Pentecost and the Power of Connection

Preached on Pentecost Sunday, May 20, 2018

Scripture readings: John 15:26-16:15; Acts 2:1-21

We all know people who are connectors. Some people dabble in matchmaking.  Some people always want all their best friends to be friends of each other. But there are plenty of other areas in life where we need to make connections or be the connector.

Walks Along the Columbia River and Crab Creek
April 2018

Sometimes a generation will be the connector in a family. Usually it’s the oldest generation that keeps the branches of a family in touch.

Some of my ancestors were Irish. They owned a farm in county Tyrone, in the old kingdom of Ulster in the northern part of that country. The farm was too small to support all the kids when they grew up about 1850, so all but the oldest son left the farm. Some went to England, some to America, and some to Australia.

They kept writing letters from the very start. Since about 1850 the cousins in Australia and America have been writing to each other every generation. I’m the family connector in America. I write the letters and connect the news on either side of the Pacific. I hold the family together, on my side, as well as I can: to keep going a connection that has lasted one hundred and sixty-seven years.

Someone told me about a grandchild who kept the older generations of a family together, after a divorce had broken up part of the family and made enemies among that older generation.

The child forced the peace. It can be a hard job for a child (and not really a fair job, for a child). Children often show a powerful instinct to be connectors.

Jesus is a connector, building a bridge for us to peace with God through the cross. All the talk, in the Bible, about the faithfulness of God says that it is the nature of God to pursue, restore, and maintain connections.

It is the special work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, to be “The Great Connector.” The Holy Spirit connects us with all the reality of Jesus. Jesus said that the Spirit, “Will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:14-15)

When the Holy Spirit connects us with Jesus we are connected with nothing different and nothing less than God himself: The Spirit, the Son, and the Father. The Holy Spirit is our living, personal, supernatural connection with all the reality of Jesus and all the reality of God.

Jesus calls us to be his witnesses, so that others may know him through us.

The work of being the church and the work of being a witness to the world, and to your family, and to your neighbor is the work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The connector, Jesus, gives his connection work to the Holy Spirit, who gives the connection work to us. A witness is a connector. A disciple in the family of the church is a connector. But I want to concentrate on the connection work of witnessing to others.

A witness is a person who has special knowledge, or experience, or a special relationship. A witness is a person who knows what they know, not by hearsay, but by reality. They have seen what they have seen. Or, what has happened has happened to them.

Jesus says that the Spirit “will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” Now, what has the Holy Spirit made known to you, out of the things of Jesus? Or what is there about Jesus that you have discovered, through your connection with the Spirit?

I don’t know whether this is really a good thing or not; but I find that as I get older, I have seen, over and over again, the same pattern taking shape. The pattern of my life is that anything of any importance has taken me a long, long time to achieve.

Some of the most basic parts of living have taken a lot longer for me than they normally take for anyone else. Tying my own shoes, riding a bike, driving a car all took me a lot longer than they normally take anyone else. I look at my personal history, and I see how I have tried my own patience, over and over again; to say nothing of the patience of others, but I have never, somehow, seemed to have tried the patience of God.

I learn that my life must be full of examples of the patience of God, or else I must go crazy. But I also find that the patience of God must be more than only a theory that I can talk about. After all, the patience of God could be nothing but a figment of my imagination, or my wishful thinking. That patience had been a gift that has worked and enabled me to serve God in a way that is a bit different from the gifts of others.

The Holy Spirit is the living, powerful, personal, supernatural connection between the patience of God and the story of my life. And, so, I believe that I could be a good and faithful witness of the patience of God.

If I don’t have that living, personal connection to the patience of God, then I will not be qualified as a witness to that patience. Patience is part of the grace of God. And, if I don’t have the Spirit-connection to that grace, I will not be very convincing.

For one thing, if I am not totally convinced of the grace of God, then I will not be convincingly gracious or patient in my words and my life. I will probably not give much grace to anyone who really needs it. Or, if my words and behavior are gracious and seemingly patient. Others will be able to see though me. My grace and patience will be strangely fragile, or else have a pretend quality to them.

Once, years ago, my dad said something that I thought was the most screwball idea I had ever heard from him, and I told him so. We argued for at least a half hour. I never lost patience with my dad’s ability to listen to reason, when reason was surely on my side. We went on and on and on with this and finally my Dad stopped, and looked me deep in the eyes, and said, “Son, the trouble with you is that you don’t know when to stop.” See how genuine he thought my patience was? (Ha!)

We are, none of us, perfect. That goes without saying. And so, people who have the Holy Spirit’s connection to the grace of God will have lapses and breakdowns of graciousness.

They will need yet more grace for themselves. And they will earnestly, and prayerfully, and repentantly turn to the Lord for that living connection to grace. But, if that is not there, it will become clear.

Does it sound odd to say that when we are being a witness to Jesus, in telling others what we know about him, then we are bearing witness to something that does not belong to us, because it is a gift?  Does it sound odd to say that this is how it is supposed to be? Scripture teaches us to call God “My God” and to call Jesus “My Lord.” But to call him “mine” or “yours” is a gift, and not a possession. It is this way, because what we have is a gift that we call a personal relationship.

You cannot possess a person. A relationship is always a gift.

            I think even being in touch with reality is a gift. We cannot take it for granted.

What we have is like a telephone connection, or an electrical connection. Sometimes, when you are on the phone, the connection goes dead. Suddenly you realize that you may very well have launched into some brilliant or very touching observations, and none of it was heard, because the connection went dead and you didn’t even notice.

Without your personal connection to the reality of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, your connection with the patience, or the grace of God, may have gone dead, at least for the moment. You have to hang up and dial again. Or let the Spirit call you back.

What are you a witness to? What can you make known about Jesus and his Father, because of what the Spirit has brought home to you? Are you thoroughly connected to grace? Are you thoroughly connected to holiness? Are you thoroughly connected to the truth? Are you thoroughly connected with peace, or the servanthood of Christ, or the fellowship to which Christ calls us together?

Or, better yet, can you stand in the crowd that stands on a hill just outside Jerusalem, at the foot of the cross, with others who were the enemies of Jesus, or those who were indifferent to Jesus, or the friends who denied Jesus and ran away? 

Do you have a living, personal connection to that scene, and do you know that it happened for your salvation; that it happened to give you a new life?

Jesus implies that the Holy Spirit is a great connector. That is what he means when he says that the Spirit will witness, will testify, about him. And, since that is so, we are to testify, too. We are to make ourselves available as junior connectors to the Great Connector.

But it was not enough for the disciples to simply have been with Jesus from the start. They could have tried to be witnesses of the things they had seen, and heard, and experienced. But without the living, present connection, working within them, it would not be enough.

Remember that Jesus said the Spirit would be their new Counselor, their new Comforter? Jesus had been their first Counselor.

Part of Jesus’ job had always included explaining the disciple’s behavior and words to the people who were offended by them: like the time when the disciples walked through the wheat fields, and plucked grain on the Sabbath, or when they ate with unwashed hands.

Jesus had to make the connection between his friends who were trying to be his witnesses and the people they were supposed to be witnessing to. From now on, Jesus said, that would be the work of the Holy Spirit.

We need The Great Connector to do his great connecting between the people around us and ourselves. The miracle of the many languages of Pentecost was just as much a miracle of effective hearing as it was a miracle of effective speaking.

We need the Holy Spirit to graciously explain us and interpret us to others, because we do not often deserve to be understood or listened to. We need that grace first, in order to share the grace of God so radically given in Christ. The work that God has graciously assigned to us will always require his grace to make the real work happen.

And then, if we have this living connection with God’s reality, we will see God at work preparing connections with people, and we will do our best to be on the spot, when and where God is working.

To be in the Spirit is to live in a world that is full of connections in various stages of contact or unraveling. To be in the Spirit is to be amazed at the gaping need for connection with God, and the connection with love of God reaching out to those in need. This need is everywhere.

The test question is: Are you connected with this? And the question that goes along with it is: Can you stand in that crowd, at the foot of the cross, and know that that cross is the price paid in blood for you and paid in blood for the whole world?

You cannot be a witness of Jesus, carrying all our sins on the cross, without that living connection of the Holy Spirit to that cross.

And, still, this is what Jesus promises to give you, through his love and grace.

Things Invisible - Meeting and Beating the Devil

Preached on Sunday, April 22, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelations 12:1-12; John 8:31-59

The first time I remember almost stepping on a snake in the wild was when I was about ten years old. My family was on vacation and we were staying in a campground at Lake Shasta.

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

I was just coming out of the restroom, and there was a little gully that I had walked through, from our camp, to get there. I took the same path to get back to our camp.

Something near my feet caught my eye. It made me jump. A rattlesnake lay stretched out in that gully, and I realized that it must have been there when I came that way in the first place. I had almost stepped on that snake twice.

Since then, I’m sure I have almost stepped on a snake at least once every year. I know it was three or four times just last summer. Of course, they weren’t all rattlesnakes. So, by my guesstimate; I may have almost stepped on about 120 snakes in my adult lifetime. That tells me, all in all, that I must be pretty lucky when it comes to snakes.

  There’s one mean serpent, though, that I haven’t been so lucky with. That serpent has been around for a long, long time. It’s about as old as the creation. It’s one of those snakes that never stops growing as long as it lives. It’s been around so long that it’s even grown extra heads. It’s even grown horns.

The Book of Revelation gives us a pretty good snapshot of this serpent. “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.” (Revelation 12:3-4)

If you wonder what the numbers mean (the seven heads, and ten horns, and all that), It means that it’s got plenty. It means that the dragon has more than enough fight in him and more than enough brains in him to do a lot of harm, if he can.

Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, and a few other places in the Bible, Jesus is a Lamb: The Lamb of God, wounded, bleeding, the perfect sacrifice for all the sins of the world. Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, Satan (the Devil) is a reptile: snake, serpent, dragon.

This doesn’t mean that the Devil really has become a reptile or that the Devil has horns or anything else that pictures show. In the same way, Jesus isn’t really a lamb. He doesn’t have wool or hooves. But if you had a special dream, or some such thing, with a reptile or a lamb in it, the stories of the Bible could give you a clue about what they are, or what they mean.

Why was Eve talking to a serpent in the Garden of Eden?  The common answer is that Satan took over the body of a living snake in order for Eve to see and talk to something that didn’t scare her. No creature would be scary in those days and in that place, where God’s harmony and peace protected everything and everyone from each other.

Why did the Lord punish the innocent snakes for something the Devil did by forcing them to crawl on their bellies? I think the snakes already crawled on their bellies. It was no punishment for them. But that fowl spirit, Satan, and his team, were humiliated in some way that we cannot imagine. Some power or some dignity, or else the ability to deceive themselves about what their own sins had done to them, was taken from them, and they would never get that back. And Satan would never be able to destroy his own future destroyer.

In all three of the scriptures we have read, we meet some of the same results. First (in God’s prophecy in the garden), we are told of the world as it has become. Next (in the gospel), we meet the same current world as it is resisting the love and peace and freedom of God. In Revelation, we meet the invisible spiritual warfare that goes on in this world, where Jesus has died and risen from the dead, and yet where the Kingdom of God hasn’t been fully installed yet.

In each of these scenes, we meet the snakebite of the world. We meet the Devil and the power of sin as conflict, as deceit, as poison, as the use of ourselves against ourselves. We meet the reason why so many people hate snakes.

Until the final judging and healing come, in a new heaven and earth (heaven and universe), there will be war. That war will be spiritual. The war will also be physical: flesh and blood, and weapons, and killing. In between the war of the spirit and the war of bombs and bullets, we have our own potential for war on the personal level.  This war will be bad attitudes, broken relationships, pride, blame, guilt, resistance, invasion, abuse.

We see and feel this every day. We are all part of it.

It’s poison, it’s sickness, it’s human will, and choices, and habits. It’s lurking there like a snake, so well disguised, so easy to step on, or to step into.

Genesis and Revelation have so much in common. God provides a garden of grace and healing at the beginning of the world and, in the end, when the long war is over, we will all come home to a garden of grace and healing provided by God.

The main difference between the gardens is that the Tree of Life in the first garden will be replaced in the eternal garden by the Tree of Life that is the Cross, and the fruit and the healing leaves will be Jesus, and all the nations (and all of us) will come home to the garden and walk with him, and talk with him, and never need to hide, and never need to ever be afraid again.

All of the conflict and poison of this world, as we see it in the Bible, comes from one sin. It’s been said to be a kind of pride, but it’s also a deep desire for something we don’t have. It comes from a decision to disapprove of what God has made us to be.

We want to redraw God’s design of us in a way that gives us more of an advantage. We want control. We want to be Gods. Eve and Adam wanted to be wise, but this was no trick of the Devil.

The Devil knew that they loved and worshiped what they saw in God, when God walked with them, and when they were tending the garden designed for them. They were created to begin a family of the human sons and daughters of God, but they could be drawn in to a temptation to take it for themselves, without partnership with God. They could just eat the fruit that would give them the knowledge of everything.

They would know the pros and cons of everything. They would know that if you did “A” and “B”, you would get “C”. The value on the other side of the equations wouldn’t be “X”. It wouldn’t be unknown. They wanted to be Gods not by being created in God’s image, but by self-creation and self-design.

The Devil himself had started his devilry with the same motives. That’s what the war in heaven is about. The Devil is in an agony of envy, to become God of a creation of his own making, even if it means creating a dead and poisoned and starving and hating creation.

The poet Milton was wise when he put these words into the Devil’s mouth: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” That is the philosophy and motivation of the Devil and his kingdom.

This is not so far from us. Jesus called a crowd of people who were believers (people who had chosen to follow Jesus and listen to him) . . . Jesus called them “children of the Devil.” (John 8:44)

They were still ready to turn on Jesus if he disappointed them.

It didn’t take much. Jesus poked at them a couple times and the truth came out. They wanted to create a kingdom of themselves in their own image, and Jesus wouldn’t play along. He never does.

We all see this in the end. Following Jesus, “we die daily.” (1 Corinthians 15:31) We die to ourselves to be recreated in Christ’s image. That is what the kingdom of God is for.

How do we beat this? How do we beat the Devil himself?

We do this by prayer: prayer without ceasing. We do this by knowing and understanding the Bible: learning from our heart the mind of God through the word of God.

We beat this by internalizing a reality of Jesus that we call “the full armor of God.” We find this armor spelled out in Ephesians 6:10-18.

Something more is hiding in our reading of the Book of Revelation. There is a song of victory. Someone is singing about the victory of God’s people over the Devil, and how they did it: “They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” (Revelation 12:11)

Let’s take the last phrase first: “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

We give our greatest gifts when we give the fullness of our own lives. Soldiers do this. Husbands and wives in mutual devotion and thankfulness do this. Parents do this for their children. Sometimes we do this for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We do this for Jesus.

When Adam and Eve tried to hide from God, they lost themselves by trying to save themselves. The step they took, in which they ate the forbidden fruit, led to the next step of self-preservation to rob God of the gift that he had given to them: the gift of his creation and his love.

They robbed God of his created family, because they (along with all of us) were to be God’s family in flesh and blood. The fear of losing what we want to claim for ourselves is a kind of fear of death that can never stand up to the Devil.

Our defense against the dark arts is to love others more than we love ourselves. Our defense is ultimately to love God more than ourselves. We are not afraid to die to ourselves. Fear of anything less is defeat.

For the soldiers of Jesus, the second defense against the Devil is “the word of their testimony”. Another way Revelation phrases this is to call it, “the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 12:17) There is a very strange use of the same phrase later on: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)

It’s a phrase that means two or three different things at the same time. It a sword that cuts both ways. The word of their testimony and the testimony of Jesus is what you say to others about Jesus. It’s also what Jesus says to you. It’s also what the scriptures tell you about Jesus. It’s also the over-arching story of what the gospel (the story of the good news of Jesus) tells you.

Our weapon against the dark arts is to know what Jesus has done for you and what he is still doing for you: to know it, and to share it with others, and to talk to Jesus about it in prayer and thanks.

This weapon against the dark arts is what the Word of God tells us, but it must do more than this.

The Word of God must feed you Jesus. The Word of God must be Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. The Word of God must be a picture of a baby in Bethlehem, and a man teaching and healing others in the desert. The Word of God must be a picture of that same man nailed to the cross, dying for you, and rising from the dead in order to raise you up and to give you life.

Here, again, beating the Devil requires you to make your life into something about more than yourself. Your life is for others. Your life is for the Lord.

The third weapon against the Devil is “the blood of the Lamb.” Again, you have the victory if your life is not about you, but truly a gift designed and shaped by the bloody hands of the one who died for you and for the whole world.

Here is what Jesus means when he started poking at the ones who thought they believed him when they didn’t really believe at all. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

The freedom of reigning in Hell instead of serving in heaven is no freedom at all, in the end. Jesus died in order to give birth to us as sons and daughters of the Living God, and to be brothers and sisters to each other, all around the world. Lesser loves bring the venom of conflict and separation. Freedom is love in Jesus, and in his family.

Paul's Prayers - Empowering Our Teamwork - Super Bowl Sunday

Preached on Super Bowl Sunday, February 4, 2017

Scripture readings: Proverbs 3:5-8; Romans 15:14-33

Walking along the Columbia River at Desert Aire/Mattawa WA

Once upon a time there was there was a town with a church football league. One of the teams was in their Sunday school classroom that they used for their locker room, while the coach gave them a pre-game pep talk. He wrote the words “Being on Jesus’ team”, and he said, “Always remember, men, there is no “I” in Jesus, but there is an “us”.

By the time I was in high school, in P. E. class, I had earned quite a reputation in sports. The team captains always fought over me, to keep me off their team. I think my un-coordination skills were without equal in the whole school.

I was a geek. I was a nerd. I seemed to be the only real history geek in my class, so, in order to spend time with other kids like me, I became a science geek. It really wasn’t that hard. I liked science too. So, I spent my free time at school in the science room.

But even when you get to talk and play together with chemicals and with the strobe light in the back room you don’t learn a lot of social skills in the science room. Neither was there any science club where we might work together as a team to win competitions with other schools.

Along the way,
 I got adopted as a mascot for one of my favorite teams:
The Dogs

So, I was known as the quietest kid in my class of sixty kids: the shyest kid of them all. Even if we had a science team, I would have been too shy to join it.

I had one cool friend, named Chris, who asked me one day, “You’re a lone wolf, aren’t you?” Even though I was seventeen I really wasn’t familiar with that phrase. I asked Chris what it meant. He told me. And, so, I knew myself in a new way: yes, I was a lone-wolf. I still am.

I had made a commitment of my life to Christ when I was about nine years old; while watching Billy Graham on television. I loved Jesus, but there were problems with the church. We stopped going, and though I read the Bible and prayed lot, there was something missing that I have told some of you about before.

I went back to my old church when I was eighteen and I went with the youth group to a youth rally at one of the county fairgrounds. Toward the end of the speaker’s message I knew that the Lord expected me to go forward to make a new commitment up front. But I was too embarrassed to do it.

I prayed with agony and struggle to get out of this, “Lord you know I love you more than anything!”

The Lord was very firm with me. I felt that he was talking to me from the cross, as he said in my heart, “Are you willing to be someone who can say ‘no’ to me?” This almost knocked the breath out of me. I couldn’t face being a person who ever said ‘no’ to Jesus on the cross. I had to go forward.

The counselor up front coached me to pray things that I knew very well how to pray. I had known for years what God wanted me to be and how it is that we come to him and let him come into us. I still commit my life to Jesus every day.

That coaching in a prayer to commit to, and to receive, Jesus as my Lord and Savior was not God’s point that night. The point was that I had to surrender what ruled my life. I had to surrender my fear and my shyness. I had to surrender my way of life as a lone-wolf. I’m still a lone-wolf, but I’m a “surrendered-to-God” lone-wolf.

Just as alcoholics can find the freedom of sobriety by surrendering in every way to their higher power, still that sobriety depends on their ability to say, “I’m an alcoholic”. This is a kind of surrender of one of the deep and powerful things in their lives.

There is a surrender that destroys you, and there is a surrender that gives you life. This surrender gives freedom, and strength. This life comes from that Higher Power which is God. But it also comes from joining a team where you take care of each other.

A couple of my nerdy-geeky friends were also surrendering to Jesus in their own ways. By going forward in front of other people, including the members of my youth group, surrendering my shyness, my fear, my awkwardness to Jesus, I became an honest and a self-surrendered lone-wolf before God.

I joined a team of honest and surrendered followers of Jesus. You could call it “The Jesus Team”. It’s been playing and praying together for over two thousand years. This Jesus Team is a group of people who aren’t afraid to be honest, and humble, and surrendered with each other. Everyone on the Jesus Team comes from the same place and we all know how to say, “Hi! I’m Dennis, and I’m a sinner. Hi! I’m Dennis and I’m rescued and made new by God’s love and grace alone given to me in Jesus. I’m rescued and made new by his life in me.”

To be able (all of us) to say such things together is a sure give-away that however different our lives may be, we have prayed, pretty much, the very same prayers, and made the very same deep offerings of our heart, and soul, and life to God.

At one time that offering of ourselves cut so deep that it seemed like a human sacrifice of ourselves: almost like an amputation. But now we see that this offering is the greatest thing we have ever done; and, far from losing ourselves, we have gained a new self we would never part with, because we see that our life has become a gift from God. God has given us our new selves as his gift, through the cross and the resurrection; through dying and rising again.

It isn’t only Jesus who dies and rises. Now we can do it with him, in our heart and mind. Now we are free and whole, because we can die to ourselves, and rise in the love of Jesus every day.

For me, this particular lone-wolf became part of a team; the Jesus Team. That team meets and struggles together in a lot of places, and the Jesus Team meets here, right now. Prayer is a necessary part of this.

We are a team partly because we have all needed to say much the same kind of prayers for much the same reasons. We are also a team because we all take care of each other through our prayers for each other. We pray for our performance in the most important game in the world.

Paul shows us this kind of team prayer in his request to his team members in Rome. He asks them to pray for him, but not just for anything. Paul asks them to pray for his ministry: to pray for Paul as he carries out his mission, his program for the game, for the team.

Paul has a difficult and dangerous play ahead of him. Paul is running to a part of the line where he will draw their fiercest opponents to himself.

There was talk of a famine in the land of Judea. The Christians there would see the worst of this because those with the biggest resources to give to those in need would refuse to give that relief to Christians. The biggest resources to buy food and other aide for the famine victims were kept in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Christians were considered heretics and traitors, and they would receive no help in Judea.

Paul was going where he was very well known as one of the team captains of the heretics and traitors. Both he and the money, or the bank receipts he brought with him (in the form of a scroll, or a tablet of wax or clay) were huge prizes in this game.

Paul was running willingly into danger, and he needed all the will-power he could muster. Paul had been imprisoned, and shackled, and beaten, and tortured, and nearly killed more than once before. If you ever had a surgery that really didn’t make you better, and your doctor was recommending another try at that same surgery that hurt you so much and never helped you, then you would look forward to that surgery just like Paul was looking forward to running to the relief of the Christians in Jerusalem.

So, Paul asks for prayer. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me. Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there, so that, by God’s will I may come to you….” (Romans 15:30-32)

“Join me in my struggle by praying to God for me.” The way that this is translated, here, teaches us that our team, with our teamwork together, gets strong when we pray for other team members for their work on the Jesus Team. Prayer makes us sweat together for our teamwork.

On this team we take care of each other by praying to God for the work, and for the effort that the others are doing for the team, and for Jesus, the captain of the work.

Imagine that you’ve been assigned to be a member of a team of two. Your other team member needs you to take care of them because of some weakness in their health. Your part, on that team, is to play the care-giver position.

It’s a common experience that the care-giver grows closer and closer to the one needing care simply because of their devotion to care-giving. Prayer-giving is care-giving that strengthens whatever weaknesses our other team members struggle with.

But the translation could be better. Paul is saying something like: “Agonize with me in your prayers for me.” I remember, when I was in high school, going by the football field in August, when the temperature was often close to one hundred degrees, or more, and I could see the football team working out. I knew something about the agony they were going through because P. E., in September, would find me playing football in gym class, and sometimes September was hotter than August in my home town.

That team was sweating together. They joined with each other in the same agony, and that made them a team: sweating together. They were becoming more and more the team they needed to be in order to play their game and win. Their sweat and their sore muscles were building team work.

As the Jesus team, we have important work to do. Taking care of each other in our sacrifices together, and in our sacrifices for each other, through agonizing prayer, helps us to grow strong together. This prayerful agonizing together makes us the team we need to be in order to play with Jesus and win.

There’s a team word hidden from us by our English language. It’s the word about the contribution to God’s people in Judea. The contribution to the poor Christians on the Jesus Team in Judea wasn’t merely financial.

In Greek, the contribution is called a “koinonia”. “Koinonia” means communion. It means fellowship. But those are old English words that sound strange to modern ears, and to those who don’t know the slang and lingo of Christians. Koinonia, communion, and fellowship can mean “partnership”.

The contribution was the teamwork of the Jesus Team. To work as a team, they needed to agonize with Paul. To work as a team with the poor in Judea, they had to agonize with them as well. Doesn’t that sound terrible?

I was never on a team willingly until I joined the Jesus-team and, even then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with it. The Lord told me, when I was twelve years old, that I had to be something like a pastor on this team, and with all my heart I wanted nothing to do with it.

That’s what was really wrong with me, until God asked me for something that I couldn’t refuse. I had to be a person who would no longer say ‘no’ to God. It went against my very nature, and against everything I had learned by experience.

I had to take the position in the line that I feared most. I had to take the position of agony. I had to play a position in which I would agonize for the team in order to become a member of the team.

At the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, every September, there would be a football game between the married students and the single students. That was unfair in itself because, obviously, the married students had to be more studly than the rest of us. And there were more married students than unmarried ones, so they had a lot more team members to choose from.

Fred Halde, one of my best seminary friends at the time, was our captain. Fred put me in the line opposite Dave Ulum, who had played college football before coming to seminary. It was one of those tiny, Christian, Liberal Arts Colleges that you find all over the Midwest, but Dave was still a big kid. The lines would hit each other, and I would hit Dave as hard as I could, and hitting Dave would always send me flying through the air backward flat on my back. Over and over again, I would hit Dave Ulum so hard that I would just fly; fly through the air backwards.

This bothered me a lot. I asked captain Fred to please let me take some other spot on the line, but Fred said that I was the only one on the team that could free up the better players to play at their best for the team. So, I went back to face Dave.

Dave looked at me and his voice almost cracked as he pleaded with me, “Please, Dennis, please, go somewhere else!” Dave was a softy despite having been in college football.

My answer was, “Sorry Dave, I have to stay here.” And, so, we played on, until the Singles lost to the Marrieds.

Dave was a friend too. I know that he was praying about this. That would be just like him. And I was praying too: a very agonized prayer. And this is what builds us together as a team for the work ahead.

You have work to do on the Jesus-team. This work is much more than church-work. You have Jesus-work to do.

Church-work is important, but it’s designed for the support of the Jesus-work. Our church-work can be a place where we can sweat together because it’s one part of our training places. It’s like the weight room is there.

We’re glad if we can do our church-work together, but the church-work is for the sake of the Jesus-work. Sometimes church-work makes it possible to give the hospitality that we want to offer the community around us, in Jesus’ name. And church-work is like the locker room where you do the team-work of psyching up together for the game, or the cooling off for half-time and for later.

My position in the line-up requires me to take care of you in such a way as to strengthen you, and train you, and teach you whatever you may need in order to do your Jesus-work, not by yourself but bringing in the whole team, praying for each other because we know and share your Jesus-work just as well as you know and share our own.

If we do this we can cut against the grain of so much that the conventional wisdom tells us. The conventional wisdom of our time tells us: “Go your own way. Take care of yourself. Be a lone-wolf. If you happen to be a Christian, then be a Christian lone-wolf, but not a surrendered one. Be a hold-out lone-wolf, not fully stuck to God, not fully stuck to others.

Let’s learn to tell each other what the Jesus-work is that Jesus is calling us to do on the team. Then we can know how to pray for each other. Then we can know how to build our line of the team in Desert Aire and Mattawa. When we know everyone’s position, then we can plan our next play: and the next, and the next. And we can hit our work and fly through the air with it: only forward and not backward.

The Advent Kingdom - Join Bethlehem's Battling Baby

Preached on Sunday, December 24, 2017

Scripture readings: Isaiah 53:1-12; Revelation 12:1-17; Matthew 2:13-23

Riverside Community Church
Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
Thanks to Those Lovingly Decorated
Our Church for the Celebration of the Nativity
December 2017

Christmas can look and feel like a battle. The stores are battling to sell their stock. The customers are battling to buy their gifts. It happens. One year I was stuck buying some last-minute Christmas gifts, in the mall, on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t pretty.

There’s the battle to beautify our homes, but I’ve surrendered in that war. There’s the battle of the Tree. I found (late) that I had a broken tree so I found another by surprise and got it put up yesterday, but I’m not going to decorate it. I’m living with it, just as it is, for three days, then I’m flying home for a late Christmas with my family. Wednesday, I fly from Pasco to Seattle, change for a flight from Seattle to Portland, and then change for a flight from Portland to Sacramento. Then, the following Wednesday, I fly back to you. But I love Christmas.

Am I making it look bad? For some people it really is: for soldiers on a foreign front, for the homeless, for those in a home with unpayable bills and empty cupboards, for the grief stricken, for the lonely.

The first Christmas (whatever the date when it really happened) looked bad. There was a hundred-mile hike for a young, pregnant teenager and her husband. (The Bible doesn’t tell us, in so many words, whether she was lucky enough to have a donkey to ride. I think that Christmas artists must just like painting donkeys.

There was the pregnancy itself: how it happened was controversial, and (to some) unbelievable. There are people who always like to think the worst, and they’re not afraid to say what they think. You hear hints of this, later in the Gospel’s, there’s a time when Jesus is called Mary’s son without naming Joseph. In that time and place not naming the father was a kind of slur on Jesus’ parentage. (Mark 6:3)

There was the Roman, so-called emperor. (Some thought dictator: and he had certainly killed enough people to win his way into power, so that he deserved to be called a dictator, no matter how smart he was.) The Roman Caesar ordered a tax-revenue and military-occupation related census that forced the whole journey on Joseph and Mary, and thousands of others just like them.

There was the “puppet” king, named Herod. They called him the Great. Was he so great because he was willing to kill all the baby boys of Bethlehem in order to get rid of some peasant baby with a claim to be the King of the Jews? Herod was perfectly willing to kill anybody in order to hold onto a title that he had already killed for, just like Caesar. It all stank.

We don’t know for sure if the manger was in the stable of an inn, or in the animal quarters of a peasant house, where the one or two other rooms were filled with people. Peasant houses did have animal rooms. Probably, the way that world smelled, the animal room may not have smelled much worse. An article came out last week which had the title: “The Real, Stinky Nativity.”

The interesting connection between our world and that ancient, stinky world, is that those people, now, for whom Christmas is a mess, are the ones who have the most in common with the people of the very first Christmas.

Jesus was born to change the nature of our lives, to fight the battle that would save us from the power of sin and death, the battle that would give us life abundant, and life eternal. The climax of that battle (which began in Bethlehem) was the cross and the grave. Those were places that stank.

Jesus must also have been born to change the smell of this world and the smell of our lives within this world. The birth of Jesus was a heavenly miracle in which God, in all his glory and power, invaded a world that stinks. Our world stinks with war, with slaughter, with the slaughter of innocents and babies, with dictators killing for power, with suspicion and fear, with injustice and poverty, with disease and hunger.

The world is beautiful with the power and ingenuity of God, but it is a fallen world, and it’s fallenness stinks. Jesus was born to bring the beauty of God, the power of God, the righteousness of God, the compassion of God, the servanthood of God, and the love that comes from God,  into the stink of the world.

That was also a battle. That is still a battle.

Jesus, and Mary, and Joseph represent the presence of God giving meaning, and value, and blessing to those who live with the indignities and the struggles that stink. That, too, is a battle.

With the understanding that Joseph gets left out of the picture so often that he stands for so many invisible people who matter, lets look at a strange, strange picture in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. It’s the picture of the woman, and her baby, and a fiery, watery dragon.

It’s not a picture of something that happens during the trouble at the end of things.

The picture began long before that. The story of the picture began when a woman met a reptile in the Garden of Eden. The reptile was called a snake there, but he has many names.

The reptile won that battle in Eden, and his victory seemed to promise to ruin the lives of the woman and her man, and all future human beings who came after them. Then, God promised something better. God promised that a son of the woman would crush the reptile’s head, even though that reptile would injure the son. God’s brand of justice would be done, and that would bring about a new kind of world. Revelation will show us pictures of that new world: that new heaven and earth.

The Book of Revelation tells us that the birth of the son would defeat the dragon. And the son did exactly that.

But, the Book of Revelation, in this picture of the woman, the son, and the dragon, says that this battle will go on for quite a while, and it has. We’re living in this battle still.

Christmas carries the message that we must get involved in this battle. We are enlisted in a war where a baby has invaded the enemy’s territory. This baby has won the essential, turning-point battles that will lead to the end of the war, in which we and the baby will win.

I was thinking about war. I watched the recent movie “Dunkirk” and think it was a great movie. But the Battle of Dunkirk looked like defeat, at first.

Because of their defeat at Dunkirk, some of the British wanted to negotiate a peace settlement with Hitler. Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw it differently, and made it count as a victory, in a way that surprised his own people. In this surprising sense, the evacuation of Dunkirk by the British was a victory that help make the American entry into that war possible. That led to the bloody, costly victory of the Landing at Normandy, which enabled us to turn the German victories at the Battle of the Bulge into allied victories there.

It still wasn’t done. There were still more horrible battles to be fought until der Fuhrer shot himself in his bunker. Our own war with the dragon goes on like that.

The dragon shifts his strategy many times. Revelation shows us this. The dragon is going to raise up two beasts: one, from the sea, will be a beast of political power; the other, from the ground will be a botched imitation of the Lamb and this imitation Lamb will have the power of spiritual deceit and blindness.

No matter how far away the battle seems, the cultures of the world always try to mold, or scare, or trick, or deceive the people of the True Lamb who was slain. The dragon, gently or harshly, tries to loosen our grip on the True Lamb in heaven. If he succeeds, he thinks that the True Lamb might get disgusted and loosen his grip on us.

This struggle began with the Battle of Christmas, and we have been recruited to join this Battle. The Christmas Battle is the invasion begun by The Baby of Bethlehem. We are the invaders of a stinky world and we are called to take our stand against the hardships that make life stink for so many.

We are the invaders of a world disabled by sin.

So, we are the re-enablers of lives, and relationships, and hearts and minds, through the power of forgiveness and love.

What strange weapons these are! And what a strange strategy. It’s like the invasion of Troy by means of the Trojan Horse. But, in our war, the strategy that defeats the dragon is the Trojan Baby. Or you could call God’s strange tactics the mommy-and-baby strategy: the discipline of forgiveness and love.

The mommy is Eve, and Abraham’s wife Sarah, and the Lord’s wife Israel, and the Virgin Mary, and the Bride of Christ, the Church. The mommy is God’s people nurturing and strengthening each other, so that the Church becomes our mother. The mommy-and-baby strategy stretches the whole Church inside out; because it has taught us to care for the strays that wonder beyond us. Our hearts are tender for those outside because the greatest baby we know is the battling baby Jesus. The everlasting Son of God became a baby in order to conquer life itself, and temptation, and pride, and hypocrisy, and sin, and death.

But there are lots of other babies, just like us, in the Battle. The Dragon knows this and goes off, in the end, to fight them and us. These babies are the other offspring of the mommy, that the Book of Revelation tells us about.

Yes, they are us. No other weapon will do but the blood of the lamb and “the testimony of Jesus”. We tell the story of Jesus as he has taught us. We tell the story of Jesus in words and in our lives.

We live what Jesus taught. How can we give the testimony of Jesus without loving our enemies, or without being the Good Samaritan to all of those who have been injured by the stink that gets into the world, and into its people, and into us?

The Bethlehem Baby, and the babies who are us, fight with these strange weapons. Jesus did this and we follow him everywhere.

Isaiah told us what people would think of these strange weapons. People who use the conventional wisdom will never see that this is the strategy that will fight for the world as God designed it to be. It takes a very different kind of wisdom to shift the powers of our minds to see strategy that will change the world. “Surely, he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each one of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

That looks like no way to fight evil, or sin, or stink: for Jesus and us to bear it ourselves, to carry it for others. Actually, it is a bit like a mommy’s strategy. The Battle of Bethlehem was fought with mommy/baby strategy.

The baby who was growing up to carry the sin of the world would have a strange bit of identity to direct him in his purpose. When the boy Jesus was old enough to understand things, he knew the story that other babies had died in his place, they died for him. What would he grow up to do for others? We are the babies who follow him, and we know that he has died for us and that others have died for him. All of them have died for us too, so that we could know and follow the baby who was the Savior they had loved.

That is the miracle of Christmas. That is the calling of Christmas to each one of us. That is the power of Christmas, or the Jesus of Christmas, that can change us, and work through us for the washing, the disinfecting, the sweetening, and the healing of the world, and for the coming new heaven and the new earth that will be won by this baby.

People in times long past have understood this better than we do. I’m going to finish by reading a poem written by a Catholic priest, in the 1500’s, who was executed for his faith by the government of Reformation England. The poet’s name is Robert Southwell. His poem was later set to music by the British composer Benjamin Britten in “A Ceremony of Carols”, during World War II: “This Little Babe”. 

This little Babe so few days old

Is come to rifle Satan's fold;

All hell doth at His presence quake,

Though He Himself for cold doth shake;

For in this weak unarmed wise

The gates of hell He will surprise.

With tears He fights and wins the field,

His tiny breast stands for a shield;

His battering shot are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes,

His martial ensigns cold and need,

And feeble flesh His warrior's steed.

His camp is builded in a stall,

His bulwark but a broken wall,

The crib His trench, haystalks His stakes,

Of shepherds He His army makes;

And thus, as sure His foe to wound,

The angels' trumps the charge now sound.

My soul with Christ join thou in fight;

Stick to His tents, the place of might.

Within His crib is surest ward;

This little Babe will be thy Guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from this heavenly Boy!

(Written by Robert Southwell, c. 1561-1595)