Lord, Who Am I in You? – Equipped and Under Orders

Preached on Sunday, May 5, 2019

Scripture readings: Genesis 1:26-31; Matthew 28:16-20

There’s a friend of mine who has told me that he became a Christian when he held his first baby child in his arms. He knew, in his heart that he, as he was, was not the man to raise this child. He needed to become a new man. So, my friend gave his life to Christ, so that he could be a wise, loving, faithful father.

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA
Late April, 2019

The truth is that my friend was raised in a Christian home and seemed to belong to Christ already. But, his baby daughter became the witness commissioned by Jesus to go to the nation of Washtucna and make a disciple out of her new father, teaching him to observe all the Jesus had commanded her.

Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 RSV) My friend became a new man for a new world: the new world of fatherhood. By the way, my friend’s wife was always a saint. She must have seen his future when she said, “I do.”

My friend saw his old world passing away. In the bigger sense our whole world is passing away, ever since Jesus died and rose from the dead. (1 John 2:17) A new world has begun because of Jesus.

To us, this world still looks like a dying world. We will only see that new world of Jesus when he comes again. We live in a new creation and we, who are in Christ, are a new creation, even though we don’t look anything like new.

We are called by the Lord to live as his new images in this new creation. We know there must be different rules and a different calling than we had in the old creation, when we were trying to make ourselves in our own image, in those bad, old days in that bad, old world that was turned away from God.

God gave my friend a new calling, with his new heart, in the new world called fatherhood. This new calling was what we might call a covenant; a fancy Bible word for a holy promise bringing and holding God and human beings together.

The last few lines of the Gospel of Matthew are such a covenant, such a holy promise, that brings us and holds us together. Through this promise, we have a relationship of grace and empowerment with the Lord Jesus.

Jesus begins his new promise like this: “Behold, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” And Jesus completes his new promise like this: “And, lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Jesus places himself at the beginning and at the completion of the promise to show that he is the one who holds it all together, for us, from the beginning to the end. The grace and the empowerment promised to us by Jesus is very clear, here.

What Christians commonly call “The Great Commission” is our calling and mission in the world that has been claimed by the authority of Jesus. Jesus came into our old, broken, rebel world from the throne that he shared with his Father in heaven. He dispensed with his heavenly authority for a while: while he was growing up, and working, and journeying toward the cross and the tomb. Jesus became truly human for us, in order to claim us from the inside out.

The classic way for an explorer to claim a new land for your own nation is never by gazing at its shoreline through binoculars and saying some magic, claiming spell. You have to set your own foot inside the new land and raise your nation’s banner.

Jesus set his feet inside the broken world of the human race, in flesh and blood, as though he was making himself a citizen of the place. Then Jesus raised the banner of the cross and claimed us for his kingdom.

Jesus built the only kind of human life in which we can follow in his footsteps. He built this new shape of human life for us when he was baptized for our repentance, and received the Holy Spirit, just as we all must baptized for repentance and receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus opened the door into what we must all receive, in order that we may be washed clean in our hearts, and be moved, and enabled, and directed by the Holy Spirit in our own lives. So, Jesus moved in first, into the new world of repentance, and baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus claimed authority over our transition from our old life into our new life.

He did this before us, and he did it for us, so that we don’t take those alone. Our repentance, our baptism, and our life in the Holy Spirit are just as good as his, because he walks with us through it.

Jesus pushed his authority further when he made his way to the center of our hearts and took our sin and rebellion upon himself, on the cross, and made our lives stronger than sin and stronger than death in the resurrection.

Jesus reclaimed human dominion in this world when he reclaimed us in birth, in life, in death, and in resurrection; and defeated the powers of Hell and the Devil. In Jesus, there is no longer any place for us to go where he hasn’t been already. He is with us always, in so many ways, until all the ages and all the places of creation are brought together for the new heaven and earth.

Now that he has created and claimed the new earth and our new life, Jesus has sent us on a mission a bit like the mission of Adam and Eve in the old creation. They were commissioned to “dress and keep the earth”; or to “work it and take care of it”. (Genesis 2:15 KJV and NIV) This was the dominion of Adam and Eve. It was their rulership over the earth: to work on the earth and take care of it, to be servants and guardians of it.

The Great Commission of Jesus for us doesn’t take the First Commission away. Instead, Jesus adds the mission of partnering with him to care for and protect the new human world by bringing our living witness to Jesus wherever we go, into all the nations, or just into our own nation.

We are to go to all nations. If we don’t go to all the nations, then we go to all the people around us.

We take part in the Lord’s work of recreating everyone who will listen, and be moved, and follow. Everyone is beloved by the Lord, and the Lord’s greatest joy is for them to become new creations where the old has passed away.

This is where being in the image of God comes in. The image of God is not having a face, and hands, and feet, and internal organs. The image of God is not some spirit, soul, mind, and body thing. God’s image isn’t even a matter of being a person of self-awareness and purpose, although that comes a lot closer. God’s image is intimate relationship. God’s image is intimate, faithful love.

The idea of a mirror comes into this, in the Bible: “seeing in a mirror dimly, and then face to face (2 Cor. 3:18)” or looking into “the law as into a mirror (James 1:23.” Human sin interrupted the faith that comes from looking into the Lord. Human sin interrupted our ability to look at any time and see all that God is; and caring for all that God cares about. In Jesus, God has stopped and untangled this interruption.

Because of this, you can pay good attention (quality attention) to everything that matters most to God in your life and, yet, center your attention on God at the same time. You can play with your kids. You can pay your bills. You can work at your job, and your art, and your garden. You can work on your check book or online banking site. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

You can write a book or read a book. You can watch television and hear the news. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

That’s what being the image of God is about. Then, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are saying, whatever you are doing is what God would do if God were you. Then people will look at you and see God: see Jesus, see God in Jesus Christ, in you. They may not know it. But they may crucify you for it just as easily as they may praise you for it.

That will be one of the ways you can measure your competence, your abilities, your success. For better or for worse you will play and fit the role of Jesus. You will spread the new creation for the new world; the new heaven and earth that are coming.

Making disciples means bringing people into the image-changing and image-making that comes from this intimate relationship. You learn from Jesus by listening and watching. You learn from Jesus by following, which means going where he wants to go: not to the righteous but to sinners. You will be the good physician. You will be the good nurse to those around you.

To baptize them means to give them a good, Christ centered death and resurrection in Jesus. They will die to themselves and live in Christ.

Teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded you means bringing them all back to your own calling. Wherever Christ has found them, that is the starting line of their part of the race in the image-of-God relay.

They will love taking care of and protecting the least of the people around them. They will love bringing others into the life that makes us the image of God by intimacy: looking and listening and following the presence and purpose of God. You teach others to observe all that the Lord has commanded you by sharing your life’s work and your life’s discoveries and your greatest loves with them.

Then the whole business spins around, and around, and around. It goes from generation to generation, family to family, country to country. It’s like a country folk dance, or a square dance, passing under the over-arching arms of the ones who are smiling at you through the lands and the ages of the kingdom of God.

There was a man whose name I can’t remember, and whom I have never met, but Christians in my home town used to talk about him. He came to my home town, from South Korea to America, because God called him to be a missionary to us.

The Americans had brought their faith to his country. Now the Lord called him to bring his faith to ours.

He was smart but, most of all he was humble and childlike. He was in a new world, for him, and other Christians helped him as they could. By helping him, they learned to grow in their own faith through him. Non-believing Americans understood the good news of Jesus better for having known him.

I don’t remember what became of him. It’s only one example of how The Great Commission works. It’s how the sacrifice and the resurrection of God in Christ creates the new creation around us, as we live face to face with the presence of Jesus.

Jesus holds us together, through the strength of his promises, for as long as the ages and worlds gather together in his kingdom. Jesus is with us always, as we go with him into this bold new resurrection world.

Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Three - Our Relation with God Restored

Preached on Sunday, January 27, 2019

Scripture readings: Romans 5:1-11; Matthew 16:13-28

Wandering around Malakoff Diggins
Near Bridgeport Bridge and North Bloomfield
California, May 5, 2015

The summer when I was eight years old, I went to YMCA Camp (Camp Osceola, near Big Bear, in the mountains of Southern California). YMCA is, or was supposed to be, a Christian organization, and one morning, toward the end of my week at Camp Osceola, a bunch of the younger campers were gathered at the campfire circle and we were given a talk about knowing God, and the greatness and beauty of God and his love. I’ve forgotten most of the talk.

Then we were all blindfolded, and guided by a bunch of the older boys through the forest. This is in a part of those mountains where there are ten-thousand-foot peaks.

Suddenly, bright light shone through our blinders. We knew that we had come out of the forest. The older boys sat us down on the ground, and the talk went on, something more or less like this.

“Every one of your lives is like a walk on a trail through the forest. You might walk on your path as though you were blind and didn’t see any of the beauty or greatness of God’s creation, but you can meet God through his creation. You can know for yourself how great, beyond your understanding, God is: how high, and beautiful, and deep, and lasting his love for you is. If you could know God, you would love him and never forget him. You would never forget how great he is.”

Then we were told to take off our blindfolds. We saw each other sitting on a wide, rocky shelf, on the top of a high cliff and, across the canyon, was one of those mountains that soared far higher than its tree-line, in rocky peaks and crags.

I felt as though my heart skipped a beat and then started racing. I got goose-bumps all over.

We’re not supposed to make images of God to tell us what he is like. Any image we try to make will fall short and confuse us, and distort our way of life more than it could possible help. But I have images of God in my head.

I sometimes think of God as being like a mountain so high that it will take my whole life to get to the top and see the world on the other side. I love mountains.

I don’t think I would ever want to climb one with ropes, and picks, and my own hands. I would rather love the mountains by walking on them. I’ve walked to the top a few mountains between eight and eleven thousand feet in elevation.

One of those was Mount Rose, between Lake Tahoe and Reno. It’s elevation is over ten thousand feet. I lived close enough to take multiple walks up to its summit, and once I took my youth group to the top. Below a certain height there were multiple trails, and you could use these to see more of the beauties of the mountain. You could wander through meadows and different groves of forest on the mountain-side.

If I had lived there long enough, I would have known Mount Rose from its many sides, and angles, and gentle, and sharp, and wide places, and ridges, and ravines, all over its slopes. I loved that mountain.

That’s part of how I think of God. God is a mountain so big, so high, that you can walk all over the Lord and get to know so much about him to love and cherish. I got to know God this way, because, somehow, I met God in a new way one summer morning when I was eight years old.

Sometimes I climb the mountain of God when I contemplate deep things in the Bible. Sometimes I climb when I’m exhausted by worry, or by puzzlement over what to do next. I might climb the mountain of God when I have a voice to sing with. I do it when I walk through this beautiful desert country.

Lately I’ve been using an image of God that my Baci (Babcia, my Polish grandmother), gave me, when she heard that I was planning to go into the ministry. It’s a small white statue of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms. She thought it was going to glow in the dark. She was disappointed when I told her that it didn’t, but that I loved it anyway.

I loved her. Now this Jesus who doesn’t glow in the dark represents a long, long love that I have lived with, or tried to live with, in good times and bad times, in the church, as a caregiver to the spiritual needs of others.

So lately I’ve been holding my Baci’s Jesus and talking to him as I hold him in my hands. For me, these days, it’s a good way to climb the mountain of God. It’s part of how I know “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. (Romans 5:1)

In our reading from Romans chapter five, Paul tells us how he knew “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. We know who God is because God, in Christ, gave us a free pass into his presence, at great cost to himself.

Paul’s picture of knowing God looked like one of the wonders of the ancient world called The Temple of the Lord, overlooking the city of Jerusalem: The Temple of the Living God.

Paul’s picture of knowing God in the Temple finds the Temple changed. In Jerusalem, only the High Priest had access to the innermost room, the Holy of Holies. God had promised to make his name to live in that room.

In that culture, the word “name” means authority, and the mysterious substance of what you are and what your life means. When the Lord made his name dwell in that innermost place, it meant that you could get to be with him there, if it was allowed.

In the real Temple, the High Priest could only enter that place of the presence once a year, and only if he brought with him the blood of a sacrifice that cleansed him and his people from their sins.

Paul says that his way, and the way that he taught others about knowing God, was like a Temple where anyone could come into the presence of the Lord, any time at all, if they and their sins had been cleansed by the sacrifice and the blood of Jesus. Yes, this is how me meet and know God: “when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son,” (Romans 5:10)

Paul also says: “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (5:5) We don’t know God by taking off our own blindfolds, but by the Father giving us the Holy Spirit to take off our blindfolds.

In Matthew, Peter didn’t know who Jesus was until the Father showed him, and I’m sure there was the silent power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, to show the true identity of Jesus to his disciple.

This happens to us, as well.

We see Jesus on the cross, crucified to bring us peacefully back home to his home, and to be at home truly in the presence of God. It’s the Holy Spirit who has the power to open our eyes to see the Lord Jesus on that cross, and to know that we are welcomed back to a relationship with God. Faith, peace, grace, glory, perseverance, a maturing character, hope, love, joy and celebration come into our lives through our relationship with God our Father, the Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Holy Spirit.

You don’t find these things anywhere else, although it is amazing how willing the Lord is to give all of this to his enemies. This gift is for his enemies: including us!

Maybe that’s part of the reason Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who knows just how far this grace will spread, in the end?

We were all created for a relationship with God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s our true purpose. It’s what we are designed for: what everyone in the world is designed for. Think what pictures come to you, what smells, what sounds, what flavors, what words help you to know God?

There may be a word, or a sentence, or a story in the Bible that helps you to know God. There had to be some experience that exposed your need for something more, in order to know God: a newborn baby, falling in love and proposing, losing a job, being in debt, making a big mistake, walking in the rain. You found that you had a need, and that need turned out to be God.

Everyone needs this, and God is big enough to meet the needs of every one of his creatures. You understand your own needs well enough to want to give help and care for the needs that others have for God.

In our reading, in Romans, there are the treasures of faith, hope, and love: the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit. Not everyone will admit their need for these. Not everyone understands or even knows their need for these.

People might have reasons to fear us Christians and the church; or at least dislike what we stand for, to them; although most people are charitable enough that they try to overlook these faults in us.

There will come some time when those we know, or work with, or play with will need a foundation to strengthen them, you don’t even need to call it faith until you get to a certain point, and then you can surprise them by what faith means to you.

There will come a time when the people around you will lose hope. They may feel this as weariness, or grief, or fear. You may have been given some understanding of these things, through your own life, and you know how a relationship with God will teach them hope, as it taught you. You can lead them through this change into hope.

A time will come when someone around you has their need for love exposed. I think it might be easier to talk about love, but not about the painful mistakes of love. People hide from love. They avoid the changes that love will make in their life. On Facebook, my persimmon friend David posted a joke that said: “I told my wife that she should embrace her mistakes . . . Then she smiled and hugged me.”

You have been given some gift for knowing how to care for those in need of love.

Paul’s letter is the letter of a helper, a caregiver, dealing with the spiritual needs of others. Paul was what we need to become. He is someone who has died and risen with Jesus. What we have to share, in the school of Paul and Jesus, is to know a glory that dies to bring us in. We become such people. In our turn, we die in order to rise with the Son of the Living God, and lead others where we have gone with Jesus. Just don’t forget your own need for meeting with Jesus. There’s more you need to know.

Kingdom of the Caregivers - Power in the Scars

Preached on Sunday, January 13, 2019

Scripture readings: Psalm 38:1-22; Matthew 4:18-25

I’ve never preached from Psalm Thirty-Eight before. And, now’s the last time I can say that.

A Walk near Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
Dec. 2018

The truth is that I have read this Psalm every year for many years, but (for this sermon) I was reading it for you, so it was important. I opened the door to the Psalm, and stepped into the shadows, and, all of a sudden, I found myself falling down, and down, into a three-thousand-year-old brain. Well that kind of thing happens all the time, when you read the Bible.

I asked this three-thousand-year-old brain what was going on. As you can guess, it was hard to understand him.

The page in front of me (at verse nine) said, “I groan in anguish of heart.” But the three-thousand-year-old brain was screaming something like: “My heart is feebly sighing itself away, and I roar in pain at the mere sound of it.”

Verse four reads: “My guilt has overwhelmed me.” The ancient brain seems to say: “I’m in way over my head. I’ll never climb out this. I’m buried alive.”

Do you like crawling under a house? The ancient brain in the Psalm feels like he’s trapped in a passage under a house and can’t get out.

Verse four reads: “My wounds fester.” The ancient voice seems to say: “My body’s a stinking puss-ball.”

Well, there’s quite a bit of that going on here, as usual. The ancient guy cries that this is because of his sins. It’s because that sin made him so stupid, and made his life such a disaster. Nobody wants to go near him. You know why. They’re all saying: “I don’t want to remember him like that.”

This is what he’s talking about. The funny thing is that he never tells us a single thing about what he’s done wrong.

What sins could go so wrong as his have? He doesn’t say. I probably wouldn’t want to say what I had done either. Sometimes my sixty-seven-year-old brain does that.

The best thing I can say about the ancient brain is that: “This guy needs help.”

To shorten up this sermon: What this ancient guy really needs is for someone like Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John to come by and be the fishers of men that Jesus told them to be, and please, please fish him out his mess.

After all, that’s what Jesus wanted them to do. Jesus was starting up his kingdom. He was starting to fix the whole world. Jesus was fixing to start a whole new heaven and earth. He’s not finished yet, but it’s our job to help Jesus, as disciples just like the first ones: fishing people out of their messes, until the kingdom comes. “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19)

Jesus is pretty smart and he must have deliberately looked for the fishermen first. If Jesus had found Matthew the tax-man first, I don’t know what we would do with the concept: “Follow me, and I will make you tax collectors of men.”

The concept of “fishers of men” is such a strange thing because there’s something in it that makes us sure that we know what Jesus must have meant by it. But it certainly doesn’t tell us what to do with the people after you have hooked them, or netted them, and pulled them into your boat, or in to shore.

Once you’ve got them, can you ever be done with them? No! Jesus never works that way. Fishing the guy out from under the house comes much closer, because it really gives you a story that you both will share a part in as long as you live. You can always relate to the guy you fished out from under the house.

Jesus and his kingdom (which the church is part of) is about much, much more than seeking, and finding, and pulling people in. The next time we hear about the kingdom of God, the context is this: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23) For Jesus, fishing for people was more about helping them out of their old life and into a new life.

Scholars argue over whether the main problem of the man in the Psalm was his sin or his sickness.

Maybe it was neither one. In the end of that Psalm, the guy seems to say that his suffering and his sin came from trying to do what was right. “I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin. Many have become my enemies without cause; those who hate me without reason are numerous. Those who repay my good with evil lodge accusations against me, though I seek only to do what is good.” (Psalm 38:18-20)

This strange state of affair gives us two basic options. One is that this man has come down to lying rather than confess his actual wrongdoing. But I know that God gave us this Psalm here for a better reason than that. Most of us know that it’s not so hard to do the right thing in the wrong way and completely screw everything up: including those you wanted to help the most.

I go with that one.

To be a fisher of someone like that; to try to help someone who doesn’t know what to make of his own actions; someone who has struggled so long that they have given up on themselves and they just want to wait until God helps them know what to think and what to do: that’s what it means to be a fisher disciple.

Everyone else seems to have failed him. Everyone has put their two cents in and thrown up their hands and left him to himself. What will you do if you are a real fisher?

The sin-sick guy of the Psalm is a person of faith who just needs God’s help. He needs the kingdom of God to come to him and give him a new chance, and a new life, and wisdom to live by. Speak Lord. “Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Savior.” (Psalm 38:22)

Someone who belongs to the kingdom of God (like Peter, Andrew, James, and John; and you and me) needs to come and fish this guy out (whatever that happens to mean), and that could mean anything.

Any of us can feel like someone trapped under a house and taking forever to find their way out. Any of us can feel like a puss-ball. Even believers can spiritual go to a place like that when they get worried, or fearful, or cocky. We go out on our own and we shouldn’t be surprised at where this takes us.

Being a disciple means helping people in their need. Their need can be not knowing who God really is. Their need may lie in their not knowing that God, working in Jesus, on the cross, is what gives us a new life and all the help that the love of the family of Jesus can give.

The Lord’s Supper is the gift of the Lord to call us to come to him for forgiveness, life, and every kind of help we may need.

If we’ve ever been trapped under a house, that makes us experts of going in and fishing anyone out from there. Our having been trapped is like a certificate of qualification for helping others in distress. Jesus earned his scars on the cross, in order to save us from Satan himself, and sin, and death. Carrying and dying on the cross is hard, dangerous work (like burrowing under a big, big house) that qualified Jesus to rescue us when we are stuck under such a place ourselves.

By the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, our own scars can be made into our certificate of qualification to be an official helper of others in their need in the kingdom of God, signed and sealed with the blood of Jesus. The scars of the sins of others may bring the strongest help of all, just as the scars of grief are the strongest comfort to others.

Jesus is building a kingdom full of Spirit-empowered little Jesuses running around and blessing people with the help they need. If this is not true, then his church is not being his church.

God, in Christ, comes to us. He comes to the whole world wherever it hurts and wherever it is going wrong. There, the Lord bears the hurt and the wrong and makes us new people.

Jesus goes straight to our need and gives us what we need. Jesus goes to our need and makes us what we need to be for love’s sake. Because this love of Jesus knows no limits, we ourselves can go to other people’s places of need. We can go to the world’s places of need and bring what’s needed as only the wounded God, and the fellow-wounded of Jesus can do.

Good News - The Story of a New Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are we to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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