"Reflections on the Book of Ecclesiastes"

(February 11, 2020)

Photos taken along the Columbia River
Near Mattawa/Desert Aire WA
February 2020

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity…. There is nothing for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:24-26)

Let us simply go. Go forth and live; in the sheer wonder that there is nothing for us, in this life under the sun, except for God to lovingly give his gifts to us; or for God to lovingly give to others through us.

Through the power of God, offering himself in Jesus on the cross, carrying the sins, and the evils, and all the striving emptiness of this world, dying and rising from the dead, we are claimed by God to be God’s beloved ones. As God’s beloveds, we are “given to”; or, as sinners, we are “given through”; through God’s power in Jesus. 

Otherwise, what is there in life for us to hold onto? What is there to call our own?

Holding on and calling anything our own are vanity, emptiness, and worthlessness in comparison with being either given to, or given through.

The whole duty of human life is to live what human life is created for, under the care of Almighty God.

All of human life (the life of the whole of humanity) is the essence of living in the fear of God. This means that our life is always full of the apprehension of a strange and blinding beauty; and of a completely undeserved, untamable, and uncompromising majesty.

The whole of human life (the essence of life for the whole of humanity) is found in our genuine experience of the ways of God, in fellowship with God: given to us so as to become the laws of our own hearts. The law for life is the intimacy of knowing God from the inside of his own heart. In Christ, the law of God’s life becomes the law of our lives.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether evil or good.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)

It is the determined will and judgement of God, for his children and for his sinners, that God will allow nothing else for us but this. God will certainly preside (over our lives, and over everything in creation, for all time) to protect us from everything that does not bring this life to us. Everything else (in this world under the sun) will be refused, and taken from us. Anything else, and everything less than this, would be nothing but worthless: an empty vapor, dust, vanity, no life at all. God will give us nothing less than what is truly life.

Passionate Jesus - Till the End of Time

Preached on Sunday, April 8, 2018

Scripture readings: 1 Peter 4:7-19; Mark 13:14-37

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

There was a little boy who constantly begged his parents to let him have a dog. Their answer was always the same: he was too young.

Finally, they told him that he was responsible enough to get his dog. So, they all went to the pet store, and his parents turned him loose to choose his own puppy.

It was hard for him to make up his mind. There were Labrador puppies, Dalmatian puppies, beagle puppies, and dachshund puppies. Finally, the boy chose one little mutt-puppy who was wagging and wagging his tail like crazy.

When his parents asked him why he wanted that mutt-puppy, he explained that he liked the way the puppy wagged his tail, “I want the dog with the happy ending.”

The story Jesus tells in chapter 13 of Mark is a story with a happy ending. It just happens that it is a scary story with a happy ending. The scary part takes up most of the story, and the happy part almost doesn’t get told before Jesus closes the book. But we will look at that later.

Jesus told the story in answer to a question his disciples had. They had all been wandering together around the buildings and courtyards of the great Temple in Jerusalem.

It was a wonder of the ancient world. Enormous wealth had been committed to rebuilding the ancient place and making it as overwhelming and inspiring as possible. The complex was huge: forests of columns, the whitest marble, gold leaf and gold plate. The first century historian Flavius Josephus reported that some of the stones were a large as 37 feet long, 12 feet high, and 18 feet wide.

Naturally, the disciples were in awe. “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” And Jesus said, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Later, Peter, James, John, and Andrew came to him, on the Mount of Olives, and they asked, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”

Jesus never really answers this question. They ask Jesus: “When?” Jesus doesn’t answer that question. He confesses that he doesn’t know when. He says: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” 

Our problem with this is that we are human beings and we really want to know the answer to questions like this. We want to know the future. And we want to know the future because we want to be in control.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the “Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” because they wanted to be in control. They wanted to be their own little gods.

Even Christians are tempted to try to be our own little gods, and so Christians for the past 2,000 years have tried to figure out the answer to the question Jesus said that even he didn’t know the answer to. In other words, Christians have spent the past 2,000 years trying to be smarter than Jesus.

That’s just part of our problem. Can anything good ever come of that?

I’ll share my theory of why Jesus didn’t know when the last days would come, and why it may be better for us not to know. My theory (and I don’t know where my theory comes from) is based on 1 John 4:8: “God is love.” We believe that God is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I believe it is the nature of the Father to plan and provide. Love requires that as an ingredient. I believe it is the nature of the Son to trust and serve. I believe that this is also a necessary ingredient of love. And I believe it is the nature of the Spirit to honor and connect, because this is also part of love.

This is the pattern I see in how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other.

But the Son is about trust and servanthood. When Peter first heard Jesus predicting his death on the cross (8:31-33) he rebuked Jesus, and Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan. You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of man.” Peter did a devilish thing by attacking the trust the Son in the Father.

Later (10:43-45) Jesus said: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Jesus didn’t know the time of his return because it is his special nature, as the Son, to trust and serve. His Father knows the time, and that is enough. The Son may know the time now. But I don’t believe we know that for sure.

It’s especially in trusting and serving that Jesus gave us our salvation. It must be in trusting and serving, as the Son, that enables him, even now, to give us life in God.

Since Jesus, the trusting and serving Son, is the one who makes us sons and daughters of God, the pattern of his relationship goes on through us. So, our own trusting and serving, without our knowing the Father’s schedule, is the way we now have life in Jesus the Son.

We can’t have life in Jesus and contradict him at the same time. Jesus didn’t need to know the time of his own returning. Neither do we.

The purpose of God for our lives is for us to be like Jesus. It is good to know things, but it is not always necessary.

What is necessary is for us to trust and serve. And that is what Jesus’ story is about. Jesus answers the question, not of “When will these things happen,” but of “What will it mean to trust and serve till these things happen?”

Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” (8:34) Part of the work of Jesus on the cross, beyond the forgiveness of our sins, was to carry on his own shoulders the world’s troubles and sorrows: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” (Isaiah 53:4)

Jesus never leaves us, not even in our worst times. Now we are his hands and feet in the world, and Jesus will not have his hands and feet be absent from this world even in its worst times, even when those times are called the Great Tribulation.

In Jesus’ telling of the story of the beginning of a new world, at his return, it is not until the human beings on earth actually see “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory;” not until then is it that Christians will be gathered from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens to come down with Jesus.

We are like Christ, the Son of the Father, in this world. And, just like him, God’s people will never be absent from what goes on in the world he loves. Jesus promised to be with us always, even to the end of the world. Surely he meant that he and we would be present together, in this world, to the very end.

The average Christian, today, does not live in North America, or Europe. The average Christian lives in China, or Laos, or Indonesia, or Pakistan, or India, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Syria, or Zimbabwe, or Nigeria, or Venezuela, or Cuba.

The average Christian today lives in harm’s way. The average Christian today lives in a present or an anticipated Tribulation. This was the normal Christian life in the first century and this has not changed.

Even in the safety of America we face the very same troubles and fears that any of our uncommitted neighbors face. Only we face those troubles in fellowship with Jesus. We may be blessed, but we are not immune to anything in this world; not now, not never. This is what Jesus is saying.

The disciples wanted to know when to be ready. Jesus’ answer was “always.” Always be ready.

When they asked about signs, the disciples wanted to know what the things were that they would have to be ready to face. Jesus’ answer was that the signs were everything. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant), and do this in the face of everything: in the face of conflict; in the face of sickness; in the face of disaster. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant); even when governments and churches turn against you. Trust (live faithfully) and serve (be a servant) when everyone turns against you, even those you love.

Jesus says that there will come a time when all human powers will work together and try to put an end to the faith of God’s people; or put an end to their very lives. When that happens, Jesus says you can run, but try to run in the right direction. And even at that, don’t be afraid.

What if the disciples had asked: “What should we be afraid of?”

Jesus’ answer would be, “Don’t be afraid of anything. Whatever comes, you and your brothers and sisters will be able to outlast it, because the Lord rules. The Lord controls the clock. The Lord is stronger than anything that can come against you.”

Jesus said, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) “So, don’t be afraid of anything.”

But wait! There is one thing that Jesus warns us to be afraid of. Maybe Jesus should have said this more clearly: “Fear only one thing. Fear sleep. Fear taking things for granted. Watch! Be alert!”

Jesus says that we are like servants who have been given assigned tasks in our master’s house. Our assigned task is to follow Jesus by being the same kind of servant that he always is. Trust and serve, and don’t stop.

Do Jesus’ work. Speak his words. Be his hands and feet. Be his mouth. Every day we have choices that challenge our alertness to Jesus.

We are asleep if we don’t see the meaning of our choices. Our choices are all either for or against Jesus, whether we are on trial before an emperor, or on trial before our friends and neighbors. We decide from day to day what we shall be in eternity.

This would be scary, except for one thing.

The truth is that we are waiting for Jesus. The Son of Man, coming in clouds with great power and glory, is Jesus who died for our sins, and for the sins of the world on the cross. Jesus loves us. He is planning a reunion of all God’s people in earth and heaven, including us. The Lord is planning a celebration with us.

Jesus compares the end of the story to the end of spring, and how you feel when you see the trees in bud. This time of year, we know how good that makes us feel.

The good news is that, as serious as Jesus is about our choices, he is also serious about giving us the right things to be serious about. Jesus is giving us a special kind of freedom. Those who follow Jesus don’t hide from what’s going on in the world. The people of Jesus can live in the real world without fear, without anger, without self-righteousness, and without any false sense of security.

What Jesus gives us is the call to trust and serve. This is the way to love with an open heart. This is the way to be loved till the end of time.

Passionate Jesus - Blowing Our Minds

Preached on the Sunday of The Resurrection of Our Lord (Easter Sunday), April 1, 2018

Scripture readings: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Mark 15:1-8

Spring Walks and Gardens of  My Past

One of the greatest events ever to happen in the history of the universe happened around the dawning of the first day of the week, almost two thousand years ago. The first people who discovered this greatest thing were three women carrying armloads of funeral spices. They were on their way to a stone tomb carved into the side of a hill, just outside the walls of Jerusalem.

They were on their way to give a very sad and tragic gift to their dear, dead friend and hero, whom they had lain to rest in that tomb.  They were on a mission to complete the embalming of his crucified corpse. They had loved Jesus, and they had hoped great things of him, but Jesus had led them straight into a fatal ambush, and a dead end to their love and to their hopes.

Jesus had seemed to have what it would take to open up a new world that they had all learned to call “the kingdom of God.” Jesus had freely owned-up to being the rightful king of the kingdom of God.

This was surprising because, although Jesus was a descendant of the famous David, the greatest of the kings of Israel, he had long worked as a carpenter, just like his father Joseph. The clan of David had been poor and struggling for so long that they had made a sort of mockery of the whole idea of their family producing anything like a Messiah. It just looked totally impossible for any of them to be a king raised up by God to conquer the world and put all nations under the power of the kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of God.

But, when Jesus was with his friends and followers, anything seemed possible. With God’s help their possibilities looked unlimited. And God was definitely with Jesus, making the impossible things possible: the dead rising at one touch of Jesus’ hand, or the mere sound of his voice. The wind and the waves of the sea stopped at his command and they became a place where a man might walk, if he had the faith to do so. People of wealth and influence were becoming beholden to Jesus for his healing of their loved ones and servants. Yes, with Jesus the possibilities looked endless.

Then Jesus was arrested less than a week after his triumphant, royal parade into the capital. The Passover crowds claimed his as their king under the noses of the Roman army and the Temple police. No one raised a hand against him.

Then, Jesus was seized by a joint action of the Roman Army and the Temple Police. Jesus was beaten, and scourged, and nailed on that cross; heckled, and bleeding, and suffocating to death, defeated for all the world to see.

He was clearly done with and finished for all time. Jesus had even yelled, “It is finished.” But he shouted those last words as if he didn’t mean them. Or else he meant something completely different from the way they felt, and from the way they were feeling now.

They were all finished now.

They and their friends would be lucky to survive much longer. The world had turned out to be much worse, and much darker, and more hopeless than they had ever imagined before Jesus had come to them, and called them, and raised their expectations.

They knew, now, that they lived in such a world where even someone as remarkable as Jesus could come and never make any difference at all. They had good reasons for being afraid but, somehow, their sense of fear was very low compared to their mountains of disappointment.

They and their friends had felt all of this for three days, but they had lost their sense of time. Their feelings were immeasurable. There is a modern British poet named T. S. Eliot. He was a great poet, really, and a Christian but, looking at the world and where most people’s ambitions were taking them, he wrote one of the bleakest and most depressing poems ever written, and it ends with these lines. I think it gives us the picture of life in this world as the disciples of Jesus were seeing it in their own time. Here it is:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

                                                                        (“The Hollow Men”)

I’m sorry to talk like this. Even on the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord we can’t understand the greatest things that have ever happened in the universe unless we see how Jesus had actually judged his own accomplishment when he shouted that it was finished.

There’s nothing good about any cross, and there’s nothing good about the cross of Jesus, unless it leads from something bad to something good. In a world like ours, the best possible good would be to produce the end of all crosses (or anything like a cross). The best possible great thing would bring an end to everything that could be woven into a world where crosses exist. The cross of Jesus exists to put an end to all other crosses, someday.

There’s nothing outstandingly good about the resurrection of Jesus except for the fact that it follows something evil. The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate cure for all evil and sin. We share in that cure when we die with Jesus by faith, on the cross, and rise with Jesus by faith from the darkness of our living tomb. The resurrection of Jesus creates a new world that is going to destroy the old world of crosses.

The Cross is the picture of death and evil completely defeated and completely destroyed. This is why we talk about that Old Rugged Cross and cling to it. The gift of the old rugged cross is to exchange itself for a crown on everyone’s head.

If we truly understood this, in all its weight and glory, it would blow our minds.

Where the cross and the resurrection are not understood, they seem foolish and perhaps even evil. Some people who are much too modern for their own good, or anybody else’s good, say that a father who sends his son to die on a cross is an abusive father. That’s what some people say.

The ancient Greeks and Romans thought the same way. This is why Paul wrote about the foolishness of God in the cross and, by extension, in the resurrection. What God knows is wise and what we humans think is wise are at odds with each other, and who will you listen to?

Paul wrote: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) In his own time Jesus also knew that most people wouldn’t understand him and wouldn’t believe that he was who he claimed to be. (Luke 7:33-35) Jesus knew that few of his own people (God’s people) would appreciate how his death on the cross would explain the old laws and prophets, and the perpetually unsolved conflicts between God and his people.

It is a shock to the system to go from seeing things the way they normally make sense to us to seeing things the way God sees them. It’s a shock to go from what you thought made sense of your life, to what God sees as sense: from what you think is wise to what God knows is wise, from what you think is powerful and possible to what God knows is powerful and possible.

In the early morning hours of the resurrection, the women, who had just been confronted by God’s wisdom and power, were scared by what they found. When the women did their appointed job to share this frightening good news with the other disciples, those others found God’s wisdom and power not to be scary but to be impossible, something not to be believed.

That first Easter dawning, the whole church as it was, or the whole family of Jesus was in two locations. One small group stood at the empty tomb and talked with angels. They were given a calling, or a mission, to help people believe what seems, at first, to be impossible.

They had an impossible mission even though they believed that the truth they served was true. The other disciples were called to believe what seemed impossible and foolish.

We have been given both callings; both jobs. The women couldn’t reach inside the doubting men and push the faith button. They had an impossible task; an impossible job to do. The men had to believe the impossible. In the end, only Jesus could make their calling work.

Our job together, like all of those apostles combined, is to believe the impossible and to do the impossible.

In the end, they did both. In the end, we can too.

It must be said here, that having this twin calling of believing and doing the impossible doesn’t make you special. It only makes you very, very needy. And that’s the only place where the impossible becomes possible. This is the foolishness of what we preach: the foolishness of our message. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)

In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote some of my favorite words. He wrote of a time in his life when he prayed and prayed for God to mend some desperate situation and the Lord gave him this solution: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul wrote how the solution worked for him in his mission impossible: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

Working together, and working each in our own way, we are called to something that the world and the people around us would regard as foolish, irrelevant, a waste of time and effort: an impossible faith for an impossible mission.

For the disciples at the tomb and the disciples in hiding, two of the best things the world could offer (the Roman peace and the Jerusalem Temple) were bad enough and strong enough to kill Jesus, the Son of God, God incarnate. It was a horrible thing think this way. It was even more horrible to watch it happen. And it was a horrible thing for Jesus to go through. Therefore, the only valid, logical option left was for Jesus to rise from the dead.

Jesus died on the cross, bearing the weight of the attack of the world on his own shoulders. It’s a weight that we all must carry, either with Jesus or without him. It’s a weight that seemed to defeat him because it killed him.

Then Jesus did the impossible thing. He defeated the power of defeat. Jesus defeated the power of evil to defeat, or corrupt, or ultimately co-opt goodness.

Afterwards, the world didn’t seem any different as a result, but God was beginning a long impossible victory. This victory would challenge and inspire those who came to him for all the centuries that have followed. It was the victory of having faith in a future new world: a whole new creation.

The cross and the resurrection are things that seem impossible but they make everything else possible. They are the victory in Jesus that becomes our victory: the cross and the resurrection of Jesus.

What’s possible or impossible is a matter of perspective. In the spring of my twenty-first year, when I was in college, I was helping a bunch of friends pre-fabricate a log cabin. I didn’t know what I was doing, of course, but I did as I was told.

I found myself standing on the eaves, above the loft, when I fell. I fell as far as most people fall when they fall off the eaves of a house.

Amazingly, I landed on my feet. I also landed on a nice wide board that was steady enough for me to keep standing on my feet, when I hit the ground. And that board had a fair-sized construction nail pointing up through the board at the point where my right foot landed.

That nail went through the sole of my right shoe and up between my second and third toe. I felt it go between my toes and it came out the top of my shoe. I saw it sticking out, about two or three inches, above the top of my tennis shoe.

I was fine. I was untouched. There was not a scratch: not one scratch, or mark, or bruise. It seemed impossible, but many such things happen.

I don’t know if that would be a miracle or not. It’s within the realm of remote mathematical possibility. But perhaps God’s miracles are just his input into our universe with its laws of nature and physics. We have our input, and God has his. And the two sources of input are not worth comparing. But they work together.

Paul wrote about this in his letter to the church in Rome: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

With God there are possible impossibilities that work, that have power, that change everything. These possible impossibilities change us.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus give us a foolish message as far as this world’s wisdom goes. It’s an impossible message, and sometimes we are tempted to rejoin the world in our opinions.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus call us to walk into the impossible where we take up our cross and follow Jesus. We can love and serve our Savior, and we can love and serve the world, and our neighbors for whom Christ died and rose from the dead, even when it all seems impossible.

With our minds properly blown by our Jesus, this will surely take us through whatever comes next.

Reformation - Faith Alone from God Alone

Preached on Sunday, October 8, 2017

Scripture reading: Rom. 3:21-26; Luke 18:9-14

A man was on his way home from work, and he stopped at a florist’s shop. He went to the roses, and picked up a dozen of them, and he took them to the clerk at the cash register. She asked him, “Are these for your wife, Sir?”  “Yes, they are!” “For her birthday?”  “Nope.” “For your anniversary?” “Nope!” And as he headed for the door, she called after him, “I hope she forgives you!” (Reader’s Digest, Jan. 96, p. 59)

Walks around home and Crab Creek
Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
August-September 2017

The word forgiveness is not in the verses we have read. But there is the issue of how we can stand before God when we have gone wrong: and we have all gone wrong.

Perhaps most people in our society would just smile, if we bring this up, and say that we shouldn’t worry our little heads about this. They have learned some famous words from the New Testament, and they will say that, “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and they know that, since God is love, that God will smooth over any and all difficulties, and they don’t have to do anything.

We can answer back and say, “Yes, you are right. God has done something to give us peace and confidence in the way we share our life with God. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified (set right) freely, by his grace, (his beautiful, undeserved love) through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”  (Romans 3:23-24)

And they might say, “Whoa now! Don’t bring up this sin stuff. I’m not a sinner. And why would Jesus have to die for me, I’m not that bad. I haven’t killed anybody.” (You know, some people have really given me the fact that they haven’t killed anybody as proof that they’re not sinners.) They probably mean: “What I have done doesn’t matter that much to God.” 

Later, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about the meaning of the word sin. For now, in Paul’s common Greek (hamartia), it was a word from the sport of archery. Sin is a kind of missing the mark, missing the bull’s eye. It’s overshooting, undershooting, missing off to the left, missing off to the right.

I have known only two people in my life who were not sinners.

One was a guy who lived in the town where I served my first church. I can see his face, but I can’t remember his name. Let’s call him Bob. I knew Bob for five years through the Lions Club. I had gone over to him and his wife’s house for a visit, and I must have been talking about why Christ came and died.

When they know you’re a pastor, people talk about themselves and God. They bring this up even when they don’t believe in anything at all. I guess they think they’re supposed to.

Anyway, all of a sudden, Bob said, “I’m not a sinner!” And I said, “Well, we’re all sinners. We all go wrong!” And Bob said, “You might be a sinner, but I’m not.” 

I never called him a sinner, in the first place, but he got really steamed about it. Now it so happens that, even if Bob wasn’t a sinner, he was still a stubborn, egotistical, hard-nosed, hard-drinking, loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed, belligerent man, and, if you disagreed with him, he would tell you that you were just plain stupid. Aside from that, I really liked the guy. He was a lot of fun, but I was glad I never had to spend more than an hour or two at a time with him.

The other person who wasn’t a sinner, was a woman named Orleana. She never told me this about herself, because she clearly believed that she was a sinner. But, once, I was visiting her husband Ken when she wasn’t around, and he was the one who told me that she wasn’t a sinner. 

We were talking about Jesus on the cross, and about Jesus rising from the dead, and we were talking about heaven, because Ken was dying of cancer, and Orleana had told me that Ken had never really committed his life to Christ. She was concerned about this.

I told Ken, “Orleana believes this.”  And Ken said, “My wife is not a sinner. She’s a wonderful woman. She couldn’t be any better, and I wouldn’t want her to be any different. I don’t know why she has to go and believe that she’s a sinner.”

Ken believed that Orleana’s faith had burdened her with an attitude of unworthiness, or a guilt, that she didn’t deserve. What could such a sweet woman ever do to feel that she needed to be forgiven?

I had to admit that even her faults were endearing. This was simply true. Ken was right about that. I wasn’t sure what to say about his idea that she would be better off, emotionally, if she didn’t accept what the Bible teaches about sin and human nature. 

I can’t remember how that conversation ended, except I told Ken that Orleana’s faith was the very thing that had made her the woman he loved. I never saw an unhealthy guilt in Orleana. I only saw a woman with great love, patience, gentleness, generosity, and strength, and faith.

Orleana had a tender conscience because she had a sense of the Lord’s glory. She had a powerful sense of the Lord’s holiness and perfection. Glory, holiness, and perfection can seem frightening or, at least, off-putting. Well, when certain people seem to be full of their own glory, holiness, and perfection they are definitely off-putting.

If we meet God, as he truly is, we find that his glory, holiness, and perfection all work hand in hand with his love. Perhaps the power of God’s love takes God’s glory, and holiness, and perfection by the hand and makes them beautiful, and desirable, and powerful in their ability to humble us and (surprisingly) to make humility absolutely beautiful and desirable to us. It’s love that has the most power to make us truly like Jesus, and not be off-putting.

Paul says something like this in his second letter to the Corinthians. Paul writes, “And we all with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness, from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Cor. 3:18)

It is true that we don’t feel very glorious. But what if the beautiful things we see in Jesus, the plain humble things we see in Jesus, in the gospels, are exactly the glory he wants to give us? Imagine for a moment that being lovingly truthful is glorious. Imagine that forgiveness is glorious. Imagine that a strong sense of justice and fairness is glorious. Imagine that using your life to serve others in any way is glorious. Imagine that compassion is glorious.

We see how glorious all of these things are in Jesus. Seeing him, we also can see how far we miss the mark. This makes our consciences tender. We know what we are not giving. We know what we are not doing. We know how what we say, and what we do, often accomplishes exactly the opposite of what Jesus is working for.

But why set ourselves up for this frustration and this sense of failure, by setting our sights so high? And, why should God care if we are not like Jesus?

When we meet God, in Christ, we begin to care, because we know how great this goal is. We know that this is what God created us for. We know how much is lost in a world like ours, where all the billions of missed targets add up to such great pains, and sorrows, and evils. The glory of God, the beauty of the Lord’s goodness, is what helps us understand sin.

Orleana loved the Lord. She knew how great the Lord is. She knew she needed him, but she also trusted the Lord’s great love for her.

I know what Ken was afraid of. I once saw what he was afraid of. I saw it in a little girl.

Once I was at a church picnic, and I was talking to this girl. She was about ten years old. She was being raised by her grandparents. I can’t remember why that was.

She was a serious and religious child: really much too serious. She had been reading some good stuff in the Bible, about the creation, in the first two chapters of Genesis. She asked me, “Do you know what God made us out of?”  And I said, “Yes, God made us out of dust.  And that means we are made of the same things everything else is made of.” And she said, “No, it means we’re dirt.” And I said, “But, do you know what the dirt is made of?” And she said, “It’s made of mud and worms.”

And I said, “Don’t you know what the mud and the worms are made of? They’re made of rocks, and roots, and trees, and grass, and lots of other living things. And everything they are made of comes from up in the sky, where you can look up and see the stars at night. You are made of the same stuff the stars are made of.” And she said, “No, we’re dirt.” I looked into her eyes and saw that, somehow, this little girl had taken to heart a great and sad distortion of herself, in the guise of the Christian faith.

Paul said, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace...” (Romans 3:23-24) To be justified, or set right, by God is to become a sinner living in the presence of glory. There, in a single sentence written by Paul, Sin and Glory come together when God has bridged the gap. 

I have told you about three people. Each one had a different way of thinking about sin and glory.  Bob had no use for either one. The little girl, sadly (really sadly), had no sense of beauty and glory. Orleana showed an awareness of both sin and glory: her own sin and God’s great glory. Because of this, she knew that part of God’s glory was his way of loving her just as she was, and making his glory a part of her.

I believe that the good news of Jesus tells us that every bit of human goodness is a gift. It is not a human achievement, but a gift from God. It is, in some way, a partnership with God, but, most of all, goodness is simply a gift from God. Just as life, itself, is a gift from God.

I don’t think that many people want goodness or righteousness to be given to them from the outside. They don’t want the goodness in them to come, not from themselves, but to come from someone else. Maybe they have a hard time believing it’s possible (or even fair) to be given someone else’s goodness. They don’t want to be dependent or in debt to another, not even to God.

In Jesus’ parable of the two men praying in the Temple (the Pharisee and the tax collector) something in our heart really wants to be the Pharisee. But the true goodness comes to us only when we pray: “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13)

The Lord gives us goodness through the cross, and so we are, “justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.” (Romans 3:24-25)

The sacrifice of atonement means that God makes peace with us: and even makes himself one with us. Knowing Jesus means knowing God as our friend. Redemption means being bought and being set free from slavery, Jesus Christ is God breaking the power of sin over us, and in us.

God justifies us. This means that God, our judge, acquits us. He doesn’t make excuses for us, but God pardons the guilty, he treats us just as if we had never gone wrong.

We don’t work for his love, as Christians. We begin with his love. Martin Luther rediscovered the ancient truth of the Bible. Only a few months after Luther nailed the Ninety Five Theses (or the points of argument about the selling of indulgences), back in the year, 1517, he wrote, a few months later, another set of points for debate to be argued in the city of Heidelberg. One of his points was this: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it…. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.” (Thesis #28 of the “Heidelberg Disputation”; “Luther’s Works”, 31:57) Our life, in which we are born again as a child of God, begins with God’s love alone.

And we keep beginning with his love every day of our lives. Jesus died on the cross to give us this love, this freedom, this friendship, as a gift: a pure gift. And faith means receiving this gift from the Lord, like a little child who receives everything from his or her parents. We receive this gift of God just as a child receives life from his or her parents.

Martin Luther put it this way: “This is wonderful news, to believe that salvation lies outside ourselves.  I am justified and acceptable to God, although there are in me sin, unrighteousness, and horror of death.  Yet I must look elsewhere and see no sin.  This is wonderful, not to see what I see, not to feel what I feel.  Before my eyes I see a [coin], or a sword, or a fire, and I must say, “there is no [coin], no sword, no fire.” The forgiveness of sins is like this.” (Martin Luther, quoted in “Here I Stand”, by Roland Bainton, Chapter 13, p. 178)

This is the kind of grace and faith that will reform any church and its people. This kind of grace and faith will reach out to others, and change the world, and point to the coming kingdom of God.

Faith's Underbelly - Anger Gone Wrong

Preached on Sunday, September 10, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 20:1-13; James 1:19-25

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law, which goes like this: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” The law comes from Edward Murphy, who was an Air Force major and an aerospace engineer. I’ve found out that his saying was what he called a rule for “defensive design”. He devised his law to encourage planning for the worst-case scenario. Apparently, he hated the way his law got turned into comedy.

The Hills of Southern California
June 2017

My dad liked to consider himself to be Irish, which was a big over-simplification of the truth, because he was really only one eighth Irish. My dad thought that Murphy’s Law was an old Irish saying. So, he had one plaque hanging in the garage with Murphy’s Law on it, and he had another plaque with the words: “Murphy was an optimist.” This worked for my dad. It says a lot about him.

I wonder if Murphy may actually have been Jewish, because anything that could go wrong really did go wrong in the exodus of God’s people through the desert. Finally, Murphy’s Law happened to Moses. For me, that’s what we read about in the scriptures for this message.

Moses was done in by his own anger. This might seem strange to you. After all, the Book of Numbers also describes Moses this way: “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men who were on the face of the earth.” (12:3)

But meekness describes a different kind of mildness or softness than you might imagine. In the Bible, a meek person is the kind of softy who is soft to God. It’s the quality of being a servant. It means responding to every signal from God, giving to God exactly what God wants.

A perfectly trained war horse was expected to be bold and fearless, and also to be perfectly meek to every signal from its rider: to charge, to halt, to retreat, to turn on a dime. That was the meekness of Moses toward God: except for this time. This time, his temper, that always went right, finally went wrong.

Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin: do not let the sun go done on your wrath.” (Ephesians 4:16)

I think anger can be the right response, the meekest response, under the right circumstances. There is such a thing as “righteous indignation.” So many people in the Old Testament seem to be angry all the time. In the New Testament, Paul gets mad. Jesus gets mad. And, as such, Jesus is the perfect image of God, because God seems to get mad a lot, and that seems to be the very result of God’s holiness and righteousness.

I have a different problem. I don’t seem to be able to get mad without getting sinful about it. One way I go wrong is by holding onto it. Paul’s teaching applies to that. It’s OK to get mad, just don’t hold onto it. And then there is this: don’t let your anger make you do something that breaks God’s law of love. That’s hard.

Then James tells us something that I believe applies to where Moses went wrong in his anger. James says” “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger doesn’t bring about the righteousness that God desires.” (James 1:19-20) This applies so many ways.

Here’s another word study: righteousness. Righteousness, in Hebrew and in Greek, is about rightness. It’s about being right and doing right. But being right is not about being correct. Being right is about doing and being what you are supposed to be, whatever the circumstances, and making things good, and making things better. I

t’s like the song “Things go better with Coca Cola.” That means that Coca Cola is righteous, within certain limits.

God’s righteousness, in this light, is very clear. God’s righteousness is his faithful love that is devoted to getting his people to freedom and the Promised Land, no matter what.

When God got angry it was part of the process of providing for his people, teaching them, shaping them, building their faith and trust and love for him, and for each other. Even God’s discipline (or his punishment), in anger, is basically devoted to providing for his people and giving them a grace and an abundance of gifts for which they are clearly not ready, and for which they show no desire whatsoever. In all that God does for them, they show no sign of change.

But God is faithful. That is God’s righteousness: just a small part.

God has ways of showing his people that he is always with them. The pillar of cloud and fire was just a small part of that. That was his righteousness too.

God was going to give them water again, even though they forgot that he always made sure they had water when they truly needed it, and even though they could see that God was with them all the time. They acted as though God wasn’t there at all. They acted as though Moses was the one who was leading them through the desert all along.

In spite of this, God was going to give them the water he knew that they needed, anyway. And his reason for doing this was because he is holy and righteous.

God’s plan in having Moses serve as the spokesman for God to the rock was a plan to show his people that God was a God who would always care for them. God would always stick to them, even when he was angry.

God’s people would get their water, even when they didn’t deserve it; even when they turned spiritually ugly in their unfaithfulness to God and to Moses. This would help them understand his holiness and righteousness. It was God’s plan to faithfully teach and shape his people.

Over and over again, we see that, when God gets angry, and when Moses gets angry, Moses consistently prays (in his anger) for the undeserved grace of God to forgive and help his people. I wonder how Moses did this over and over again. It would be so easy for Moses to get his anger wrong. It could have gone wrong so many times. But it didn’t go wrong, until it did. Murphy’s Law proved true.

On a human level, Murphy’s Law is never out of sight. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, in the beginning. We were created for the joy of seeing our love blend with God’s love, and to see our love doing good, and making good, and being good. We were made for this joy, as well as for this love.

Soon after the beginning, in the garden of Eden, the Garden of joy and love, we decided to limit our love’s dependence on God’s love. We decided to make ourselves into our own little gods, with our own independent instinct for good and evil, on our own terms. And, so, Murphy’s Law was born.

God had a defensive design from the start, and so he told Adam and Eve about that design as soon as he got them out of hiding. There would be, sometime in the future, a son of Eve who would grow up to be wounded in the heel by evil, and the serpent Satan. But this child of Eve would crush evil, and the serpent, with his heel. In the ages to come Jesus would be the son of Mary, the long-drawn-out descendant daughter of Eve. (Genesis 3:14-15)

On the cross, Jesus would be bitten with evil’s poison, the poison of the serpent, and sin, and Murphy’s Law. Then Jesus would crush those enemies with his wounds. The wounds of Jesus, the wounds of his death on the cross, were the fatal bite of the serpent that killed Jesus. The wounds of Jesus were also the weapons of his victory over the serpent’s bite.

Jesus was able to stomp that serpent of evil. Jesus rose from the dead as conqueror of the serpent, and as the conqueror of the sin and death that came from the serpent’s rule. Jesus’ prayer, “Father, forgive them,” was like the prayer that Moses was always saying for God’s forgiveness and grace for his guilty people.

Jesus’ prayer got everyone who would become one of his people back on the track to the Promised Land. The cross of Jesus is the very heart of his prayer that changes those who trust him into receivers of God’s holiness and righteousness.

God’s anger at Moses seems ungracious, at first sight. Moses’ unrighteous anger didn’t break one of the Ten Commandments, but it did break Jesus’ law, in the Sermon on the Mount.

In the case of Moses, we see something surprising about the heart of God. We see God get angry about anger. God got angry at the anger of Moses. And there, God, in his heart, looks suddenly, on that point, like Jesus. Jesus got angry, but he also got angry at anger.

Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’” (Note: that judgment, here, means death by stoning) “But I tell you that anyone who is angry at his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca (or worthless empty head!)’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

It wasn’t only because Moses didn’t mention God when he struck the rock, or that he struck the rock instead of talking to the rock. In essence, Moses, in his anger, forgot the heart of God that he normally knew so well. He and his brother Aaron had just been in the direct and full presence of the Glory of God. They had heard the voice of God. (Numbers 20:6)

In seeing and hearing this, Moses saw the holiness and righteousness of God, which expressed God’s faithfulness and grace for the unworthy. He saw what he always remembered to pray for; until now.

Then he came back and looked at the people who hated him, and who had no faith in the God who had forgiven them countless times before. (Numbers 14:18-19) When Moses came back and looked at these people, his anger returned, and he forgot God’s absolute love.

Moses called God’s people “rebels” which was perfectly true, but God’s intention of showing his forgiveness to his people was a greater truth. Moses failed to give God’s message to God’s people. Moses might just as well have called them “fools”, as Jesus warns us against.

In praying for God’s forgiveness of his people, so many times, Moses had prayed according to what he had seen of the heart of God. In praying according to the heart of God, Moses had been praying according to Jesus.

Jesus is the heart of God’s holiness, and righteousness, and faithfulness. Moses, praying as he did, was, in his own heart, giving his people Jesus. Moses praying for his people’s sins, and for their forgiveness, was praying an equivalent to, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  By forgetting to hold such a prayer in his heart, Moses was withholding Jesus from the people.

Anger can do this. Anger can withhold the love and grace of God, in Jesus, from those who don’t deserve it, and yet they need it. And we are in the same boat. We don’t deserve grace, but we need it. It’s the faithfulness and holiness of God.

There are many times when anger is the right thing, but it will always go wrong if we don’t hold onto the heart of God, in Jesus, when we are angry. We will repeat Murphy’s Law.

Other people are just as much the image of God as we are, and we condemn ourselves when we forget to work for the righteousness and holiness of God in those people’s lives. Anger goes wrong when it stops showing the absolute love of God.

Moses was punished because he let his anger make him forget to pray for his people, even though they played the part of being his enemies. Moses forgot to love them anyway.

Jesus is the voice of God telling us to never forget to love others, even when we are angry. Moses shows us, and Jesus tells us and shows us on the cross, to remember to pray for others and to speak and work so that God’s grace becomes known to them. Let’s not go wrong with this.