Good News - The Story of a New Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are we to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News - The Story of a New Beginning

Preached on Sunday, July 15, 2018. This is the first of two messages about the work of the gospel (which means good news).

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; John 1:9-14

The Bible tells us about the kind of world and the sort of life that we were designed for: that we were created for. It also shows us a picture of what has gone wrong.

The Next Leg of our Cruise to Santa Catalina Island
June 2018

The part of the story we read from Genesis tells us how things went wrong. If we kept on reading we would see how things got much worse.

But this is no news to anyone. TV, and the radio, and the internet all tell us that too many things are getting worse all the time. We wonder when the next terrorist attack will come, and when the next jet will plow into the next skyscraper. The big world around us shows us that things have gone wrong.

But we see it on the small scale of our own lives. Even in our own homes (or even if we live alone) there can be angers, and stresses, and betrayals, and griefs that eat at our minds. At work, and even on vacation, the things that go wrong can break our hearts, or embitter us, or isolate us.

The Bible tells us that we were designed and created to live in a garden, a paradise, a place of harmony, a place of good relationships. And we lost it. We blew it. The world and human life became broken and dysfunctional things. This happened long before we were born, but it’s a fact of life now.

Long ago the first humans tried to put themselves in a state of independence from God. They thought they could get away with this, even though God is the source of life for all things. God responded to their raid on the forbidden fruit by graciously giving them exactly what they were really asking for. If you want freedom from dependence upon God, then what you really want is a life lived outside the source of life.

They had wanted an independence that was beyond the ability of any creature living in a world made by God. It was as if beings with lungs wanted to live independent of the air, or a fish wanted to live out of water. What hope could there be for a life like that?

And yet God, at their request, did the best he could do in order to give them this unnatural way of life: to be living lungs without air and living fish flopping around on dry land. That first pair of humans found out the hard way that getting exactly what you want can be more a punishment than a gift.

Before the portion of the story that we have read, you can read how God brought all the animals to the man, and the man named them according to their nature. The man was able to clearly read and assess each one of them. But the man did not find among them a companion truly suited to his needs. And since none of the other creatures were capable of giving him the help and the depth of relationship that he needed, God gave him a wife. And the man immediately knew who this person was and how good for him she was.

If we were in harmony with God, we would be like those first humans in the beginning. We would be able to size up anything (and anyone) that came our way. We would know what to do. We would know what was good for us, and what wasn’t. We would know what we needed and what we didn’t need. Any person who came into our life, we would understand, and we would be able to see how that person was a gift from God, and we would know how to deal with that person. We would know what to say to that person, and how to live together.

Our human nature is out of harmony with God. If God brought the very best person, the greatest source of human love to us, we would fail to praise that person properly and give God the proper thanks.

In the temptation, where Adam should have accepted responsibility for his own actions, he blamed his wife instead. And Adam blamed God for giving her to him. And so, in the story, half the human race was divided from the other half, as it has been ever since.

The fall of the human race and the breaking up of human nature shows us who we are. When we do not live in harmony with God, we don’t know how to live in this world. We don’t know what anything is. We don’t know how to relate to our opportunities. We blame others instead of facing ourselves. We allow our pride to divide us from others. It becomes our nature to fight, and hurt, and get hurt.

Before the first humans divided the human race from God, the garden life was a place where you could work and know what you were working for.

With the help of God work can be a blessing but, living in a world that does not work God’s way, you can do all the right things and have nothing to show for it. Farmers know this. You can invest the work of your life in a job, in a marriage, in a way of seeing the world, and end up with nothing.

You can even work so hard, so intensely, that you make the work go bad. The sweat in your eyes makes you fail to see how you are toiling for what you think you want in all the wrong ways. This is what it means to work for thorns and thistles.

Even though we often live broken lives in a broken world, it is not completely natural to us. We see that something is wrong. If we were really designed for the world as it is, and for life as it is, we wouldn’t know any better. We would feel perfectly at home.

But we don’t feel at home. The fact is that most of us know there is something wrong, and sometimes we can imagine the way things should be.

We are not like blind people living in a world where everyone was blind. In such a world there would be no one who would know that there was such a thing as light.

We live in a spiritually and morally hungry and thirsty world. Most of us know that we are missing something. Hunger and thirst tell us that we are made to eat and be filled; to drink and be quenched. At least some of us know that we hunger and thirst for goodness, and for fairness, and justice, and forgiveness, and love, and truth.

This shows us that we were made for a better world than we see around us, and that we were made for better lives than we have the power to live on our own. This tells us that, either the world was once such a place for finding fullness, and harmony, and fulfillment, and satisfaction; or else it tells us that we are made for a better world that is ahead, a better world that is coming.

The Bible and the good news of Jesus tell us about such a world and such a life. It tells us about a paradise that has been lost, and a human nature that has been broken, and about relationships that have been divided. It tells us that we were made for peace with God, and that such a peace would make us able to grow in peace, and in healing relationships with others, and we would have something to give to the world that would make a difference.

The Bible tells us that there will be an end to the world as it is; that Satan and all the powers of evil will be crushed as one might crush the head of a rattle snake when you’ve killed it. The Bible tells us that God has a plan to make each one of us a new person fit for a new creation that is coming.

The Lord told the serpent, the devil, in the garden, that one of the woman’s children would crush the serpent’s head and the serpent would strike the child’s heel. That is the first picture, or prophecy, in the Bible that shows us the healing and the salvation of the human race and the whole world. Everything else is built on this promise.

The serpent is Satan, the Devil, and all his minions, and all the forces of darkness, and all the sin rooted in human hearts, and all the rebellion in human beings that poison nations, and families, and each one of our individual lives.

We are all children of the man and the woman in the garden. We are all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We cannot crush the serpent because the serpent is a part of us. At least we are allies of it. It is our very nature to be allies of the serpent, even though we have been made in the image of God and made for life with God. We are divided against ourselves, and so we cannot defeat, for good, the evil in the world and in ourselves.

So God became human to fight the battle that must be fought. God entered the world as Jesus, the son of Mary.

His coming into the world was his own doing. It was his free, and gracious, and miraculous act of love.

There is something in the love of God that is parental, which we call the Father. There is something in the love of God that submits and serves, which we call the Son. The Bible also calls this submitting and serving Son, the Word of God, and the light that enlightens everyone and everything.

The Son, the Word, the Light, says everything about God and everything about us. When he comes to us we see true glory, and holiness, and love, and worth; and we see ourselves just as we are. And this Son, this Word, this light in the nature of God is what led God to become human, to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

God became human as Jesus to invade us and establish a beachhead in us. In Jesus God built a perfect human life; the kind of life of faith, and compassion, and wisdom that we were created to live.

In Jesus God suffered the injustices, and the griefs, and the pains, and the death that human sin made a part of our life. He suffered the experiences that sin in our nature deserved. He who was without sin died the death our sins deserved.

He was beaten and whipped bloody by those who arrested him and prepared him for death on the cross, but our sins were in those fists that beat him, and in the lashes that tore his flesh. Nails were driven through his hands and feet. His whole body’s weight hung upon those nails, but all the sins and injustices and evils of this world hung upon him. The pain and blood of the cross are the pictures of the extreme and infinite love of God for you. They are his power to reach into you, and claim you, and make you whole.

He bore our punishment on the cross. He went through the gate of death because he was human, and because he was God he broke the power of death, and he broke the power of sin that brought death into the world.

On the cross it was as if all the evil and sin of this world, and of our own hearts, struck the Jesus’ heel and killed him, but Jesus lived again and crushed the serpent’s head.

If we will receive Jesus we receive everything that he is, everything that he has. We receive his grace and his forgiveness.

Everything we have, from then on, and every step forward, is the result of that forgiveness. We never receive the victory of Jesus in order to brag, or to be better than anyone else, or to look down on others. Apart from Jesus we don’t have anything to call our own, but Jesus makes us his own. He makes us children of God.

Even when we first meet God, in Christ, we may be afraid of him because we can see that he wants to take away the hard-won gift that Adam and Eve and the human race have struggled so hard to hold onto. Jesus looks snakey and suspicious because we are used to hiding from the true light of God. That light hurts our eyes and we can’t see what’s good for us.

We don’t want to see ourselves just as we are. We don’t want to know too much about our responsibility. We don’t want to completely escape from the crippling and destructive desires within us, because these desires may give us the only pleasure that we have known; even though they are hurting us and those around us.

We may think we that want God and what God has to give us, but we don’t want it all. We want to pick and choose what God will deal with in us and what we can keep for ourselves.

And, so, the light shows us that the old sin of Adam and Eve is at work in us, wanting to be independent from our very source of life. It is as if we want to be sober and drunk at the same time. It is as if we want to be sick and well at the same time. In that sense we want to live a lie, even when we see all the goodness of God waiting for us in Jesus.

But God is full of grace and truth and he shows us this through his Son. There is no grace or truth outside of him.

We have to die with Jesus and rise with Jesus by receiving him. We have to die to our stubborn independence in order to rise in a life of grace alone: the beautiful and freely given mercy of God alone.

And we have to die and rise with Christ so that we die to our version of the truth and listen only to him. We have to die to the lies we have told ourselves, about our lives, and about our real priorities, and about our true responsibility. We have to die to ourselves, and rise in God’s truth about us and about the new life he sets before us.

Receiving Jesus, the word and light of God, means the deepest surrender. It feels like the greatest risk in the world. It’s like floating on your back when you are afraid of water. It is like sky diving and jumping out of that plane when you are afraid of heights. We have to lose ourselves and give up ourselves in order to put to an end to a life that needs to stop, and to receive a life that comes from God.

The life God gives is a life that we cannot manufacture for ourselves. The life we receive from God has its beginning before the creation and it will never end, and there is no shadow and no fear in it.

This new life will enable us to go forward in harmony with God. It will make us into givers of grace and truth to others, and to the whole world. This new life is the end of something old that we know too well, but this life is only the beginning of something else. To receive Jesus, you have to be ready to begin what only God knows.

The Blessed Heritage is the Blessing Heritage

Preached on Sunday, July 1, 2018

Scripture readings: Deuteronomy 10:12-22; 1 Peter 2:9-25

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
May 2018

A mother came into her kitchen and found that it was being destroyed by her young children. They were definitely up to something. There was a mess of flour, and milk, and eggs everywhere it shouldn’t be. “What on earth are you doing?” she yelled.

The youngest answered first. “It’s almost America’s birthday, and we want to make it a birthday cake!”

It’s a good thing to want to celebrate this birthday. There are a lot of good reasons to do this. Birthday’s celebrate hopes and dreams, and they celebrate the heritage of the life carried in a person, or in a community, or even a nation.

Our nation’s birthday was an important day in my family, growing up. In his later years, my dad lost enough weight to fit into his old Navy uniform again, and he would put it on first thing in the morning and march out of the house, carrying the flag, and setting the flag in it’s bracket on the front of the house and saluting the flag at attention. My mom liked to spend part of the day watching Jimmy Cagney play George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, which seemed to be on TV every Fourth of July. By the time I was twelve, I took over setting fire to our fireworks.

The dog and cats celebrated the evening of the fourth by hiding. Some of the neighbors fired guns loaded with blanks, just like they would do on the stroke of the New Year.

The Nez Perce tribe in Idaho celebrate Independence Day in the middle of their summer powwow. The last week in June and the first week in July they celebrate what they call Talmaks. It’s also called “Presbyterian Camp Meeting of the Nez Perce Indians”. They’ve been doing this since 1897.

The Nez Perce were the tribe that sent messengers east to the settled lands of the United States, back in 1831, to ask for “the white man’s Book of Heaven”. Their mission was to ask a wise man to come to their people and teach them the message of the Bible.

A lot of Nez Perce people have long considered themselves to be a Christian tribe. The Nez Perce Wars were fought by the part of the tribe that didn’t want the Book. That part of the tribe is still fighting, to tell you the truth.

As the Presbyterian Camp Meeting would tell you, the most important part of the powwow is worship, study, and prayer.

The next most important part of Talmaks is the Fourth of July. A lot of the Nez Perce men enlist in the armed forces and become veterans. Independence Day is a big day for them: serving their country as warriors along with celebrating their identity as a Christian nation.

Well, they like to call their tribe a Christian nation. The truth is it doesn’t always look that way. As a nation, there's some debate among them, but a lot of them do their best to make it so.

That’s sort of like us, isn’t it? I remember the days when, if you asked someone if they were Christians, their answer could very well be: “Of course I’m Christian, I’m an American!” Although, back in the day, I was learning how to be a Christian in fellowship and not alone, and my most valued fellowship consisted of people who didn't buy that logic. On that point we might not have been any better Christians than they were, or anybody else, for that matter.

By the way, did you know that, legally speaking, Christ is the King of Poland, and the Virgin Mary is the Queen of Poland? It’s in their constitution, but I wonder if they’re doing a very good job following their King and Queen.

We want our nation to be truly Christian, and that means we want our nation to act in the spirit of Jesus doesn’t it? We want our nation, in this world, to have a role like the role Jesus has in this world. Then, as old as I am, I take a look at what I’ve wanted our country to do in the past, and it didn’t always seem very much like Jesus when it was all done. It’s hard to be a Christian nation if that means being a nation where the people see to it that their government behaves like Jesus.

This shouldn’t surprise us, though, if we know even a little about the Book of Heaven. That Book regularly tells us that even when God himself makes a collection of people into His Chosen People, it’s very hard for them, with all of God’s help, to live up to that.

There are certain themes and ideas that run all the way through the many books of the Bible from cover to cover. From cover to cover, the Bible is the love story of God for his broken creation from birth, to failure from the start, to the sacrifice of God, in Jesus, on the Cross. To the wedding and the happily ever after in the Book of Revelation. That’s one theme that runs through it all.

Another theme is God’s proposal of marriage, over and over again, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, to Joshua, to David, to the prophets, to the disciples of Jesus (which means us). This is our engagement, as disciples of the Lord, to be his bride, to be his people, to be his nation and kingdom.

Well, the Church could become the heart of a Christian nation. But it’s awfully hard to be that kind of heart of a nation without being heart sick.

Our readings from Deuteronomy and First Peter tell us a bit of what it’s like to be God’s nation, God’s people. Our Bible readings tell us, in that sense, what our heritage is when we celebrate the Church’s birthday on Pentecost. Our readings tell us, as the heart of our world and as the heart of our nation, what our heritage is. It tells us the heritage of how we go about helping our nation celebrate its life as we beat quietly, deep inside it, as any healthy heart usually does.

The first clue, in our scriptures, to our God-given heritage, if we stand in our nation and in our world as its heart, is that this heritage is a miracle. The miracle, as Moses puts it, is that God chooses us to be his people even though he could have chosen anyone else. How could God have chosen Israel, or us?

Although everything in heaven and earth belongs to the Lord, “Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers, and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all nations, as it is today.” (Deuteronomy 10:14-15) What a surprise, that God would settle for us. Earlier in the Book, the Lord and Moses tell Israel that they weren’t chosen because they were great (7:7) or good (9:5) but only as a demonstration of the Lord’s powerful faithfulness (Deuteronomy 7:8-9 and 9:29).

Peter means the same thing when he writes this: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (2 Peter 2:10) We “are a people of God, that you may declare the praises of him who brought you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (2:9)

There is no light in us, but there is wonderful light pouring into us from Someone who is not us, but who loves us perfectly in spite of who we are.

That is, surely, a wonderful light. Isn’t it?

No nation, and no church, is chosen by the Lord because it is great and good. It is chosen because God is love, and God’s love is absolutely faithful. God has never, ever, left his people. God has never left Israel. God has never left the Church. God has never left his violent, broken world. The history of the Chosen People of Israel as a rebellious nation is told in the Bible. The history of the Chosen People of the Church as a rebellious nation is told to us in history.

It’s the same story, the same history, the same heritage. It’s the same story here with us.

Knowing this is a very great relief. Thank God, we are not in our own hands alone. We are in the hands of the perfectly faithful Lord. It’s a great and perfectly humbling, humiliating miracle. It’s all about being love. Apply this to yourselves. Apply this here and now, in this place. Apply this to our nation. This is a heritage worth celebrating.

We were a small population on the shore of the Atlantic; colonies of the greatest naval power in the world of that day, and God saved us. George Washington and the small, poorly trained and poorly paid colonial armies lost most of their battles. When they won, it always seemed like an accident, like luck, or like the intervention of God.

Our heritage of somehow being brought into being from outside ourselves, to belong on the inside of the center of the history in this world flows from this. Our nation seems to have a purpose from God for changing this world for good, though we were once so small and weak, at the start.

Now we belong. We are insiders, and this should remind us that we were once outsiders. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. It means our heritage is a God who loves outsiders and loves to make them insiders.

The method for getting into our heritage as a nation in God’s hands is described when Moses and the Lord tell his people that part of their obedience is to love God by imitating him. “Walk in his ways.” “Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.” (Deuteronomy 10:16) Our heritage is not an itemized check-list of rules, but a matter of the heart.

Walking in the Lord’s ways is like being a little child following their father in the snow. The child sees their father’s footprints and jumps to make sure that their feet go into those big footprints.

The last thing the child wants is to miss a single step. You might call this a fear, but it’s the fear motivated by love. You bite your lip at every step you take, and every good step is joy.

At every step gone wrong, you don’t stop but you try for the next step. It’s more like a dance than a walk. It’s all a matter of the heart and, with God, your alien heart has become a child’s heart and new every morning.

Our heritage of being the outsider brought in is the heritage of an alien finding a new, safe, free, beloved home. This has the strange power of not making you selfish about coming home and wanting to keep home for just yourself. You love the hospitality of the Lord, and this is part of the path of his footprints that you are jumping into, step by step, in a dance that is bigger than you are.

You and I all live in the hospitality of God, and your own heart becomes a place of welcome. You become the welcomers of outsiders. We know that the church is not only for us but, most of all, for others. We know this.

Those who have a Latin/Spanish culture have a saying: “Mi casa es su casa.” (My home is your home.) When the outsiders come to your house, they are not guests, they are family. If they are family then they aren’t held to the standards of guests. They are better than guests.

When outsiders come to your church, they are not guests. They are family who are welcome to make themselves at home-church with you, and they graciously share their ways with you and it is part of the joy you feel because they have come inside from the outside, and you know what it is like to do the same. With God you are strangers who have found a home.

Peter says the same, only he says to show the same hospitality to outsiders when you are with the outsiders outside your own house, or outside this house. You know you are an alien, so that they don’t feel like aliens to you. You and they are the same and this is a great miracle. But this is not a miracle that you indulge in by living down to it. You stoop down to lift others up.

You don’t just go along with everything. Peter says: “Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.” In other words, don’t use your friendliness as an excuse for going against the Lord’s values: remember that you are still an alien yourself for God’s sake. “Live as servants of God.” (1 Peter 2:16)

When the church has the heritage of hospitality built on the sympathy of your own alien experience, then the church will go outside itself. We will volunteer to be aliens in a world of people who feel perfectly at home without us, and who don’t realize that they are aliens who do not know yet what’s so good about coming inside God’s love.

They might well see something wrong with you, and they will see you as the aliens with themselves as being the ones who belong as insiders. But something will click and they will see something good behind you and come in before they know it. “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)

Goodness, in the languages of the Bible, has nothing to do with a daunting list of rules. True goodness doesn’t earn a gold star on a chart.

True goodness is experienced as thriving. True goodness is like serving chocolate gelato (like ice cream but much richer) to someone who has never eaten it before. True goodness is having someone smile at you when they have put a bowl of chocolate gelato in your hands.

That’s what a servant of God wants to do. That’s the heritage of a church that is being a servant. How can we find a way to give chocolate gelato to our neighbors and to the communities around us, so that they glorify God with us on the day of his coming? How can we give them something richer than they have ever tasted before?

You know that if you pass your neighbors some chocolate gelato over the fence, they will likely come to your door. If the Church could pass out that chocolate gelato, we’d have people coming in. But it’s got to be something surprisingly stunning.

Our nation is like a big bowl of chocolate gelato in a painful and desperate world. We should be so glad about this, as a nation, that we would also enjoy those who come knocking on our nation’s door. It’s the real meaning of disciples, the church, and the blessed nation being a city on the hill.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14) Some people think that the city on the hill is simply visible to all: that it is simply an example to others, and not their actual destination for arrival.

Jesus was really saying: “You are the new Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was the city on the hill. You could see it in the distance, for miles and miles. But Jerusalem was much, much more than visible. Jerusalem was a destination. It was the place where people would love to come and stay for the purpose of worship and offering their sacrifices and themselves to the Lord. In message of the Old Testament prophets, the nations of the world were all going to come to Jerusalem. All the old enemies and destroyers would come there to worship. “In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.” (Isaiah 2:2)

When a nation truly has a heritage from the Lord, it will be like a temple where all the nations will want to come. It’s a great blessing. In the story of the whole Bible, from beginning to end, a nation belonging to God will draw all the nations in. That’s the heritage that those who hunger for a Christian America will discover. We will just be too good.

Under God, we are blessed to be a blessing. The Lord said it to Abraham, and it applies to the Church, and to any people of God. “You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

Now, I’m going to quote a politician of yesterday.

In his “Farewell Address” Ronald Reagan took up the theme of the city on the hill, and he got it right. He was a good, smart, decent guy. Here it is.

“I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.

That's how I saw it; and see it still. How stands the City?

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.

And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the Pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

Our heritage is not always something you are born with. A heritage may be a gift given in hospitality by those who were there first. But our heritage, as the people of God in the Church, is the heritage of being aliens who have come home. We give to other aliens, as they come to us, the same heritage that the Lord has given us in Jesus. We make people who were not a people into our own people, in the church. This is sacred. This is the gospel; that we are saved by gift, saved by grace, and saved as we come home by faith. In the Church of Jesus, the Bride of Jesus, we welcome the aliens home.

Any nation that would be a Christian nation will have the same heritage as those who belong to Jesus. That nation will do for others what Christ has done for us. Every church that that loves the gospel, the good news of Jesus, will be eager to welcome outsiders. Every nation that loves the good news of what God has given their country will be eager to welcome outsiders. The church that enjoys the blessings of God will bring people in. The nation that enjoys the blessing of God will bring people in.

The church has to be like Jesus: welcoming wandering outsiders home. We have no choice besides this one, or (if we do have a choice) we have a choice of heaven or hell. The Church, or what seems to be the Church, will live or die by this choice. “For you were like sheep, going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25) How we give grace to those on the outside will be the sign of our belonging (or not belonging) to the Shepherd who welcomed us aliens from outside.

In the day when God visits us, all nations will live or not, according to the heritage they asked for and chose for themselves.

The Bible tells us about the heritage that belongs to those who were outside and welcomed in. That’s the only heritage that God can give us. Let that be our heritage, as a Church and as a Nation. Let’s live by that.