself shook, and the people steadied themselves upon it, but their hearts shook as well.

The Temple Mount and its sanctuary shook. Its marble walls seemed, almost, to pull apart and snap shut again, but the parting tore in two the veil that hid the holiest place from view. A shaken witness reported that he had seen the veil tear from top to bottom as if it were the work of some invisible giant.

The inner room of the presence of God could be clearly seen, even by those who, in spite of the shaking earth, stood outside the Temple and looked through the line of now completely opened doors. “Look! There’s the room of God!”

The shouting and drooping Jesus was the wounded and bloody hand of God himself, shaking whatever was capable of being shaken. The bloody hand of God tore the veil from the forbidden door.

That same hand also tore the veil that hangs over the place, in human souls, where our hearts go to hide: where we hide our hearts in order to avoid knowing ourselves too well.

Just now, we may not know where our own hearts are, or what they’re hiding, until that wounded, bloody hand of God in Jesus shakes us as it shook the Roman soldiers and officers.

That wounded hand (or maybe it would be better to call it the wounded heart of God) has a special power to shake things up. It has the power to shake and to carry the sins of the world.

That power can shake the whole planet. Its wounds carry the authority of a proven faithfulness (faithful to death) to judge the whole planet; the whole universe; and each and every one of us.

When we meet that hand and heart we meet his carrying that same authority of long ago. We find ourselves shaken, and carried, and judged, and changed.

Through their army life, the centurion and his soldiers understood power and authority. They understood coming into an order of command, and training, and discipline. They understood being changed by that into something they had not been before.

That’s what I wanted to happen to me, at one time, when, late in 1968, I considered enlisting in the armed forces. Then I told my parents what I had decided, and they freaked.

They freaked out big time. They wore me down for days, till I gave up my plan.

I thought it might have made me a new man. In the end, Jesus did that in his own way. He changed me. But it was with the power of that bloody hand and heart. I couldn’t resist that when he grabbed me and held me in his grip.

I think the centurion and his detail became the first converts to Jesus after his death. That would make sense to me. They found out who Jesus is by crucifying him themselves.

Jesus, himself, changed before their eyes into someone they could never have imagined, even though they had crucified so many people before. They became changed because they saw their whole lives, up to that point, in a completely different light, once they recognized what it meant for them to have crucified Jesus (just as we all have). They knew what it meant that Jesus had died because of them (just as he has died because of each one of us). Their understanding of the whole world changed because they now saw how Rome, and its famous laws and Roman peace, that claimed to shape the world for good had been the enemy of the kingdom of God.

The mighty Roman Empire called their Emperor the Son of God, and yet Rome had killed Jesus the true Son of God. These soldiers knew this.

The soldiers would change how they would see themselves from now on. Their real life would change from representing the power of war and military security to serving Jesus the Prince and Servant of Peace, even if they still wore the uniform of Rome. Their true aim in life would turn them into servants of peace.

We all change like that down to our heart and core. We all change like that, down to every detail, when the sacrifice made for us by that wounded, bloody hand and heart have grabbed us and shaken us.

Now we see God and his Son with the eyes of faith. We recognize who God and his Son are, and what they want for us, and what they give to us. We will all be changed. In God’s time everything will change.

Faith's Underbelly - Expectations Versus Surprises

Preached on Sunday, July 23, 2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 14:10-15:3; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Walking around the Feather River: Live Oak, CA
June 2017

You could say that Moses and the Israelites were caught between a rock and a hard place; but in this part of the story they were caught between a superpower and a wet place. Each of us, in our own way, has been caught like that, over and over again. After that, we never struggle with faith, ever again! Or not?

Well, the word of God gives us a pattern of getting caught and getting faith. In our reading, it says: “And when the Israelites saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.” (Exodus 14:31) This is said at the end of chapter fourteen and it will remain absolutely true all the way until chapter sixteen.

The scriptures are inspired to tell us who God is and what he does. They are also inspired to tell us who we are and what we do. I believe what it says, because it certainly fits me.

About God: what we’ve read this morning tells us that God is a warrior (Exodus 15:3) and that he will fight for us (Exodus 14:14). About us: this is the first place that I know of, in the Bible, where Israel is called an army (Exodus 14:20); and what applies to them, applies to us.

This is pretty impressive, until you take a real look and see how they acted. When they saw the Egyptian army coming for them, in the distance, the Israelites basically told Moses, “We told you so!”

“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” (14:11) This is an old, old joke, because of the pyramids. You know: the pyramids were graves. No one could miss them. Everyone could see that there were graves in Egypt. It’s a four-thousand-year-old joke.

The Bible has a sense of humor, because God does. God has to have a sense of humor just to handle his own people.

The Bible shows us that there is a running battle between our expectations and God’s calling for us to trust and obey. But what does it mean, in our readings today, to trust and obey? We are to obey…but how? The guy with the faith is Moses, and even Moses doesn’t know quite what to do next.

The Lord seems to scold Moses for not guessing the improbable (or seemingly impossible) surprise that the Lord has planned. “The Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me?” (14:15) It’s almost as if, by telling his people what to do, Moses is telling God what to do. Moses had a running battle with his own expectations.

Moses gave the people these commands: “Do not be afraid.” “Stand firm.” “You need only be still.” (14:13-14) In some way these all say the same thing. There’s a line from Psalm forty-six, where God says: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) This doesn’t mean, “Do absolutely nothing, and you will know that I am God.”

“Being still” is an inward determination to trust. It’s a kind of peace that enables you to do something: whatever it might be that God is calling you to do. It might be a calling to stop doing something. It might be a calling to come to attention and get ready to go.

Whatever it may be, it’s a way of standing firm. Years ago, during World War II, a British poster carried the motto: “Stay Calm and Carry On.” Those are slightly different words, but they carry the same meaning as “be still.”

The Israelites were in a mood to be still by putting their hands up in surrender. That seemed, to them, to be the best thing to do, if they were smart. I’ve always had the feeling that Moses thought that something entirely different would be smart. It’s as if Moses was saying: “Face the Egyptians, get in battle formation, prepare arms, and see how God will fight for you (meaning: see how God will fight through you, and on your behalf, as you do your part).”

For Moses, as the guy with the faith, knowing God just a little bit, this seemed, to him, to be the best thing for them to do, if they were smart.

It can seem smart to trust God, and stand your ground, and do what you must. Sometimes this is the right thing to do. Sometimes I’ve been smart enough to do just that.

Apparently, God’s idea of a really smart thing to do was for them to cross the Red Sea on dry land. But who could have had enough faith and trust to have thought of that? It’s as if the growth and survival of God’s people depended on God giving them options that their faith could never hope to have imagined, or foreseen, or held onto.

Another part of the pattern is that, in order to live as people of faith, we seem to need to be confronted by the truth of what we are without God (or without faith). We seem to need to be confronted by the truth of what we may become with God (or with faith).

God’s people, Israel, needed to know that. Even Moses needed to know that. And so do we.

Looking at it another way, even Moses needed to be confronted with the limitations of his own faith. In this sense, faith is not enough. Our faith, or our lack of it, can be so much about us, and not about God.

Moses was showing real faith, but the limitation of that faith was that he was prepared to use faith to make something happen, and faith is something that rests in the faithfulness of God. The faithfulness of God often comes to us in surprising ways.

Surprise is at the core of knowing God and having a relationship with the Lord.

We see this, all the way through the Bible. Moses asked God for his name. God told him that he would be known by a name that wasn’t a name at all, but a verb and a state of being. God was “I Am Who I Am”, or “I Will Be Who I Will Be”. This verb of God is a state of complete independence and self-being (uncreated and unconditioned being, if you can imagine that).

This absolutely independent God needs nothing, and, so, (obviously) he creates everything. God wants to change the world through a nation of people who know him, and so he, obviously, called an old, barren couple named Abraham and Sarah to be the parents of that nation.

The real core of the God who is known through his surprises, is the gospel. This uncreated and unconditioned being, beyond time and space, became a human being, bound by time and space, born as a regular baby, and taught and raised like any normal child, and trained by his father to work as a carpenter. This perfect, uncreated, and unconditioned being got himself killed on a cross by everything that was wrong with this world in order to set us free from everything that was wrong with this world. Even set us free from sin and death. What better way could there be, to beat sin and death, than being killed by sinful humans?

This is what Paul claims to be the foolishness of God and the weakness of God. And Paul claims this foolishness and weakness to be the source of God’s his victory and the source of our new life in God. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 25)

Who would have guessed it? It’s a surprise. How strange it is for God to love surprises. His word tells us that this is his way.

We want to have faith in proven techniques for dealing with God. We want the Bible to provide us with such techniques.

It’s true that there are disciplines for a life with God, and the Bible tells us these disciplines: prayer, servanthood, worship, study, generosity, the love of our enemies, and so on. There are principles of life: laws, wisdom, and so much more; and these are to be found in the Bible. But these are not the core of the message.

The core of the message of the Bible is this completely surprising God. This God is absolutely beyond us, and beyond our control, and this God has a purpose and something he is aiming at. It’s something that he wants to share with us. God wants to take us along with him, and it’s all too big for us. It’s beyond our expectations, and we wouldn’t understand it if we knew what it was beforehand.

The Bible tells us that this God comes to us in our need and our abject slavery; like the slavery of Israel in Egypt. This God gets really close and takes us with him to freedom and life. You can call it an exodus. You can call it the way of the cross and the resurrection. You can call it Jesus: God in Christ; Christ with us. Christ in us. What a surprise!

And so, there we find ourselves, caught between a rock and a hard place, or caught between a superpower and a wet place, and there is some impassible barrier between us and the goal. God makes our own limitations clear, and that makes the impossible all too clear. God says, “Go forward through the impassible, impossible barrier. That is the road to my plan for you.”

Perhaps you have passed through the impossible with God, in Christ. I have. But it’s always something new. I never know what’s next. The Bible tells me so. I have no idea what those surprises will be. I pray to know them when I come to them. Don’t you?

I hope that the church can always be this place where we make it through the impossible barriers and find the road to God’s promises together. The barrier, and the road that takes us through it, will be God’s surprise. Let’s trade in all our smartness, and all our expectations, for God’s surprises.

We should know our exodus. Most of all, we should know our Jesus. In Jesus, we meet the God who is the master of surprise.

Journey of Faith - Partnership with God

Preached on Sunday, October 30, 2016

Scripture reading: Genesis 18:1-25 ff

There’s a joke that asks the question: “Do you know how to make God laugh?” And the answer is this: “Tell God your plans.”

Tall Timber Ranch
Leavenworth, WA
October 2016

When we begin to love and trust the Lord, we also begin to have a sense of humor about the difference between our priorities and the Lord’s priorities. We grin and confess that God knows what he’s doing.

But the Bible (in the stories of Abraham and Sarah) shows this joke working the other way. The question is: “Do you know how God makes you laugh?” And the answer is this: “God makes you laugh by telling you his plans.”

God made Sarah laugh by telling her his plan for her to have a baby in her old age. Sarah wasn’t particularly guilty in her laughter. In the chapter before this (Genesis 17:17), Abraham also laughed at the very same promise. He had heard the same, basic promise, in one form or another, so many times, and nothing ever came of it. How could it?

Eventually, the baby would arrive, exactly as promised. Each time Abraham and Sarah laughed at God’s plan for them to have a baby, God told them to name the child “Laughter”. The Lord told them to name the baby “Isaac” which means “laughter.” True to form, when that baby was born, Sarah did laugh. (Genesis 21:6) Or, at least she claimed she did.

Isaac was God’s joke on them. It was a sign that God understood laughter and, for God, even the laughter of disbelief is not a disqualification for true faith. The old couple who laughed at the impossible are the parents of our own faith.

This has a lot to teach us about the journey of faith, which is a kind of partnership with God. And it has a lot to teach us about the journey of prayer, which is also a partnership with God.

Faith and prayer are a way of what we might call “living in the presence of God.” This, in fact, is what human beings were created for. The story of the Garden of Eden teaches us that you and I, along with all human beings, were made to be at home in a place, and in a life, where God comes, and meets with us. The whole world was meant to be in sync with heaven and the kingdom of God.

But Adam and Eve teach also us that we have wanted to get a bit outside of the presence of God. Only the problem is that you can’t get just a little bit outside the presence of God, and his life and glory. The world, as it is, shows us what comes from being a bit outside the presence of God.

This mysterious meeting in which the Lord came to Abraham and Sarah in the form of three men tells us about what it’s like to “live in the presence.” It tells us about faith and prayer.

It shows us that there is a pattern of give and take, in faith and prayer. It really is a relationship, and that relationship is personal. God takes his relationship with us personally. God weighs his part in it. God weighs his input, and pushes us, and pulls at us, and God is not afraid to make us laugh. God is not afraid to make promises that we will doubt and laugh at.

The story’s strange. In a world like ours, and with people such as we are, it should strike us as strange, and a little crazy, seemingly, and a little laughable.

Abraham’s head was probably nodding as he sat in the shade of the flap of his tent, at siesta time, in the heat of the day. Suddenly he saw three men in front of him, standing out in hot the sun. We don’t know how he knew that he was in the presence of the Lord. Abraham speaks to them as if they were one, and they speak to him as one. In the next chapter, the three become two.

Let’s not worry about what this means. Meeting God is strange. Faith is strange. Prayer is strange. Face it!

Abraham ran up to them and bowed with his forehead, touching the dirt. He called them Lord. Why did he offer them water to wash their feet? Were God’s feet dirty?

He begged them to stay for a morsel, and off he went, running all over the place. First he ran into the tent to have Sarah bake three loaves of bread.

Then he ran to the cow herd, and slaughtered a prize calf on the spot, and told a kid to skin it, and clean it, and roast it on a spit over the fire. How long was all this going to take?

When everything was ready, and the places were set, Abraham stood beside the picnic cloth waiting to serve as needed. The good host is there to serve.

This is hospitality, and it runs all the way through this chapter. All the way through, in his actions and words, Abraham showed that he was putting the Lord infinitely higher than himself, and putting himself to the side.

This is part of the strangeness of prayer and faith, because people like us always want life to be about us. We want to come out on top, even with God.

The Abraham sort of hospitality is a lesson for us. We learn to speak with God, and listen to God, while we stand to the side of ourselves. In prayer and faith, we stand to the side of ourselves, and we make room for God to be God.

At the same time, God is also our host, with a hospitality all his own. The Lord treated Abraham like a fellow expert, or even as a critic. The Lord stood to the side of himself in order to show Abraham what he was working on; what he was up to.

The Lord was like an artist standing away from his art to let someone, whom he wants to please, enjoy it. The Lord was like a cook, with something on the counter, or on the stove, standing aside to show the guests the meal the cook is making for them. Although God is God; God sees us as his family, or his friends, and stands aside to make room for us. God came as a human in Jesus to make room for us.

When the Lord said of Abraham, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” And the Lord also said, “For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just…” (Genesis 18:17-19) The “I have chosen him” part is a friend word. It’s a partnership word.

Hebrew is so different from English. This word “chosen” is also a word of recognition. It is like suddenly recognizing that the person in front of you is a friend or a potential partner. It’s like love at first sight.

I knew a widow who remembered the day she first met the man who was going to become her husband. The year would have been about 1920. She was walking, with a friend, down the Main Street of her home town, and she saw two young men leaning against the wall of a store; and she saw one of the young men point at her, and say to his friend: “I’m going to marry that one.”

Chosen means a recognition like that. Sometimes our own recognition of God comes like that. We sense that God experiences the same thing with us all the time: love at first sight, all the time.

The idea is that the Lord has decided that Abraham is more than a creature: and so are we. Abraham is the friend, and even the partner, who needs to be in on the secret. Abraham shares responsibility with the Lord for getting a certain job done. That job is being a blessing to the world. The job includes understanding what is right and just, and living accordingly.

Abraham took the Lord up on this and became the Lord’s partner in the matter of what to do about Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham said: “Far be it from you to do such a thing: to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25)

These strange things, called prayer and faith, make for pretty daring talk. The point is that this is the talk of partners, as unequal as we are to God. We are God’s partners in caring about what is right and just, and doing it, and making sure that we’re on the same page with God.

In some strange, way God agreed with Abraham about what was right. In the same strange way, God agrees with us about the way things should be.

We see what it means to live out our agreement with God, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10) Praying “thy will be done” includes the prayer for God to enable us to do his will on earth, just as the angels, and our brothers and sisters, do God’s will in heaven.

We are the children of God’s kingdom who have been placed here to do God’s work. We need to ask God what he wants us to do for his kingdom here, where we live. This is what prayer and faith are all about.

Prayer and faith are also about receiving God’s blessings. Part of this includes receiving God’s blessing of partnership that we’ve been thinking about.

It also includes letting God open our closed doors. Sarah laughed, just as Abraham had done, at the closed door of the blessed baby. The baby was their impossibility. It was the thing they could not do. God’s blessing includes what he may tell you about the closed doors of your life.

They had come to terms with the closed doors of their lives, and they had made other plans. It was their way of giving up. God told them to stop doing this.

I don’t know what to say about this. In “The Singing Nun” Sister Maria says that the Mother Superior had a saying: “Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window.”

It may seem like that. That is part of what you and I need to pray about. We need to take God’s blessing into our hearts, and not laugh at it. At least we need to do more than laughing. We need to find the door of God’s promise that we have closed and that God wants open. It might not be what you think.

God arrives, and we hardly know what’s going on. Prayer with God includes our hospitality, God’s recognition, God’s blessings, our questions, our requests, treating God as God.

Prayer and faith are like that strange discussion between the Lord and Abraham about what the Lord was doing about Sodom, and about what was right and just. Life in God’s presence is just that: it’s a discussion.

Abraham wasn’t haggling with God about numbers. Some people think that, if Abraham had argued God down to saving Sodom even if there were only one righteous person there, that the destruction would never have happened.

The discussion wasn’t haggling. It was an exploration in which Abraham got to understand God better. The point is that God doesn’t count numbers at all. If it’s about numbers at all, the story tells us that God values innocent life even when it is a tiny minority. Goodness counts more than evil. Goodness carries more weight. In fact, goodness carries all the weight, all the way.

God understood what it meant to spare Sodom for the sake of goodness, and God had been sparing Sodom all along. God had used Abraham and his men, in battle, to spare Sodom.

The Hebrew word for “spare” (as in sparing the city) is also a word for forgiveness, and it is also a word for carrying something. The gist of it is that forgiveness carries sin: forgiveness bears sins. In his exploration of God, Abraham got a glimpse of something he had never thought of before: that God’s forgiveness means that God carries our sins. In some way, the burden that God carried in Jesus on the cross must have included Sodom.

Justice, in Hebrew thought, is the process of carrying out decisions that will put an end to evil and making it possible for goodness to live. When God forgives our sins because he carried them, in Christ, on the cross, it means God putting an end to the evil within us, and within all human being, and making it possible for goodness to live in its place, if we will embrace this promise.

That is what it means to die in Christ and rise in Christ. It’s part of what Paul meant, in Galatians, when he wrote: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Abraham didn’t see all of that. He only saw that God might do such a thing as carry the sins of sinners so that they might live.

If Abraham saw anything in his discussion of what to do about Sodom, he saw that God was good and cared about goodness. Abraham saw that God cared about what was right and just. Abraham saw that God could be trusted, even when things didn’t turn out as he hoped and prayed.

The purpose of prayer is to explore the heart of God. Our exploration is for the purpose of knowing God, and living in his presence by faith and trust. God teaches us, as he taught Abraham, that daring (and almost irreverent) questions are not out of place in a life of prayer and faith. You can discuss daring things with your friend; and here we are taught to be God’s friend, and we are taught that God (as God) wants to be our friend.

This is what our journey in life is about. We live by faith and prayer. We learn to be God’s partners and God’s friends.