Lord, Who Am I in You? - Life"

Preached on Sunday, April 21, 2019

Easter-Resurrection Sunday, at the main service

Scripture readings: Matthew 28:1-10

Some people complain that each of our four gospels tells the events of this Resurrection Day differently, some more differently than others. You’d think that, with an event so big, the tellings would come out the same.

Walking near Crab Creek, Desert Aire-Mattawa
Holy Week Crosses, Riverside Community Church
April 2019

Actually, if the tellings had all come out the same, the world would suspect the authors of collusion. The truth is that, when the world judges the actions of God, for better or worse, God never gets treated quite fairly.

I would say that this has been true since the first humans believed devil’s lie in the Garden of Eden. This is only one symptom of why we need the cross and the resurrection of Jesus in the first place.

Adam and Eve took the first bold step of human nature in the direction of a lie. It was the first layer that humans laid for themselves on top of God’s foundation.

It was never built straight after that. It all needs to be done over, from the bottom up. That’s why God became a human. The Lord came to earth in Jesus in order to become the first true and genuine human being in a new human race. Jesus was and is the beginning of a new creation of a new heaven and earth. In the end, his death and his life will work backward until this world’s last day becomes the new creation’s first day. God will say, “Let there be light!” and there will be a new heaven and earth.

You see, it’s important, this day.

The English and the German speaking people are pretty much the only people in the world to call this day by a pagan name. All other languages use a better name: something like pasch, or Pascua de Resurrection. Pasch and Pascua mean the Passover.

The Hebrew, Jewish Passover was from slavery to freedom in the Promised Land. It was really a prophecy of our own Passover: our passing over from death to life in Jesus.

You might say, “But we still live in a world where everyone dies.” That’s true for now. Christians believe that life with Jesus, in this world now, is a richer, fuller life: what the Jesus called life abundant. “I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) You might say, “At least, life now has a little bit of heaven in it.” Or you might call it “Life with a little bit of resurrection in it.

In the old world, as it was before Jesus came, you died in a world where no resurrection had ever happened. Someday that would come, but it wasn’t a part of that old world yet.

There was heaven, yes, but heavenly life only after departing from a defeated and tired world that was lost in lies and death. It is a very different thing to die in a world where someone has defeated the power of sin and death. Because of Jesus we depart from a changing world, where someone has made a start by rising from the dead.

In his body now, Jesus carries around with him his own tiny bit of this defeated and tired old world. Only, that bit of our world, from which we have been made, isn’t defeated and tired anymore. We live, now, in a world where there is someone who will not die, and cannot, die.

We die, now, in a world that is in its first stages of being brought back to life. In Jesus we have the slow beginning of a tidal wave of life.

In God’s time, we will all be part of the great change that will bring an end of death: an end of lies, an end of brokenness, and hurt, and scars, and hate, and fear, and decline, and every kind of ugliness.

The day of the cross and burial, and the day of grief, and the day of rising from the dead are the days that changed with world. It’s the three days that changed the world, and heaven too. Life without sin, life where every human achievement, every blessing of your life and mine will reach its mark, life without death, has begun.

Everything that ever has caused harm, and pain, and tears was carried by God, in our mortal flesh and blood, in Christ Jesus. Our freedom from all of that is gone, when we seek Jesus, and Jesus comes to us and says “REJOICE!” Xairete, in Greek!

English Bibles are so mild-mannered. Jesus walks right up to those women disciples and says “Greetings!” “Hail!” It’s like saying howdy! “Hi there.”

In the Spanish Bibles Jesus walks right up to the friends who are looking for him and says, “Salve!” That can mean “hello” too. But Spanish says salve (as in salvation). Jesus has given the word a hidden power because, from the mouth of Jesus, you feel saved, and safe, and healed, and joyful. Jesus has given this to us: Salve!

Those who spoke Greek usually said “rejoice” instead of saying “hello” or “ola”. They said it as a polite custom, just as we Anglos say “how are you?” without really wanting to know. What the Greeks said without caring, Jesus says because his dying and rising for us are real. His living and dying, and rising are where all lasting, never-ending joy will come from: A new heaven, a new earth, and a new everyone, and that means you.

It can be you.

I know Jesus. Jesus is my oldest and dearest friend, but I seek Jesus every day. I look forward to my friend, and Savior, and Lord every day. Do you? Do you seek Jesus? Then Jesus says “salve” to you. You are saved. You’re eternally safe. Rejoice!

In my imagination, the angel says these words with a smile, a joyful smile. The angel knows that what these women and disciples will find is much better than anything they are looking for now. They’ve been seeking the dead instead of the living.

The angel knows that they will have to get used to living in a whole new world. So do we. So do you. Someone has risen from the dead. No one ever saw the need before. And, if they saw the need before, they weren’t able to do it.

Jesus saw our every need: above it all and beneath it all. Jesus saw our need to die to a dying world, and to live an undying, everlasting life. When we grieve, or when we fear a future grief on the horizon, it’s the image of God in us, telling us that love is meant to last forever and never, never die.

Because Christ has risen indeed, from now on, we die in a world where we will never do anything in the future but live: live now in the Lord’s well-being, live to come, in the Lord’s heaven, which is only the recess until a greater life comes, live into the living future where death will be no more. The only brave new world is found in Jesus.

Are you looking for this? Then are you looking for Jesus, the Lord of Life. Today is the Passover to life. Life invading a dying world has begun, and we celebrate today because we know that we belong to life. We are part of this invading life, in Jesus.

The Battle Primeval – Desires, Wishes, or Hope

Preached on Sunday, November 25, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:17-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-22; Luke 24:1-12

Southern California and Santa Catalina Island, June, 2018

Once upon a time, there was a Bible Zoo. The owners collected animals from all over the world so that people could come and see all the animals mentioned in the Bible. As much as they could, the owners tried, in each exhibition, to show the animals in the scene, or in the action, mentioned in the Bible

So, a guy was taking his family through this Bible Zoo, and around these exhibits. They came to the one with the verse from Isaiah 11:6-7 “The lion shall lie down with the lamb”. That’s not actually in the Bible that way. (There are wolves and lambs, and lions and calves, but not lions and lambs. We shouldn’t fuss about this.) But, the zoo had them lying down together, anyway, on a small lawn with a lily pond, because everyone was expecting to see them like that.

This guy was amazed to look at them: the lion and lamb together and quiet. He turned to a nearby groundskeeper and asked him: “How do they do that?” And the groundskeeper replied, “Well, they have to replace that lamb every day.”

There are plenty of people who look at the promises of the Word of God that way. Even Christians find it hard to understand the very concept of hope. Even the common English language is confused at the concept of hope, to say the least.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about what I had to get done that day. I said to myself, “I hope it doesn’t freeze tonight.” I hoped that because I hadn’t gotten around to insulating my outdoor faucets yet. In spite of my hopes, I left my other stuff undone, for a while, in order to get those faucets covered.

Of course, once that was done, I didn’t have to hope that it wouldn’t freeze that night. In fact, I didn’t need hope at all, anymore.

People like me say that kind of thing all the time. “I hope this doesn’t happen. But I sure hope that happens instead.” We’re not talking about hope at all. We’re talking about wishes: only wishes.

It’s as though we have no idea what hope means.

In the Bible our hopes are only wishes when we place our hopes in something else, or in someone less, than God; or else, our hopes are only wishes when we make our God too small, or when our hopes have forgotten who God truly is, and what our God can do.

Our three readings from the Scriptures are about hope, or about the lack of it, or about why our hopes are so weak and small.

The reading from the third chapter of Genesis (Genesis 3:17-20) tells us that we humans, who were given the opportunity to live abundantly and forever, chose death over life when they ate the fruit of a knowledge that was way too much for them to digest. They ate the knowledge that was too much for them, in order to make themselves like God.

They knew they shouldn’t do this. They knew that death was part of their choice. Waiting for the God who walked with them in the garden to choose a time to give them the fruit if he thought it was time for it, that could have been one of their greatest hopes, but they chose against hope and for their own destructive desires. We inherited from them a nature that prefers desires (and even wishes) to hope.

Only in Jesus does God offer us a life of hope again. When we choose him, we choose hope, but first we must relearn, from Jesus, the hope we’ve never known before.

Adam and Eve believed false hopes (or wishes) in the form of lies, because choosing the lies served them better than faith and hope. The result of this lost capacity for a reliable, God-centered faith and hope, is that we find ourselves in this broken world, and in these broken lives, where death seems stronger than life, and evil seems stronger than love, and stronger than God.

Because we have inherited the mental and spiritual deformities of sin, and of this world, we can only see the evidence of what has gone wrong, and we can only see that the odds are against hope. We don’t realize that God isn’t bound by what we see, or by how we count our chances. In God, in Christ, hope is not about the evidence. Hope is not about the odds.

Writing to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul responded to the rumors that his friends, there, found it hard to hope in a resurrection of their bodies. They were convincing themselves that not even Jesus defeated death with his own physical body. They liked the idea of heaven much more than they liked the report of the resurrection.

They thought that perfection and glory were only possible for spiritual beings, because they believed that all matter (like their bodies) marched in lock step with decline and decay. If Jesus raised his own body from the dead, then he was doomed and so were they.

They didn’t want to save the world they lived in, and they didn’t want themselves to be saved in flesh, and blood, and bone. They wanted to escape from the world. They wanted to escape from their bodies. They wanted to be souls only; flying around freely in a far-away heaven.

Paul told them that exactly the opposite was true. Paul told them that the salvation and life that came from Christ was a lie if Christ was unable to conquer this world, and their bodies, and everything wrong with this universe. Christ was able to do anything he chose. Christ could conquer and heal and empower everything good. Christ could conquer everything created by God for good, no matter how much of a lost cause it may seem.

Timothy Keller says this about the conquest of Jesus, and what it means for our lives. “If Christianity is true, the good things we have cannot be lost.” Jesus enlarges our hopes to include every gift that lifts our hearts and gives us joy.

Christ could only save them if he was Lord of All. Jesus is Lord of the creation. He is Lord of the atoms, and Lord of the galaxies. He is the Lord of our souls, and the Lord of our bodies. He is the defeater of sin, and death, and the devil. He is able to replace the whole universe with eternal, and victorious, and overcoming life.

The Corinthians had made the mistake of settling for hopes that were much too small. They felt safer with smaller hopes, but small hopes don’t make a full life. They would only find life if they had a large and daring hope; only if they hoped for the unimaginable and the seemingly impossible and stake their faith and hope on a God who promised to take care of it.

In Luke’s telling of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the angels told the women who had come to the tomb: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you….” (Luke 24:5-6) Jesus had already told all of his followers, many times, what he had to do. Jesus had promised them, many times, that he was more than able to truly do it all.

Here, again, they had made their capacity to hope too small. They had made their hope small because they had made Jesus small, and they had also made the Father, who sent Jesus, small. They had made the Son and the Father smaller than the evils of this world.

The women at the tomb, and the other disciples, had made God smaller than sin, and smaller than death. They measured their God by the yardstick of their own loss and grief.

They had made their God too small. They had hearts too small for the hope that comes from God: the hope that God insists on giving us. And we often do the same.

The greatness of God, that we see at work in Jesus, is the Lord’s yardstick to measure our hopes and dreams. So here it is.

God’s goodness is stronger than evil and sin.

God’s forgiveness is stronger than guilt, or shame.

God’s peace-making is stronger than our division and alienation from him, and from others, and from the creation.

God’s peace-making is stronger than all our divisions, our conflicts, our covetousness, our envies and jealousies; stronger than the wounds we give and the wound that we receive.

God’s abundance is stronger than our needs.

***

If we have faith in this God; if we trust this stronger God, then our faith will grow. Then, Hope will sprout out from our faith. Our lives will be empowered, and changed, and set free by faith, and hope, and love, in the form of Jesus.

We will live up to God’s gifts more than we live down to our losses and griefs.

We will live up to God’s promises more than we live down to our fears, our worries, and the world’s low expectations.

We will live up to God’s eternity more than we live down to the limits of our time and strength.

We will live up to God’s crosses more than we live down to our compromises.

We will live up to God’s mysteries more than we live down to human common sense.

We will live up to God’s self-giving in Christ more than we live down to our own self-preservation.

We will live up to God’s humility and servanthood in Jesus more than we live down to our own dignity.

We will live up to the abilities of God’s grace more than we live down to our own sense of weakness and disqualification.

We will live up to the life that says “Our life is hid with Christ, in God” more than we live down to our weariness of life. Those who grow tired of life need to know that what they truly need. What they truly need to desire, and to hope for, is more life, and not less.

Living by great and daring hopes, as well as living by great and daring faith and love, will make us faithful witnesses to the good news of the gospel. We’ll join the fellowship of all God people in heaven and earth in the unimaginable purpose to which God has called us, in Jesus: “To make known among the Gentiles (or among the nations) the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

Wonderful World of Wisdom - Doppelganger Effect

Preached on Sunday, August 5, 2018. 
This goes back to a series I began about the Book of Proverbs three Sundays ago.

Scripture readings: James 3:13-18; Proverbs 9:1-18; Matthew 11:25-30

A Street in the Venice District, Los Angeles.
Started in 1905 as an Italian Themed Resort. (2018)

I came home from college, one Christmas break, and I needed to shop for more presents. I drove down to the California version of Marysville, where J. C. Penny’s was downtown. At Penny’s I spotted a pretty girl in her late teens, slim and sable haired. It was my sister Kathie. I didn’t yell at her because we were in the department store, but I walked over to where she was. I wondered why she was there without me when she could have ridden into town with me.

I got within five feet of her and realized that she wasn’t Kathie at all. She looked exactly like Kathie, but she wasn’t.

Later on, my sister and I talked to our friends and found out that this had happened to them before, as well. There was this girl in our area who looked exactly like Kathie, except for the fact that she wasn’t Kathie. It was Kathie’s exact double.

Back to Santa Monica Pier for a ride on the Carousel.
June 14, 2018

She might have been what you would call a doppelganger (which means an exact double) except that a doppelganger is supposed to be a kind of ghostly double, which she wasn’t. A real doppelganger, if such a thing existed, was (according to legend) potentially dangerous. If a pair of doppelgangers meet, they both disappear without a trace.

In Proverbs, chapter nine, we’re presented with the case of real doppelgangers. There’s the woman named Folly and she’s the doppelganger of the Lady Wisdom.

When you read all of Proverbs, you find tidbits of their resemblance. They both have loud voices. They both walk the streets. They both seem to be selling their wares. You find them both in the same parts of town. We read how they both live in the same neighborhood in the high ground, the top of the town. The top of the town is the part that catches the breeze and so the air doesn’t stink as it would in the lower parts an ancient town without a proper sewer.

They both start out with the same message to the same customers. After they start, their messages have a whole different point to them. But they both start out like this: “Let all who are simple come in here!” She says to all who lack judgement. (Proverbs 9:4 and 9:16) Both have a meal ready for their customers, but their meals are different, and the fellowship at their meal has a different purpose.

It’s not really customers the two ladies are after. They’re really after students. Lady Wisdom will teach her students wisdom. Lady Folly will teach her students…death. Well, it’s the same as saying that Lady Folly will teach her students how to be fools. But foolishness is a tricky thing. Maybe wisdom can be tricky too.

Wisdom and Folly have their hard parts and their easy parts. So, there they go, being doppelgangers again. Except that Wisdom starts hard, and (perhaps) gets easier. Folly starts easy, and (definitely) turns hard in the end. At least, that’s what Proverbs seems to say.

Proverbs, remember, is one of three wisdom books from the school of Solomon. The presumption here (and it is a presumption), is that King Solomon had a royal school in

Jerusalem for training public servants and leaders. Any decent kingdom, deserving of the name, needed to have a leadership academy. The three wisdom books were the core curriculum for that school and the model for whatever ordinary schools were started in the towns and villages of the kingdom: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. Proverbs is wisdom for kids before they go out to face adult life. Song of Solomon is wisdom for young love and marriage; and wisdom for love and marriage between the Lord and Israel and, much later, love and marriage between Christ and his Church. Ecclesiastes is wisdom for summing up life, and its purpose and value, later in life.

Why would public servants and leaders and the general population need such a curriculum as this? Because Solomon knew that public servants, and leaders (and a whole nation together) need to be wise about life. It’s not good enough just to be smart.

The Book of Proverbs is full of wisdom about the incompatibility of opposites: wisdom versus foolishness, righteousness versus wickedness, good versus evil, diligence versus laziness. You would think that these opposites were as opposite as white and black.

A little bit of wisdom can see how opposite they are and how one can mess the other up. Also, a little bit of wisdom can tell you how close these opposites are to each other, and how easily we can mistake something foolish for being wisdom, or at least for being smart. For myself, I find that I’m foolish every day, even when I’m trying to be wise, or at least when I’m trying to be smart.

Our doppelgangers look a lot alike, and you find them in the same places, and their message starts out exactly the same. Here’s how they start again: ‘“Let all who are simple, come in here!” She says to those who lack judgement.’ Both wisdom and folly are attractive to those who are simple and who lack judgement.

I get a kick out of comedies about people stranded on some deserted island where one of the first wise things to do is to build a simple shelter. Something always goes wrong with their simple shelter. For a long time, I served a church where the shelters weren’t so simple. They were a hundred years old and they needed a lot of attention all over the place all the time, but there were some needs that were more basic and, if you were wise, you took care of those first.

One of those old Penny Arcade devices.
This is "The Personality Tester".
It declares me "Dreamy".

When you think about it, it’s simple. You need two things first of all: a good roof and a good foundation. Those will take care of everything in between, at least so they’ll stay in one piece until you get to them. You can hold off waiting to paint the Sunday school classrooms in the basement once every sixty years, so long as you’ve got a good foundation and a good roof.

What the doppelgangers offer you in the end is simple. We can see that Lady Wisdom promises to give you life. We can see that Lady Folly secretly plans to bury you in her basement: that’s death. That’s her promise, but you don’t hear her say it.

That’s part of the difference between wisdom and folly, but we can understand them better yet.

The response of the foolish to wisdom is hate and harm. The response of the wise to wisdom is love and learning. Love is life, the foundation and roof of wisdom. Hate is death, the roof and foundation of folly.

Those for whom the fear of the Lord is a love-word will begin to have wisdom. For those who love hating and mocking, the end is being alone and suffering. Suffering, here, is not literally about pain. It’s about loss, and grief, and ending: the ending of all the options that make life a living thing.

Wisdom has only beginnings, wherever we are in life. Even at our last breath we are still stepping into the beginning of something. There’s something in foolishness that cuts us off from others and brings possibilities to an end. Beginning is also the simple roof and foundation of wisdom. Ending is the simple roof and foundation of foolishness.

The feast in the house of Wisdom is wine and meat. Real meat would make this an expensive meal. There was an expensive meal that you could offer in the Temple and then eat with your family and friends. It could be a thank offering of a lamb and wine.

When the lamb was killed, as an offering on the altar, part of the meat was dedicated to the Temple priests, and part of it could go home with you. Some of the wine would be poured on the altar, and the rest could go home with you. The meal would be part of a prayer of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for his gifts and faithfulness. The meal in the house of Wisdom was such a meal as that: a meal of grace, and thanks, and faithfulness. It’s the Lord’s Table. It’s the table God sets for his people.

The meal in the house of Folly was stolen. It was taken. It was not a gift to God or to anyone. It was not a meal of love.

It was delicious because it was exciting. It was exciting because it was dangerous. It was dangerous because it was a flirtation with death.

Lunch on a roof-top.
View to the north.

Folly and foolishness come from a word with special meaning in the Bible. The word points to people who have chosen a way of life that refuses to learn and it is a way of life that is both destructive to others and (in the end) it’s self-destructive. Foolishness is bad not because it’s silly. It’s bad because, in the end, self-love is not love at all. Such a love only steals its food and it has no future: no life.

Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly offer their schools to those who lack understanding as well as to the simple. The word for “understanding” here is the same as the Hebrew word for “heart”. When we are heartless we desperately need wisdom, and we are in danger of taking the road of foolishness to the bitter end.

In a way the Hebrew word for heart means the capacity to truly choose your way. You grow in understanding because you have a heart. You have a center and core values. The heart follows its center, to the place of attraction. The understanding knows its true home: the ways to home and the ways of home and kindred.

Children and the young make choices all the time, but there is a kind of innocence that serves as a protection until we choose either the school of wisdom or the school of foolishness. In some way, those who choose the school for foolishness never quite acquire a real heart. Those who choose the school of wisdom begin to have a heart, and it is a heart that learns and grows.

There are those who leave the school of folly and join the school of wisdom and they can begin to grow a heart just like any of the wise. You can see how those who choose wisdom choose life. And those who don’t choose wisdom don’t choose life.

When I was a fourth grader, I remember the day that I was walking home after school, across the playground to the back gate that was closest to home. A couple of older boys were walking faster. They caught up with me and I saw that they were holding a magazine between them and they were laughing their heads off.

I asked them what they were reading. They told me they had a Playboy magazine and they were looking at naked women. I asked them, “Can I look?” They said, “You can’t look, you’re just a little kid.” Of course, they were a lot older. Why, they must have been sixth graders. They thought that they were looking for life and that they were finding it at Playboy. What they found was a catchy disease. I almost caught it from them. I wanted to see life too. The truth is that I already carried the foolish virus. We’re all born with it into this world.

There’s real life for you: a nine-year-old looking at pictures of naked women; if the older boys had let me do it. I would have laughed my head off with them, too, but I wouldn’t have known why, not yet.

The older boys were right in the sense that I shouldn’t look. That kind of looking would not give life to a little kid.

No, that’s not life. That’s trouble. A lot of people have that trouble. It doesn’t make people more alive. It does just the opposite. It imprisons people in a dungeon of paper and computer screens. People die there.

It looks like life. It looks like wisdom. The New Testament even calls that way of life wisdom (wisdom of a sort), but it’s the wrong kind of wisdom. James calls it the wisdom that doesn’t come from above. It’s not just about sex. It’s not even about what we call ethics and morality. The wisdom of death is (at least in part) what James says it is: bitterness, envy, selfish ambition, disorder, and conflict.

It’s possible even for holy people carry these in their shrinking hearts. They mistake the sickness of their hearts for the suffering of holiness. They justify what their hearts desire.

Churches, at their best, must become hospitals of life for people with such sick hearts. Churches need to love these sick ones through protective gloves and face masks, in order to resist infection.

If we choose the school of wisdom, we have to confess that we do it under the same condition as those who choose the foolishness of death. We have the same simplicity they have. We have the same lack of judgement: the same kind of hearts the foolish do.

We can see this every day, if we want.

There’s another thing about the feast of the thank offering in the school of Wisdom. Thank offerings were sacrifices, and those were expensive. Thank offering could cost the giver dearly, but there was a great motivation that made all that cost worthwhile.

The motivation to pay the price was the joy that came from an answer to prayer. Thank offerings were thanks for God’s faithfulness in answering some life-shaking need and prayer. The motivation could even come from a heart-pounding thanks for God’s deliverance from the terrible consequences of some foolish, destructive, self-destructive choice that the thankful soul had made and regretted. The holy meal was an offering of thanks given to a saving, merciful, and gracious God.

It was an offering of thanks to a saving, merciful, and gracious God, whom we see and know much better in Jesus, who was the sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the world.

Jesus is the correction whom the heartless holy people killed. The holy people killed Jesus in rebuke for the way his goodness reflected badly on their hypocrisy and heartlessness to others. Jesus is the wise one who came to show the way to sinners and give them forgiveness, and love, and life. He shared his wisdom with such fools, even though he knew what it would cost him. The wise often do this because wisdom has given them understanding in the form of a heart.

We enter the school of wisdom when we let Jesus make us a new heart like his own. Then we become teachable. Then we love being corrected. We love learning. We love changing.

I was telling someone a few days ago how hard it was for me to change who I am and how I think. I was using the difficulty of that kind of change as an excuse. It’s true, of course.

Let’s start at the beginning of wisdom with Jesus. Let’s learn from Jesus the path that he took in this world as the wisdom of God. His school of wisdom is the way to the cross, and the way to find resurrection and a new life, even in this old life. Let’s follow him on that road. Jesus still walks that road, and he will become our wisdom when we welcome him and walk with him.

Passionate Jesus - Rip the Veil and See

Preached on Good Friday, March 30, 2018

Scripture readings: Mark 15:21-40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul's Prayer Priorities - Enlightenment

SERMON Dennis Evans 11-12-2017

“Paul’s Prayer Priorities – Enlightenment”

Scripture readings: Isaiah 42:1-7; Ephesians 1:15-23

How can any human being miss the fact that we all need some kind of light to come on and shine for us? And we all need something to come on that isn’t like the light in the refrigerator that only comes on when we want it.

Along the Columbia River at Priest Rapids Lake
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
October 2017

Not a day passes when I don’t want some light to show me what’s going on, and how to respond to it, or to show me where to go next. That sort of light could be compared to an outside light: sorting out the world around me. Not even a porch light: but a flashlight, a street light, a search light, or a light house.

There’s that story of the policeman who finds a drunk crawling around on the sidewalk under a street light, and he asks the drunk what he’s doing. The drunk says: “I’m right here in front of my own house, but I dropped my keys so I can’t get in.” Well the cop decides to help him and he spends a few minutes with the drunk helping him search.

Finally, the policeman asks, “Are you sure this is where you dropped your keys?” And the drunk says: “No, I dropped them way over there. But the light is much better here.”

The drunk knew that he needed an outside light, but he didn’t have enough inside light to show him that he needed much more. He needed more light inside his befuddled brain. We also know that he needed more light in his heart, if he truly wanted to find the key that would open the kind of door that would let him come home to a much better home than he could ever imagine.

Paul had found such a light, and such a key, and such a home. So had his friends: all because of Jesus.

First came the light. This is how God works. The first thing God does is to say, “Let there be light!” (Genesis 1:3) But the light came even before that, because “God is light” (1 John 1:5) just as much as “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Jesus, as well, is “the light of the world” (John 8:12) and he calls us to be “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). Jesus is the light of God that comes into a dark world that has lost the light of its creation. Jesus is the light of God that comes into a dark human world where humans have chosen to live independent of the light, which means to live outside the light, but there is no life outside the light.

The light of God is no ordinary light. It isn’t the light of the sun, or the light of electricity. The Gospel of John says this about Jesus: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” (John 1:4) Jesus is the light for human beings to live by, and to have that life abundantly.

The light of God is actually life itself. By definition you can’t have most forms of organic life without the sun. Spiritually you can’t have the light of personhood, or the light of love, without the life of Jesus who is the light of the image of God. Jesus is the brilliance of God that makes human beings into the children of God. But the first humans tried to live without this light, or to rule this light for themselves. We can’t rule the light of God. The fact that we tried to be in control of the light was the choice that produced our human darkness in the first place.

In their sin of trying to live by nonsense, these first humans handed down to us a banished life, on the very edge of darkness. It’s the part of us that has damaged the image of God, and his light and life in us. But Jesus, the Son, who is the servant of all, came: “To open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison, and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” It’s just as the prophet Isaiah said it would be. (Isaiah 42:7)

Who are the blind, the captives, the sitters in darkness? It’s everyone in the world. It’s us, and everyone else.

Jesus died for us on the cross to give us the light and to show us the light. Suffering on the cross and rising from the dead, Jesus bridged the darkness to trade our darkness for his light.

Suffering on the cross and rising from the dead Jesus shows us the light, because (in doing that) he shows us what light is, and what the light does. Because Jesus shows us the light, we can not only live in the light, but also know what the light is for, and what to do with it.

The light from Jesus gives light to us, and the light in us shows others what the light is, and what to do with it. That is why Jesus, “the light of the world”, calls us “the light of the world”. So, Jesus shares his name, and his servanthood, and his calling with us.

So many of the prayers of Paul for his friends were about this very thing. It’s about them (and us) seeing the light, knowing the light, having a relationship with the light, having our lives changed and transformed by the light, having a life guided and motivated by the light, having a life rebuilt in the image of light, and with the mission and calling of being the light, showing the light, giving the light, implanting the light, reproducing the light.

Paul prayed for his friends, including us. Part of Paul’s prayer about the light went like this: “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened….” (Ephesians 1:18)

When I walk in the dark with the help of a flashlight, I’m very thankful for it. I understand what the light is for. But I would understand light in a much different way if the light was my life: if I was light.

Paul’s friends, just as we, have met the light, and our lives have been changed by the light, because it is something we can hold onto. Holding onto the light helps us to walk in the darkness.

Paul wanted much more than this for all of us. He wanted the light to take over our hearts.

Paul wanted the light to enable the power and the motivations of God to change us. Paul wanted the light to guide us through the maze and dungeon of the darkness, in ourselves, and for us to be led to the freedom that comes from the life that is also light. Paul wanted the dungeon torn down and replaced, so that light would be what our lives and our hearts and our minds are made of.

There are other faiths or religions that talk about enlightenment. Because of this, many Christians have become suspicious and afraid of the word enlightenment. It is a Bible word: not a common Bible word, but it is there, and it’s important enough for Paul to care deeply about it. Everything in this particular prayer relates to that enlightenment.

Light helps you to see better, and to know better. Paul prayed for the Father to “give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.” (Ephesians 1:17) It’s all the same thing. The Holy Spirit plays a part in answering the need of our heart, and the core of our being, to know God better. But the enlightenment means that we need that light to come inside us so that we can become the light.

The Holy Spirit could just tell us things, and give us a lot of accurate information: inspired information, and doctrine, and instructions. But the Holy Spirit also must become the light inside us that makes us light. Information, doctrine, and instructions are not enough, no matter how inspired they are.

The light must come inside and make us into lives that are light.

This is grace. This is what grace is for, if God is going to completely have his way with us. The cross and the resurrection were acts of God, in Jesus, to call us his own; to change our name from sinner to child of God, but even that is not enough.

In Second Corinthians, Paul wrote: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9) In the same way, we may say that Jesus became dark on the cross so that you might become light. In the same letter Paul wrote: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 6:17)

We will not understand the prayers of Paul very well unless we remember that these were prayers for others. We know that Paul prayed for himself. We just don’t have many examples of those prayers.

Paul commonly asks for his friends to pray for him, but he never asks them to pray for the gift of things. He doesn’t even ask them to pray for his health; although we think that he tried this without success, if that was what his thorn in the flesh was about. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10) The Bible instructs us to pray for people’s health, but our prayer list should include the much greater needs of others.

This prayer surely gives us something to pray for, for ourselves. If Paul prayed it for his friends, then his friends could join Paul in his prayers for them. They were, after all, clearly prayer partners, all of them together. So, let’s pray these prayers for ourselves, never forgetting that every other Christian needs our prayers for their enlightenment, because we are all prayer partners, all of us together. Let’s also remember that those who are not yet being invaded by the light need our prayers as well.

Enlightenment, for us, in the Bible, means seeing reality as God sees it. It means seeing our lives and God’s goals for our lives, as God sees them. It means seeing the whole world and everyone and everything in it as God sees them, and as God wants them to be.

In Paul’s prayer, enlightenment means the beginning and the growth of hope. “in order to know the hope to which God has called you.” The world and everything and everyone in it needs hope and needs this prayer, and so do you. Pray to be made into light, and pray to be made into hope.

Enlightenment means the beginning and the inward growth of power. Now, power, here, is a translation for the Greek word “energeia”. It’s energy. It’s energizing.

We and the world give up. We run out of energy. Or there is a break in the circuit, and the energy isn’t flowing into us. In a way, the same word means “working”.

Sometimes I wish I had power. But I would probably mess everything up with it, if I had my choice.

God’s power isn’t about power, as we think about it; or as politicians, and monarchs, and dictators covet it. It’s the ability and the energy to work.

For us Christians it’s a very special focus of work. It’s the kind of energy or power that only does certain kinds of work. It’s the power that created the universe and our world. It’s also the power that raised Jesus from the dead. God’s power reverses weakness, evil, sin, and death.

So, it’s the kind of work that gives form and substance to something that wasn’t there before. It’s the kind of work that reverses evil, and death, and darkness, and defeat, and weakness, and sickness.

That is the nature of God. It’s the power that we are supposed to see in the world around us when we see God in our world. It’s what the world needs to see through us. It’s the ability we want the world to know and receive for itself. It’s the ability that is needed by everyone we know or hear about: the energy to do something new that wasn’t there before, the energy to bring dead things, weak things, tired things, and even outdated things, to life.

We are right to pray for such a power. We are right to pray this power for others.

When Paul says that God “appointed Christ to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way,” (Ephesians 1:22-23) it means, at very least, that in Christ, in the Church, the energy that raised Jesus from the dead still works and pushes out in God’s plan to fill the world. It’s the very core and center of everything God is about. Enlightenment shows us this.

Paul’s friends, as well as we, have been tempted to think that we are stuck on the outside of everything looking in. Enlightenment would begin and grow the understanding that God has: that Christ in us is the center of everything that matters. Christ in us is the center of everything this world needs. It’s at the center of what God want to do in the lives of the people around you.

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible, called “The Message” puts it this way. “At the center of all this, Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world, the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.” That’s what God (that’s what Jesus) wants to do through us, together.

Enlightenment enables us to see things the way God sees them, and to see our tasks and callings as God sees them. It is this enlightenment that says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

The Lord’s Supper reminds us that the power which raised Jesus from the dead and through which all the gifts and riches of Jesus are ours, is the power that works in us. The crucified Jesus lives in us.

The holy meal says this. Because this Jesus lives in us, we are also promised that the great energy and work that raised him will also raise us (raise us in the end, but also raise us up every day until then). The energy of the resurrection will work through us, for others, and for God.

This enlightenment gives us the knowledge that comes within us through experience. With that intimate knowledge comes light, and sight. With that light comes hope. With that hope comes a power that energizes us for the work of the kingdom to change lives, and to change the whole world.

In this enlightenment, we will truly see, and love, and follow Jesus, and live out his plan for us.