Faith's Underbelly - Our Wedding Jitters

Preached on Sunday, August 13, 2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 19:1-19; Hebrews 12:18-29

Seeing that I’ve never been married, it might not surprise you to know what I think about this part of the Exodus. When I read this story about the promises made at the foot of Mount Sinai, between God and his people, it reminds me of a wedding.

Mission San Diego de Alcala
San Diego, CA
June 2017

Yes, it does. Actually, this is a very Biblical idea. The Old Testament has lots of references to Israel being the Lord’s bride. And the New Testament is full of references to the Church being the bride of Christ.

We believe that those two marriages are the very same marriage. But think of that idea: the idea of getting married to God; because that’s exactly what we are.

In Exodus, though, we see a problem with this marriage. We see a lot of fear and caution before the wedding. How crazy is that: feeling fear before your wedding? How could that possibly happen, when weddings are about love?

Maybe there are reasons to be afraid. You might find yourself wondering if you are actually capable of being a good husband, or a good wife; and, later on, wondering if you are capable of being a good parent. Perhaps, just as with the process of getting old, these things are not for the faint of heart.

Promises can be scary, can’t they? Maybe this shows our deepest need for God. It is the nature of God to make what’s called a covenant with his people. The promises we make in marriage are promises of the covenant kind. For me, that defines covenant as a relationship based on promises, which we find scary.

Some people define a covenant as a contract. I don’t think that’s right.

Contracts tend to be conditional. Marriage might be more of a contract when it includes a prenuptial agreement. But I don’t like hearing about that kind of marriage.

It’s true that the covenant between God and his people seems to have conditions. It sets conditions of obedience, but it really only has conditions for happiness. Obedience, or submission are necessary conditions for happiness. God’s people broke those conditions constantly. That’s the lesson of the Old Testament. That’s a lesson for us, because the Bible is a picture of God, and a picture of us.

The Lord began the covenant with his people on his own initiative. The only condition his people met, at that time, was that they were in great need of help.

Up until this point in the story of God recreating a human family for himself, all of the basic, fundamental promises, and qualifications, were made on his side. At the foot of Mount Sinai, the Lord told his people how he had started the next level of his promises. He said: “I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” (19:4)

God was starting the wedding by acting and proposing unconditionally. This is what brought them through the desert to Mount Sinai.

God knew what would follow. The wedding would follow. His people would say “I do”. They would make the promise: “We will do everything the Lord has said.” (19:8) But they never kept their promise.

Surely the Lord was not surprised by this. The Lord was well prepared enough to see to it that the happiness of the marriage would be conditional, but that the marriage itself would be unconditional. That’s how it worked out in the course of things. Marriage with God is like that, all through the Bible. In our marriage with God, there are conditions set for our happiness, but our marriage itself is unconditional. It will go on.

In Jesus, God won our hand in marriage by his death for our sins on the cross. There is the condition of saying yes, I do, but to truly see Jesus on the cross, unable to kneel at his proposal to you only because of the nails in his hands and feet: to truly see this, robs your heart of the power to say “no”. And you know that it’s always unconditional when you see that there is nothing you can do to adequately repay him for it. Your gifts to him can never equal his gifts to you.

Marriage is a new life for those who undertake it. In marriage, something has got to give; and, in this way, we could compare marriage to faith, as faith is shaped by Jesus. With Jesus, something within us has got to give. In Jesus, we die to ourselves and we rise to a new life.

It’s another way of looking at what Jesus meant when he said: “You must be born again.” (John 3:7) But I don’t think we understand what it means to say, “I’m born again,” unless we can say, “I’m married to Jesus.”

Are you married to Jesus? Can you remember if you got the wedding jitters before you went through with it? Have you exchanged vows with God?

Here’s one of the questions I ask the bride and groom in a wedding. The words are the same for both, except for the personal pronouns. “Will you pledge your loyalty to him, in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness, to live with him and cherish him, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” Are you married to the Lord? Are you married to Jesus?

The problem is that, in Exodus chapter nineteen, something seems wrong with the proceedings of the wedding. There was fire on the mountain, and a dark, gathering smoke, and the flashing of lightening, and some sort of trumpet-like sound that got louder, and louder, and louder. The ground shook. Scurries of rock clattered down the sides of the mountain above them. The Lord was coming to their wedding! What does this say about God?

There’s violence in the long course of this story. There were the plagues in Egypt, and the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red sea. God’s people have had to fight battles, and face thirst and hunger. It’s been a hard journey, so far, and there’s so much more to come. God has gotten angry with his people. God has gotten angry with Moses.

We don’t know what to think of this. God’s people didn’t know what to think, and it terrified them. Then they and we, both, think of the same thing. We think that God is dangerous, and that following God is dangerous. We think of God’s anger. That fire and lightening could turn out to be quite effective weapons.

Jesus seems like an antidote to the anger of God, but even Jesus got angry, and not just with the money-changers and the Pharisees. Jesus got angry at his own disciples. When Peter protested about the inevitability of the cross, Jesus got mad and said, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:23) But we hope he’s gotten over that, now that he’s been crucified and resurrected.

When I was five, I stuck a wire coat-hanger in a wall socket and got a painful shock, and I screamed really loud. I remember my mother running from the kitchen, and she saw what I had done, and then she screamed at me, and then she hugged me, and then she scolded me, and then she got ice to put on the burn: the big red welt that ran across my hand.

Her screaming and her scolding were a part of her love for an endangered and accident-prone child: which I sort of have been all my life.

There were many other times when I did something I knew I shouldn’t do, when I deserved to be screamed at, or yelled at, by my parents. They did this because they loved me.

The whole story of the Lord freeing his people from slavery, and leading them through the desert to the Promised Land, is a story of love. In spite of his frequent anger with them, and his punishment of them, the Lord never left them. The Lord saw them through to the end of their journey, and beyond. The Lord is with his people, Israel, still.

What other tiny nation of people has maintained its existence for four thousand years? It’s a miracle. It’s love.

God is with us in the same way.

The Letter to the Hebrews (meaning the Hebrew Christians) talks about two mountains. It tells of the scary mountain of Moses, in the Exodus, and the happy mountain of Jesus, called Zion.

It’s very strange that one of the happy things on the happy mountain is also a very scary thing. The scary thing is blood. The blood of Jesus has gotten on everyone who enjoys life with Jesus on that mountain.

There was a time when Mount Zion had crosses nearby, and Jesus hung on the cross. There wasn’t smoke, but there was darkness. Mount Zion shook, just like Mount Sinai, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us there. It was scary, but it was love, and it was a miracle.

We live here on Mount Zion with our spouse, Jesus. And we live here reliving that scary thing. We meet with Jesus as he now is, crucified, and risen, and full of glory, and we receive him into ourselves. We eat and drink, and he comes into us through that eating and drinking. Jesus says that we take into ourselves his body and his blood in the Lord’s Supper; and, so, we live the good news because of a scary thing. We die and we rise with him.

Saint Augustine, back in the late fourth and early fifth century, said that this is a miraculous food. Everything else that we eat and drink we change into ourselves. The food and drink of the Lord’s Table, the body and blood of Jesus, turn us into him.

This changes us. Something gives way. There are so many ways and opportunities to get more of Jesus and grow in our union with him: our marriage with Jesus; two lives growing together, two hearts beating as one.

The love of God is like the sun that shines upon our world. There would be no life without the sun. But the sun is dangerous. It can make you sick. It can even kill you. The sun can blind you, because our eyes are too weak to look at it, and truly see it, and survive.

Only a total solar eclipse can enable us to look into some of the mysteries of the sun. But, even then, the sun will destroy our sight, unless our eyes are properly protected.

Love thundered, and lightninged, and burned, and smoked on Mount Sinai, but it was all love. Perhaps the smoke made it possible for God’s people to see a bit more of him than other ordinary people. The smoke was like the moon that shields us from the sun in its eclipse.

We think that we want love, and we do. We are made for love that never ends. We are made to experience miracles of grace and love. We are made to love, and to be loved, forever.

But our love is weak. We often know this in the marriages and families that form our lives. Love requires great emotional, spiritual, mental, and even physical efforts from us. Sometimes we rise to them. Even when we do so, we see that giving more would be better. Sometimes we know that we have not, or cannot, meet the needs that call to us. Our love may prove very strong indeed, but our fall from what we were created to be has made our love too weak to see, face to face, the holy love that has created each one of us. Our fall has made our love too weak to see all of the love God wants to give to others, and to our world, through us.

The warnings against getting too close were not warnings of anger, but warnings of love. It’s as if the sun could speak, and thunder, and shake us, so that we knew better than to look straight at it.

There are discoveries and understandings that we are not ready for. God, in his love, has the power to give us what we need (and what we are ready for) in knowing and seeing him. That’s why we are told, in another place in Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

The dangers of our going too far in, or seeing too much that we’re not ready for, are like the dangers of a baby who has immune deficiencies, who needs the shelter of a bubble, and the parents can only hold their child with gloves that are extensions of the bubble, through which they put their arms and hands. It’s what their child needs, and so they do it. Jesus is like the gloved hand of God reaching through and holding us; getting as close to us as our current health will allow.

But there’s more. The message of Mount Sinai had the power to warn and to teach God’s people, and that message was a gift of love and grace. It’s grace to have good warnings and good learning. But learning may not transform us. The message of Sinai could not transform God’s people, and they showed this all the way through their history.

God becoming one of us, in Jesus, his living our life in our own flesh and blood, his living as a servant, his sharing the darkness of death, his dying for our sins, and conquering sin and death for us: this is the grace that enters us, and changes us.

Only grace can complete us, make us whole, fulfill us, and bring us to what God has created us for; what God has in mind. The old mountain is actually a good place, a good covenant, a good promise, but the mountain we live on with Jesus is so much “better in every way”.

Grace enables us to approach and serve. Grace empowers us to be bridges and mediators of grace to the people and the world around us. That’s what it means to be “a kingdom of priests” like Jesus. Priests are mediators. They are go-betweens.

Grace, in the blood of Jesus, bridges the gap we could never cross by ourselves. It empowers us to become what we could never fully be on our own.

There was a wedding at the foot of Mount Sinai. It was a wedding of God with his people. Well, it was not the full-fledged wedding. It was only one of many rehearsals for the real thing. We have the real thing in Jesus, the real wedding that gives us a new life.

The truth is that the wedding still isn’t finished. We are just in the process of making our vows. When God’s plan for this world is complete, Jesus will step over to us and lift the veil for a kiss. Then all the jitters will be over.

Right now, it can still be awkward. We’re in the middle of our vows. But this is the time for us to say: “I’m doing it! We’re doing it together! We’re getting married together.”

We’re marrying Jesus now. Let’s get into it. Let’s live into it.

Faith's Underbelly - Joining the Resistance

Preached on Sunday, July 9, 7-9-2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 1:8-2:10; Hebrews 11:1, 23-27

Sometimes, when I hear people talk about events that happened long ago in their lives; toward the end of their story, they pause. Then, they sum it all up by saying, “But that’s ancient history.”

Photos along the Columbia and the Willamette Rivers
May and  June, 2017

I think it may be their way of saying that those old issues didn’t matter anymore, or that they shouldn’t matter anymore.

Personally, I love ancient history. I love ancient Greece and Rome. I love ancient Egypt. I think they matter a lot. I think that the people we call “cave men” and “cave women” matter a lot to us now.

In my own life, some of the oldest things matter. Some of the most important events of my life happened before I was born. They happened to my dad. They happened to my mom. These old events shaped what mattered to them, as human beings, and shaped their parenting of me and my sisters. I believe that such old events matter to God himself, and to his plan and his purpose for each one of us.

You may have no way of knowing how you are reaping the benefits or paying the price (because of me) of the events that happened to me before I was born.

Time is a creation of God, who has eternal purposes and loves. No matter how far back an event or an experience may be in the past, or how far forward in the future, the distance of time doesn’t change God’s purpose for it: to love it, deal with it, prepare for it, or work to heal it and transform it. We reap the benefits of that. And God has paid the price for that. It all contributes to his work for us. It all contributes to his love for us.

I love the Bible. It’s ancient too. It shows us what is real and what matters most. It teaches us who God is, and who we are, and what we can be when we learn to live with God, in his world, by faith.

In the Book of Exodus, we are jumping back in time to about fifteen hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It’s a time about six hundred years after the Lord spoke to an elderly couple named Abraham and Sarah, and made them into the beginning of his chosen people Israel, and into the beginning of us (his Church).

Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham, had been sold by his own brothers to slave traders who took him to Egypt. As a slave, in Egypt, Joseph served his master well, got put in prison, got out of prison because he had the interpretation of the king’s dream, and Joseph became Prime Minister for Life, of the great civilization of Egypt.

His brothers and their families came to Egypt and lived there for about four hundred years, without ever quite blending in. They were the worst kind of immigrants imaginable. They were only one of a whole group of similar immigrants who just would not blend in.

These unblended people grew and grew in numbers, until the Egyptians got scared and tried to control them by making them into slaves. Then the Egyptian government tried to set a policy of genocide by requiring the killing of all the male babies born to these people.

None of the Egyptian genocide policies worked. But the genocide policy did result in one baby, named Moses, getting put in the river, in a basket, and getting found by an Egyptian princess.  This princess raised Moses as her own son, and gave him a life of leadership-training, wealth, and power.

Moses was a worldly success, until he blew it all to pieces by identifying himself with his unblended, immigrant, slave people. His own people couldn’t understand what was with him, to make him do this.

Moses didn’t know anything about God’s intention for him to lead his people out of Egypt, into freedom, into a land of their own, into a life intimately shared with God though all the highs and lows of this life. His own people wondered what was with Moses, to so identify with them as to kill their slave-driver.

Moses, himself, could hardly have told them what it was with him. We know what was with him. What was with Moses was God.

His own Hebrew mother got the job serving the princess as his milk-nurse, but that was a job that, sometimes, in unusual cases, lingered on until a child was four or five. Moses seems to have had some link with his family long enough into his life to remember his true identity, and he must have held onto simple stories that a small child might recall: stories about the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

Moses had no plan. He had no concept of his own future task. The New Testament Letter to the Hebrews tell us that the faith of Moses, at that point in time, was a sorrow for the suffering of his people, a willingness to identify with them and to share their disgrace and suffering, and a willingness to know the God who had come to his people.

Moses ran for his life, but we are told that he ran with faith, and not with fear. Moses had just enough faith to know that he was right to care. He had, it seems, enough faith to know that God cared about his caring, and that this was part of his calling and purpose as a human being who belonged to God.

Moses and his people lived in a world where it didn’t make any sense to claim that such things were real. We share that same world today. The eleventh Chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews begins by recognizing this important point. It says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

We have to understand “the substance of things not seen but hoped for.” There’s no simple cause and effect that we can prove from faith. Faith doesn’t always make something happen visibly. Faith is created by the reality, or the substance, of what God is working for.

Faith is the protrusion into our souls of the reality of what God is doing and what God stands for. This protrusion creates desires and actions in us that we simply must follow, even when it is really hard and strange to do so.

What no one can predict or prove becomes the intimate, personal influence of a God who makes himself, and what he is, and what he stands for, real to us. We must obey, and that is faith, even when faith feels like a struggle.

There was no evidence to show that an influx of immigrants turned into slaves was the place to look if you wanted to see what God was up to, or to see what God is like. But God was there, caring and preparing the way. Centuries before this, the Lord told Abraham the story of the enslavement and the liberation of his future descendants. (Genesis 15:12-16)

What mattered to the Egyptians was the opposite of what mattered to God. What made sense to the Egyptians was the opposite of what made sense to God.

The midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s policy of genocide, and the parents who hid their sons, and Moses himself, formed part of a holy resistance. They were God’s people and they showed this by becoming, in their lives, the evidence of things hoped for by the least and the most looked-down-on of people.

They joined God by faith. They joined God’s resistance to the world as it was, and as it is today.

We think that faith makes things happen, but faith is simply identifying with what God wants to happen, and with who God is and what God is doing. We care about the things that no one else notices or cares about because we know the love of God for us, and for all such invisible things, and for all such vulnerable things and vulnerable people.

Faith is taking the side of “the God of the least of things.” Jesus, who is God in human flesh and blood, is the Savior of the least of things. Trusting him as the savior of sinners is just an extension of this. This becomes our rule. Knowing and living with the God of the least of things and the least of people leads us to identify with a world that is not yet visible: the world that God is planning and building from the raw material of the least of these: including us.

Jesus wants us to know that he will recognize us as belonging to him by whether we have joined the resistance. Jesus told a parable which pictured him saying to his own, at the end of time, “’Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:34-40)

These are famous words and, yet, we often try to wiggle out of them. They don’t make sense, the way this world teaches us to see things, and commit to things. Only the faith that joins God’s resistance to this world has the ability to see what the world teaches us not to see.

Moses was one of the least of these. He was one of the babies that a king was trying to kill. He survived, and lived, and then he became an outcast and a lost cause. And yet, in God’s purpose, this “least of these” came back to set his people free.

God, himself, (in Jesus) became one of the babies that a king was trying to kill. In Jesus God became one of the least of these. He became an outcast; and the rich, and the powerful, and even those of God’s people who thought about their own goodness, and their own self-preservation and success, succeeded in killing the grownup Jesus, on a cross.

But Jesus (the God who became the least of these) used his own downfall to set his people free. He sets us free from the kingdom of this world and its values. He sets us free from the kingdom of sin and death.

The Lord became one of the least of these, one of the least of us, to save us. We need this, because we (each and every one of us) is another of the least.

Just as it was with the slaves in Egypt, we, in our own way, on our own, are the least of these. We fail to be what we are designed to be.

Faith is knowing that God is our God. God belongs to us because God is for people like us. This truth doesn’t make us great or powerful. This truth makes us loved, and honest, and compassionate toward anyone who is one of the least. This makes us members of the resistance, which is God’s side of the great conflict.

The least of these, in Egypt, were in a mess for a long time. Their mess lasted for generations, when you look at what the Lord foretold to Abraham.

The least of these don’t always receive visible deliverance and visible help. What they do receive is a God who will die for them. This God has died, for them. In Jesus, God has died for all of us and with all of us. So, in Jesus, God is most truly our God: The God of the least.

There is a song that says “Faith is the victory.” But it’s also true that faith is the battle. Faith is the resistance. This is what I’m calling “the underbelly of faith.” It’s the challenge. It’s the learning process: learning to trust and live by the truth of who our God is.

The lesson of Exodus, Moses, and the wanderings of his people, is that the underbelly of faith. This lesson of faith tells us that faith is given and learned in such a world as ours; with such needs, and dangers, and fears as we see in our world today. The truth taught to us by this story is that a world such as ours is the very place where we can find the real truth about God: that he is to be seen and known by faith at his clearest and deepest in just such a world as ours.

God is to be seen in the resistance, just as he is most clearly and deeply to be seen in the cross. That is where real faith begins. That is where our real life with God begins.

Remembering the Faithful

Preached on the Sunday before Memorial Day, May 29, 2016

Scripture readings: Psalm 77; Hebrews 11:1-3; 11:32-12:3

 Memorial Day is a day for remembering. That is what the word “memorial” means. We remember those who have died; not to hallow their dying (though death, itself, is holy ground). We remember those who have died in order to hallow their living.

Photos at White Bluffs, Hanford Reach National Monument
May 2016

It is easiest to hallow lives when those lives are in some way shaped by faith. Faith works on many levels. We were created for a life of faith and for a world where faith could be expressed in every kind of relationship.

The thing we call sin came from the decision to not live by faith. Our first parents were given a life in paradise by a loving God, and they chose to not have faith. They chose a life where they would not trust the most trustworthy source of love that they knew.

The people who live faithfully by faith, and who trust in something besides themselves show us what this world has lost. The root of all faith is faith in God, but we can show the power of faith in all our relationships and all our great loves: the love of God, the love of one dear person, the love of family and home, the love of neighbors and enemies, the love of country.

The people who have some kind of faith live in a way that makes hope real. They live in a world where reality seems dark, and yet they decide to live in such a way as if they see better things than this world shows. They see better things than other people see.

The heritage of people of faith is about lives not deaths, because their deaths are not the only point. The point is how they lived through to the end. Whether we are talking about life in a home, or a school, or a community; or whether we are talking about life in a hospital room, or a nursing home, or a battle field; there is a way to live all the way through, seeing what so many others don’t see.

The word of God teaches us about the heritage of the imperfection of the people of faith; so that we can see how they learned from grace, and were shaped by grace.

The word of God teaches us about the heritage of the variety of people of faith. It tells us of people going forth to live, or going forth to fight. It tells us that the call to join the life, or the fight, is the lot of all different kinds of people: husbands and wives, parents and children.

The heritage of the people of faith is the result of their choices: choices about family, choices about how we are called to serve and worship God, choices about how we are called to serve our country, choices of whether to blend in or stand out, choices of whether to fight or surrender, choices about where to stay or where to go.

The New International Version says: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” The King James Versions says: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

I like the older translation at this point. I think that older translators and earlier scholars knew more about the substance of faith, and were not blinded by our modern love of feelings.

Substance is about reality. Reality is real, whether we feel sure and certain about it or not.

Faith takes hold of a substantial reality that it cannot see. Then faith gives substance and reality to those invisible things. Faith builds our will, and our actions, and our way of life. Faith makes what we believe real substantial in our own lives, and faith makes what we believe real for the purpose of serving and blessing other people.

Faith is not about feelings of certainty. If faith is assurance, that’s because the assurance comes from outside of you. Faith comes from something real and substantial reaching into you and changing what you know, and how you live.

Faith is like the pipe that the old timers drove into the hillside behind their house, on their homestead, where a spring seeped out. That’s why they built their house there in the first place. The pipe in the hill connected to the spring, and (if that was a good spring) the water came out as if you had turned on a faucet and left it running forever.

That is the connection between faith and the reality of the life of God that comes to you through Jesus. The pipe let the reality come through. The pipe of faith lets the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen (hidden in the hill) come through.

Faith is about a living connection with things that are real, whether you see them, or feel them, or not. This is how the best life goes on. This is how ordinary, imperfect people become our heroes. This is how these heroes change our lives.

Here again, my Baci (my Polish grandma) is an example. Baci was always poor, and she didn’t have very many nice things, and she lived in a tiny apartment. Before I moved with my family to a small town in Northern California, we lived close to most of our relatives and, during the Christmas season, we always had several Christmases. One of the Christmases, every year, was always at Baci’s.

There was no fancy table for our Christmas feast. We all ate on TV trays, and the little kids ate on the floor, and there were hardly any Christmas decorations. But Christmas was just as real at my Baci’s as it was at any of the other Christmas celebrations we were part of.

Christmas, at Baci’s, was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My Baci will always be one of my heroes.

In families, and communities, and churches, and nations, the things that matter most are real even when people are struggling, or weary, or worried, or afraid. The things that make a family, or a community, or a church, or a nation continue to be real. They continue to be in force.

They just pass unseen, except for those who see with the eyes of faith and live accordingly. Those who live accordingly live by faith; and they do the things that are worth remembering. They are the heroes.

The mutual “substantiality” of faith and the things hoped for “realize” each other. They make each other real.

The most important part of our heritage is the story of the faithfulness of God; who continued to love a world that didn’t love him back, who died on the cross for a world that wouldn’t live by faith and trust in him. In Jesus we see that our God is a hero who does heroic things. The faithfulness of God makes him our hero.

The heritage of faith is also the story of a faithful memory: a selective memory; a “some-timers” memory.

This is what I mean. Are there terrible troubles, and hurts, and griefs to remember? Yes!

Are there gifts, and graces, and pleasures to remember? Yes, absolutely!

How do the bad things render the good things unreal? They don’t. So remember the gifts, and the grace, and the pleasure, and live accordingly.

Sometime or other you have smiled.  Sometime you have laughed. Sometime you have known that it was an easy thing to give thanks.

This is what the writer of the psalm meant, when he wrote, “To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High.” (Psalm 77:10) The “right hand” is the hand of the handshake, or the hand raised high in blessing. The psalmist remembered the times when God had shaken his hand, and when the most important things were easy remember, and when faith saw things the most clearly.

A heritage of faith speaks to how we live in this world as individuals, as a church, as a community, and as a nation. Faith renders its judgment on the continual crises and dangers of this world. Faith decides whether we are doomed or not.

The news, and our politicians, often surround us with a message of continual crisis. Faith creates life by not surrendering to crises, and angers, and messages of doom.

Some communities are famous for their fighting. My home town was like that. You would hear about a meeting of the city council where a citizen invited a council member to step outside for a fight.  You would hear about shouting at a meeting of the church elders. Our town was famous to me, in my young days, for how many good projects and ideas could be destroyed by the envy and rivalry of others. My home town had a lot of churches, and a lot of Christians, but not so many signs or examples of faith.

There is a humble form of faith that comes from asking yourself what you would do in a “worst case scenario”. What is the worst thing that could happen? Then what would you do?

You can always do something. God designed the world so you can always do something: even if it is only to wait, and to watch, and to pray. But sometimes you can do much more.

In the little town where I served before I was called here, I was asked to fill a vacancy on the Park and Recreation District. I must have been on that thing for about ten years. I went on it because no one else wanted the job. I ended up being president for years. I have to confess that I never felt like I knew what I was doing. I made some big mistakes. I didn’t want to be doing it. I had no agenda. I had no plan. I didn’t want to take any side. I didn’t want to be against anyone. All I wanted to do was try to make good things happen, and to avoid making bad things happen. That’s all I wanted, and I still hope that was inspired by a desire that came from faith.

Then there is the faith that is shown when a person commits themselves to serving their country in the armed forces. Until my teenage years, the big war was World War II. When I was a kid playing war with my friends, World War II was the war we fought.

Every kid’s parents were affected by that war. Most of our dads were in the service during that war. It was the last truly unquestionable, noble war. Once we were in it, nobody doubted it. It was a war of faith, in its way.

That changed in the 1960’s. In 1966 the Vietnam War was getting fierce. I grew up in conservative places so, when “The Ballad of the Green Berets” hit the top of the music charts, in 1966, it was the favorite song of almost every boy in Live Oak. But even in Live Oak it was a questionable war. We had the sons of a college professor in our school, and we all knew that they were commie sympathizers.

The fact is they (the questioners) were on the winning side. Veterans came back from Vietnam and got heckled and spat at: never in Live Oak, but in other places. Heroes were not treated as heroes. Because of the draft, people who had not chosen to fight and lay their lives on the line did it anyway, at the bidding of their country, and they never got the respect they deserved.

My point in this: it takes faith to see the real value of the world. This world is a created and much died-for place; and it is full of created and died-for people. It takes faith to see that a country, such as ours, with such a great heritage, and with such a confused and conflicted present, means something far greater than it seems to be. Faith sees that those who serve their country are exercising a kind of faith that is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Their rightful place is in a cloud of witnesses.

The creation of our world has its roots in the invisible. That means it has its roots in God. And this world in which we live has been died for by Christ.

Even for those who don’t know Jesus, even for those who don’t believe in God, the people who live for others, and who give of themselves, and who even pay the ultimate price for their giving, are acting out a kind of faith in people, and in home, and in country that implies that all these things are far greater than they seem. A world that is created and died for means something, and these faithful givers and “sacrificers” have given of themselves for something far greater than they know.

 “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)

Our world has a heritage that is invisible to many people. Our world, and all of life in it, exists in the shadow of the cross and the God who hung there for the sins of the world. Our heritage is the story of a Jesus-formed memory. He is the beginner and finisher of our faith. Jesus (truly human and truly God) joins together our faith and God’s faithfulness.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” (Hebrews 12:1)

If the life of faith is like a race, then Jesus is the prize we set our heart on. Jesus will make the race worthwhile. And our race will be a memorial race. We will run it well by remembering the many, many people who have run faithfully before us.

Telling It - Undaunted Believing

Preached on Sunday, October 25, 2015

Scripture readings: Hebrews 11:1-7, 29-40; Mark 5:21-43

I have been wanting us to learn to tell the good news in a new way. “Gospel” is a famous Bible word and Christian word, and it is so famous that we take it for granted and forget what it means. Gospel means good news.

I have wanted us to learn to tell the good news of Jesus, not just from the old stories of the Bible, but in the story of our lives. I want us to learn to help others understand the Lordship of Jesus, and the cross, and the resurrection from the way in which that Lordship, and that cross, and that resurrection take shape in our lives now. How does all of that make us new people now?

Near Desert Aire/Mattawa WA: September & October 2015

Another part of the good news is the way we receive it; the way it comes into our lives. The good news comes by means of grace, repentance, and faith.

The good news is one single story as big as heaven and earth; but even in such a big story, everything works together as one. Grace, repentance, and faith are not separate things, but interlocking pieces of the story.

Grace means that we receive the good news as a gift. It comes to us as a new life that we have not earned.

Repentance comes from grace. Repentance is a life lived in a new direction; and that new direction is possible only because of God’s grace. In Jesus, God has given us a new heart and mind that can live in that new direction. Our new heart and our new mind can lead us in that new direction because Jesus lives in them. It is their nature to carry us that new direction.

Today we come to faith. Faith is another great word that we take for granted or misunderstand. The great catchphrase, in the New Testament, is “repent and believe.” Jesus put the two words right, tight together. He said, “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

Jesus was there, telling everyone who would listen to him that God was taking charge of the world in a new way. It was Jesus, himself, who was making this happen. Jesus was the king of the kingdom; and he was there where they could see him, and they could hear his voice.

When Jesus confronts you, when Jesus speaks to you; that is when wonderful things can happen (life-changing things). Grace is there. The beginning of a new heart and mind are there.

Life in a new direction is there: grace and repentance. What else could you want? Repent and believe. You want faith. You need faith.

I think, from the example of Jesus, that it’s pretty clear what faith needs to be. When Jesus confronts you in order to take charge, and when Jesus calls you to something, faith means sticking to Jesus and following through.

Faith and believing have other parts to them, but the English language is not very good at helping us understand faith and believing. Faith and believing include the fact that, when you have faith and believe, you know something to be true. But the truth is that you can know a lot of things that don’t make a difference in your life.

Faith and believing mean consenting to what you know. You are not against the kingdom of God being near. In fact you consent to it. You agree that it is good, and that you are on the side of the kingdom. But a lot of people will say that they agree with something and that you can count on them to be on your side, but they don’t do anything.

A deeper word for faith and believing is trust. Trust takes you further. Any trust that is worthy of the name requires you to take a real stand. When you believe and trust that someone or something is right, then you stand up for them. And you stand up against those who don’t.

In the gospel story, in Mark, the president of the synagogue (his name was Jairus) decided to trust Jesus, even though a lot of his colleagues hated Jesus. A lot of his colleagues saw Jesus as dangerous.

Mark doesn’t give us a picture of the mind of Jairus about Jesus. No one really knew who Jesus was, or what he was about, except that Jesus claimed to represent what the kingdom of God was doing.

Jairus bowed at Jesus’ feet. He took sides. Jesus could claim the faith of Jairus, and tell him not to fear, even when the heart of Jairus’ desire seemed to be lost. Jairus, when all of his motivation for seeking Jesus seemed crushed, stuck to Jesus.

This is faith. This is what it means to believe. You cannot live in a new direction without the grace of a new heart and mind. You cannot live in a new direction without faith.

But see the truth here. Faith is not an item that is in you. Faith is not one of your working spiritual parts. Faith is a living connection with Jesus and with everything that Jesus stands for.

Jairus’ family was going to carry a dark mark on them for the rest of their lives, because they would always be a sign of the truth of Jesus as the king of the kingdom of God. For the colleagues and neighbors of Jairus, his living and breathing daughter would always be an unpleasant reminder of the truth of the good news of Jesus. The sight of Jairus, bowing at Jesus’ feet would always be held against him and his family.

The woman who tried to hide in the crowd also had to stick to Jesus. She tried to be healed by simply touching the hem of his clothing, but Jesus wouldn’t let her get away with that. She had to come out into the open. She had to face her fear of her neighbors. She had to tell everything.

The woman who tried to hide in the crowd had a chronic hemorrhage. She had an unstoppable flow of blood. This made her what her people called “unclean”.

Blood was considered holy when it was part of the sacrifice of an animal on the altar in the Temple. There it stood for a life given in sacrifice to God for the forgiveness of sins. When the blood of a sacrifice was sprinkled on you, it stood for the grace and mercy of God given to you. That blood made you clean.

But, out of context, blood was too holy and it made you unclean. People who touched blood (especially when it was the blood of other people) were not supposed to touch other people. If someone who was bleeding touched you, then you were unclean and you had to isolate yourself, and wash, and bathe, and wait. It was complicated.

The woman who came to Jesus made half the town unclean that day. When she told Jesus everything, everyone knew this. Everyone was mad at her. They were mad at the inconvenience she had caused them. It was rude, insensitive, and inconsiderate. They would hold it against her.

The language of the Gospel of Mark tells us (in the Greek) that, when the woman touched Jesus, she was cured. When she came out into the open and told Jesus everything, then (in the language of the Gospel), Jesus declared that she was healed. There was a difference between being cured and being healed.

In fact, in the story of the bloody woman  and the dying girl, both of them were more than cured and revived. They were given something that was saving. It was more than being saved from long sickness. It was more than being saved from death. The kingdom of God had come to them in Jesus.

Jairus and his family, and the woman and whatever family she had, received something because they had stuck to Jesus through their risk-taking and through their facing of their fears.

Faith isn’t something that gets you what you want; because the father wanted his daughter not to die, and the bleeding woman wanted to be healed without getting caught. Jesus had something else in mind for them, and for us. Jesus wants us to have a new heart and a new mind that will stick with him in spite of shame, and anger, and reproach, and fear, and danger, and despair.

Sticking to Jesus was never easy, and it isn’t easy now. The disciples who followed Jesus on the road (as the big twelve) were always aware of the danger from the authorities. And they were mobbed by the crowds. And they were swamped in the storm. And they were given seemingly impossible tasks by Jesus.

After Jesus died on the cross, and rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, the people of Jesus could only live out the kingdom of God by sticking to Jesus through danger, and risk, and being in want. That is faith.

The Letter to the Hebrews and all the other writings of the New Testament tell us the same message. What the new life and the new heart need are to stick to Jesus.

Our reading from Hebrews says, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1, New International Version) I believe the King James Version is better. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Sureness and certainty are things that we feel. Substance and evidence are things that are objective. They exist, whether we feel them or not. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is sticking to what Jesus has given you for substance and evidence, in spite of its mysterious invisibility.

The reference to the creation tells us that what God gives us in Jesus has substance and reality. It tells us that our new life in Jesus has the same reality as the world we live in, even though our new life comes to us every day from God’s invisible work. God continues to make you his new creation.

The hope that your faith holds onto is the coming of the kingdom of God, when God will make all things new. The hope is in the future, but, in your new heart and mind, the future is now. You life is a time capsule that doesn’t contain the past. Your life in Jesus is a time capsule that contains the future. Jesus puts the future in your heart and mind.

The world around us may not see the power of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. The world may not see how the cross and the resurrection will bring a new heaven and a new earth. But you are different. You know this without seeing it. The substance of that future lives in you now.

God first began to call me to the ministry when I was twelve. The Holy Spirit spoke through the stories we were studying in Sunday school. In those stories God called people like Moses and Jeremiah to serve him and they had objections to being called. They had good reasons for why they should not be called. They tried to worm out of it.

I prayed that God would help me understand what he wanted me to do in such a way that I would be certain of it. I thought that if I was certain that I not try to worm out of it.

God answered my prayer for certainty, but I tried to worm out of it anyway. God gave me a vision. I saw a storm and darkness coming over the world. I saw people in fear, and anger, and confusion, and doubt, and despair. I was told to speak to them for God.

What I saw was very difficult and terrifying, and I haven’t forgotten it. But I stick to Jesus, even when it is difficult and terrifying. I finally surrendered to that when I was nineteen. But I couldn’t do anything else. And, from then on, my life changed. The people who knew me best knew that something had changed in me.

In that vision there was light beyond the storm, and there was the voice of God speaking. In you (in your new heart and your new mind) God has planted the substance of your hope: the evidence of things not seen. There ahead of you, hope is able to grasp what no one else can see. Your hope is able to grasp and stick to the kingdom that is ruled by the cross of Jesus and by his resurrection.

Think about how that part of the gospel story became part of your story. Think how Jairus and the bloody woman had to come out to Jesus and take that risk. Think of the fear and the despair that went through them. Think of how your own life has changed by sticking to Jesus through it all.