Wonderful World of Wisdom - When You Don't Know Nothin'

Preached on Sunday, August 26, 2018

Scriptures readings: Colossians 1:24-2:5; Proverbs 30:1-9; Luke 5:1-11

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

There’s this guy who sounds like he’s beating himself up for how stupid he’s been. “I am the most ignorant of men. I do not have a man’s understanding.” (Proverbs 30:2)

Here’s a guy who feels really stupid. Well, that’s what I thought at first. I thought it was the bad things that make us feel small and clueless. Then again, there might be some huge, wonderful things that make us feel small and clueless.

The man who wrote the words we’ve read is someone named Agur son of Jakeh. The names here aren’t Hebrew names, but they come from a related language that was spoken by the descendants of Abraham’s second-class son Ishmael, who became the ancestor of the Arabs.

The story behind Abraham and Sarah and their treatment of Ishmael, and the ongoing influence of that bad treatment on the relationship between Israel and the Arabs is something that has come to endanger the peace of the whole world. They haven’t always fought each other, but it’s been a rough road for over three thousand years.

The wise man Agur and the publication of Proverbs takes us about seven hundred years into that long story: long enough for him to have earned a bad reputation with the wisdom school of Solomon. And yet there he is! There are a number of people, whose writings are in our Old Testament, who have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the story of the Bible.

The same is true with Job. The whole Book of Job is the story of one of the best people in the whole human race and one of the most beloved people of God who has nothing to do with God’s people, except that his story matters to God; and God wants to hold up to us these stories of people who lived beyond our horizon and still knew something good about our God, in spite of us and without our help. God has managed to get through to them on his own.

They are part of a world where God is at work in ways we don’t understand. God’s work in other people is beyond our knowledge and our understanding. Which is exactly one of the truths that Agur knows.

You could say that I’m wrong about this. After all, Agur confesses that he doesn’t know the Holy One. He says that doesn’t know God. But he also says that his level of understanding would test out to be subhuman. And that doesn’t seem to be true, and his words form an inspired part of our inspired Bible, so he knows more than he says.

Augur has a faith very much like the faith that the Lord taught to Job. Read chapter thirty-eight in Job and see how what the Lord (speaking through questions) reveals something to Job that sounds a lot like what the Lord has told Agur.

Agur knows that God strides back and forth between the dimensions that separate Heaven and Earth. God creates the atmospheres of the planets and makes their winds blow at the tipping of his hands. God gathers the waters in his cloak, and pours them into the seas. God has defined the ends, or the borders, of the worlds; and surely much more than that.

And those are just a few of the big things. That doesn’t count all the little things God can do.

In just a few verses, Agur the Arab can write a Hebrew poem as good as anything in the Bible. What Agur knows about God is beautiful and great. He knows that the Lord communicates perfect truth and he knows that you can count on that truth if you have any desire to walk with the Lord by faith.

Agur also knows that you can royally mess with the word of God. You can adulterate or contaminate it. He calls this “adding to the words of God.”

We need to take notice of when and where these words were written. Most of the Old Testament was not written at this time. What was already written down was probably not assembled into single scrolls yet. The words of God that Agur knew were the words he passed down to us in this chapter of Proverbs.

God’s words tell us that God can create heaven and earth, the spiritual and physical universe, and the particles and the underlaying fields of energy that are the foundation of everything we can see or detect. The ends of the earth could be like the limits of nature, and the laws of physics, that define how things happen; that define what can and what cannot happen. It’s simpler if we just say that God can do anything and that we can safely, securely live accordingly by faith.

God’s words tell us that his words, his communications to us, can be trusted because God values the truth and makes his words true in such a way that they are like a shield. The shield of God’s words is strong because God has made it from the most perfectly refined and forged metal possible. His words cannot be broken, or shattered, or pierced through to cut you.

Adding to God’s word doesn’t mean rewriting it to make it say something you want it to say. It doesn’t mean scribbling words in, or crossing words out. You don’t need to do any of that in order to add to it, or subtract from it, or just mess with it in general. All you have to do is to teach it messed up. All you have to do, in order to mess with the words of God, is to preach them all messed up.

I may have messed up Agur’s poem about “God Can Do Anything”. Maybe I shouldn’t say that the ends of the earth could be the laws of physics. That’s kind of a leap of the imagination; and maybe a leap of physics, too.

To explain something strange and mysterious in such a way as to make it more rational, or (even worse) to explain something away, is a dangerous game. Preachers and Sunday School teachers might be like children playing where they shouldn’t: like my mom’s two brothers, as kids, when they would compete at jumping off the roof of their garage. Of course, those were the good old days of childhood when parents seldom gave a thought to what their children were doing out of their sight.

Trying to change the meaning of God’s words, God’s messages to us, to suit ourselves, is what it means to add to the words. Making them not so weird, or scary, or threatening is adding to the words of God. Cherry picking them in order to make us look good or, at least, better than other people is the same as adding to the words of God. Making God’s words not mean what they say, or not say what they mean, is adding to God’s words. Those are the lies and the falsehoods that scare Agur.

Agur knows that God’s words tell us reliably what God can do, what God does for us. God’s words tell us who we are as we stand before God, and how to stay right and not forget the good news of God’s word.

Agur doesn’t want to mess with this, or get in the way. Agur sees himself in God’s words: how easy falsehood is and how it can come to cover God up and make him a different God. Agur sees that we can be tempted to worship a God of our own invention. He prays that God will deliver him from his own lies.

Agur sees that possessing too much can distract us from God and his word for us. Having too much can make us breakers of the truth: promoting ourselves and demoting God.

Having too little can make us desperate, always seeking our own advantage, and worrying about our survival, and forgetting to trust God, and actually stealing, and cheating, and lying to serve ourselves, because we don’t trust that God will give us our daily bread as we need it. Agur prays, like a Christian, for his daily bread, the right amount of anything, as God knows we need it to be.

But Agur prays because he knows great things about God.

If he makes this prayer because he doesn’t trust what God has said, and because he’s afraid, then I don’t know what to do with this prayer. I believe that he prays this way because he loves God so much that he doesn’t want to fail. He knows that God won’t fail him, but he wants the help that only God can design and give to make sure that this poor ignorant believer doesn’t fall short of the love of God.

Agur says he has no knowledge of the Holy One. Knowledge, in the world of the Old Testament, means a deep level of experience. It implies intimacy with the facts, the truth, the message. In some strange way Agur says that he has no knowledge of the Holy One, and yet the very next thing he says is a poem dedicated to the knowledge that the Holy One has given to him.

The dynamic of what we see in Agur is that he possesses no wisdom, but God’s wisdom possesses him. Agur has no knowledge, but God’s self-knowledge has opened his eyes.

There are a lot of experiences that can make us say something like: “I am the most ignorant of men.” “I am the most ignorant of women.”

Something terrible could make us say this. You could lose your job, and seem to fail at finding another. You could be hit by loss or grief: the loss of a home in a flood or fire, the loss of a precious human life that is so much a part of you that you don’t know how you might still be your true self without them.

You could find yourself in the path of an accident, or an illness, or a disability, or the threat of cancer, and the uncertainty of health and life that this brings. You could be hit by a mistake or a failure of your own, or make a horrible discovery about yourself that never occurred to you until now.

It happens. You say: “I don’t know anything.” Then, again, maybe that’s not true. Maybe a word crept in long ago. It was a word of something beautiful waiting for you: something that gave you strength, and courage, and hope, and energy. Maybe the gifts in your life seemed so great and strong that you forgot that word, that message, from God: that God can do anything and make anything possible. Maybe the poverty you feel now makes it hard to hold onto what you once knew, or makes it seem hollow and far away.

Yet there can be a quiet word that tells you that you are in God’s hands. It may be true that you aren’t holding onto God’s wisdom and intimacy, but God is God, and God is holding you in his hands.

Agur was afraid of speaking falsehood, but he was also afraid of hearing it from others. Agur had heard the same message. He had received the same truth that Job heard.

There were others who knew what Agur might have felt slipping away. The wise thing to do would be to find someone who has gone through what you are going through, only that person has not forgotten or lost the perfect shield that nothing can break.

Then, again there can be experiences that aren’t terrible at all, and these can also make you feel as though you didn’t know anything.

I think being in love can make you feel wonderful and scared at the same time and also feel as though you don’t know anything. Absolutely anything might happen. There was this one girl (or woman rather) who I thought might be the one for me, and one really good point in my favor was that her parents loved me.

Well, this girl could be a tomboy and go hiking with me in the woods and cliffs of the Oregon coast, all dressed down in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Another time I took her out to a dinner theater in the county seat. She fixed herself up and she was gorgeous, and there was a friend of mine and his wife at the same dinner theater and, when they saw us together, they broke into great big grins. My friend gave me a wink, and I felt so proud and giddy at what I was doing and who I had with me. But I moved too slow and she met someone else.

In spite of this, I know something about something wonderful making me not know anything.

I know guys who report that they became serious about their relationship with Jesus when they first held their babies in their arms. They knew that they didn’t know anything, anymore, and that they needed lots of help and strength from someone else in order to become what that child of theirs needed.

Love, parenthood, the work of your dreams, a home of your own designing, a talent that comes to life: These can open your heart to words of wisdom and good news.

It’s like Peter in our gospel story. He met a man, a teacher, a man about whom people were reporting a lot of crazy stuff, a man with callouses on his hands and maybe some stray sawdust on his tunic, like a carpenter. This stranger walked up to Peter and commandeered Peter’s boat, to use as a pulpit.

Then this stranger named Jesus told Peter where the good fishing could be found, as if he were a fisherman too. Peter grumbled and then he got a word from the Lord in the form of his biggest catch ever.

Peter didn’t know anything anymore. He knew that Jesus had done something, but he didn’t know how or why. He realized that he had made a huge mistake. He had misjudged someone who knew far more that he did. Peter had scoffed at someone who could seemingly do anything. This Jesus could do anything where Peter couldn’t do anything. Jesus was like the power and truth that Agur had known.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll be catching men. You will fish for people.” Peter and his partners left everything and followed Jesus. Something wonderful made Simon Peter feel very small, and stupid, and clueless, and he never felt better in his life. It’s not a bad change. I recommend it to you.

Peter and his partners would come to feel the same way, sort of, when Jesus died on the cross. That was a bad thing. Now, again, they didn’t know anything anymore. That was a bad change.

Then, they were wrong again. They didn’t know anything all over again, when Jesus rose from the dead. They never felt better in their lives. And that’s not a bad change. I highly recommend it to you.

There is someone who can do anything. He can create a world, and he can save that world, and he does, and he has. What Agur knew was the wisdom that knew more than he did. In Jesus we meet the very wisdom of God in the flesh.

We may feel like we don’t know anything. We may feel like we can’t do anything. Jesus is God’s word and our shield, when our littleness comes from terrible things. Jesus is God’s word and our shield when our littleness comes from his wonderful gifts.

Things Invisible - Don't Go to Hell

Preached on Sunday, April 29, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 57:14-21; Revelation 20:11-15; Matthew 25:31-46

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

What is God like?

Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So, what is God like?

Sometimes we read that God is like a hand.”

David said this to God, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (Psalm 63:8)

Hebrews says this about God, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

What does it mean that God is like a hand?

Sometimes we read that God is like fire.

When the prophet Isaiah received his calling to become a prophet, he had a vision of God enthroned in glory surrounded by flaming angelic creatures called Seraphim.

The name seraph means burning one. They are all fire, and wings, and eyes.

Isaiah was in agony with the fear of his own sinfulness, so God sent a burning seraph to do something important with fire. “One of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth, and said, ‘See, thIs has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. “(Isaiah 6:6-7)

After the resurrection of Jesus and his departure to heaven, the disciples were waiting for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit, and this is how it happened: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit….” (Acts 2:2-4)

So, the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus is like fire. The Holy Spirit enables us to follow, and serve, and be the witnesses of Jesus. The Holy Spirit enables us, as the followers of Jesus, to demonstrate the love shown by Jesus on the cross to take our sins away. So, this is like fire. Those who follow Jesus are filled with something like fire.

In Hebrews, again, the author wants us to be hopeful and excited in our faith, and so he says: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28) Security in the love of God and his kingdom is like fire.

So, what do we think that God is like, when we are told that God is like fire?

What do we think that God is like when Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) What do we think when the apostle John writes that: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

We can see the connection between Jesus and love. Then we hear Jesus say: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

If God is like Jesus, what is God like? If God is like fire, and if God is like Jesus, and if punishment is like fire, then what is God like, and what is Jesus like?

I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible always says exactly what God wants it to say, exactly the way God wants it said. And the same Holy Spirit inspires the hearts and minds of those who read the Bible to receive exactly what God wants to tell them, so long as they are ready to hear whatever God wants to tell them, exactly the way God wants to tell them.

I don’t believe there are any contradictions in the Bible. I do believe that it is perfectly possible to understand the Bible and to make sense of it. I don’t believe that anything about the history of the words of the Bible and how it may have been written and passed down to us take anything away from its divine authority.

Jesus, the Living Word, is truly human and truly God, and so he is able to give us everything we need as human children of God. In the same way, the Written Word of God, in the Bible, is truly human and truly divine, and, (because of this) it is able to give us exactly what we need.

There have been many people who have spoken and written about the geography of Hell, and the temperature of Hell. There seem to be many Christians who are perfectly happy to believe that there is a Hell and that some people are going there. There are Christians who have a very clear idea of exactly who is going to Hell, and they can hardly wait for that to happen.

I want to say something about the mentality of Hell and, at the same time, I also want to tell you: “Don’t go there!”

It’s clear that Hell has something to do with punishment. But I don’t know if we even understand punishment that well.

I don’t. But perhaps you understand it on the basis of your experience as a parent, or as a spouse, in family and marriage.

In my experience as a kid, I think kids talk with each other and make plenty of comparisons about how they are being raised. The 1950’s were the years of the final flowering of the spanking. My friends and I were amazed when one of us shared that when he did something wrong, his dad would get out a heavy leather belt, and pull down his kid’s pants and underwear, and whip him on his bare bottom.

We knew that some of our own parents had been raised like that. We were genuinely glad that this was a thing of the past.

Let me tell you about the punishment my dad gave me. My dad, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, would get mad. But my dad wouldn’t scream, or yell, or raise his voice. He didn’t use bad words. My dad spanked me. He spanked me so that it stung, and I would cry.

But by the time I was about eight years old, I realized that although his spanking stung a little, it didn’t really hurt at all. I suddenly realized this right in the middle of getting a spanking.

I realized that it didn’t hurt. This almost made me laugh, right in the middle of that spanking. I tried not to laugh, but I think I snorted and gave myself away. That scared me for a second, because I wondered, in that second, if it would make him madder.

I remember, at that very moment, how my dad immediately stopped the spanking. He never spanked me again. After that, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, my dad wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t use bad words. My dad would simply look me in the eyes with anger and with a terrible, terrible disappointment.

His eyes, that were normally brown, would turn green for a minute. And I couldn’t stand that.

I mean, I wished that he would spank me. In those days I would have rather been spanked so that it hurt, at least a little. I would rather have had a spanking, than see that look in those eyes. I think my behavior improved a lot when the only punishment I got was that look in those eyes like an angry, sad, green fire.

With human beings, I don’t think that plain and simple punishment does any good. OK, punishment may stop bad behavior. But punishment will also open up a whole new world of trying to get away with things without getting caught.

With my dad, that look in those eyes left me helpless and I had no motivation to try to get away with things without getting caught. There were more things in that green fire than anger, there was disappointment, there was expectation, and there was love.

Punishment alone, plain and simple, never touches the heart, and never makes you better. Good parents know that punishment, plain and simple, is never their job.

Their job is to give their children everything in their heart. Their job is to bring children to life, and give their children more and more life, and give their children the capacity to receive more life from God, and from the love and faithfulness of others.

The parents’ job is to teach their children to use the lessons of the love they’ve received to become givers of life and love to others, in their own right. Parents want their children to be givers of life, especially to those who need it most: to give that life and love most of all to those who need spanking, because they may have children of their own.

The Lord says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” But this is not about punishment, plain and simple. God is not about punishment and reward.

God is about creating life. God is about giving to his created children the capacity to thrive in a life that is learned from God and gifted by God. God is about creating and raising children of his own.

In the Bible, fire has strong associations with the holiness of God. Fire often appears when holiness is broken and when punishment becomes the order of the day.

We think of holiness as a standard of perfection, and we think of perfection as never making mistakes, and never breaking rules or laws. Holiness is actually an ability to be devoted to a purpose, to have a goal in view and never letting go of it. Holiness means the capacity to focus on your goal and not deviate from it, ever.

God’s goal is not law keeping. God’s goal is life and love. God’s goal is thriving, and joy, and appreciation, and thankfulness, and praise. God’s goal is to say to every one of us, as creatures who have spread the beauty of goodness: “Well done good and faithful servant.”

Holiness is only one characteristic of God that we call an “attribute”. What we might call God’s moral attributes include holiness, justice, and love, and a number of other very fine qualities.

If we say that punishment is part of God’s attribute of holiness, we are right. But God is never just one thing at a time. God’s holiness never exists in the absence of God’s justice and love.

Imagine that you have, in spades, the attribute of intelligence. You would never want that attribute of intelligence to function without the attribute of wisdom, or else you would end up being too smart for your own good.

It’s no good to go around being less than you are. You want to be ready to be everything that you are all the time.

And if you have the attribute of being right all the time, or at least being right more often that other people, do you realize how much harm you can do, and how hard you will make life for others and for yourself. Never let your attribute of being right elbow your attribute of love out of the way. Some people do that. But, you never want to be less than all that you are.

Back to parenthood, and marriage too: you never want to reduce yourself in what you have to give. You never give enough unless you are ready to give everything.

So, when your child goes wrong, becoming The Avenger won’t do any lasting good unless your child can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes. Even if your husband or wife messes up, never get mad unless your partner can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes and in your voice.

Justice is an attribute that goes beyond rewarding and punishing. Justice creates a system where goodness is enjoyed, and flourishes, and where badness fails, and breaks the heart of even the guilty.

And love,” Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8) And God is love.

And God is a consuming fire. And Hell is an eternal fire. In the Bible, fire is, first and foremost, an image and expression of God. Fire is the expression of who God is and what God is like.

I always loved fire. When I was a kid I loved to build fires. It became my family job. We had a fireplace, and I built the fires. When we camped, I built the fire. When we barbequed, I built the fire. When there was trash to burn I loved to build the fire.

I grew up with incinerators in the back yard and burn piles on the farms. Fires were never about punishment. Except that it feels like you’re being punished, when you’re the one who has to build and manage that fire in the summertime, in the Sacramento Valley, when the temperature is 100 degrees. Fire is light, and warmth, and food, and heating water for washing. It’s for cleaning up the yard or the field. If fire were punishment, it would only be the saddest use of a beautiful thing.

Even Jesus says, in his parable of the sheep and the goats, that the fire of Hell wasn’t made for us. It was made for the Devil and his angels; not for human beings. (Matthew 25:41) It was made for cleaning up the creation of God.

God hates us trying to turn him into something less than everything he is. That’s why the Ten Commandments forbid us from making any image of God. No image can show all that God is. So, when the first and foremost expression of who God is, and what God is like, makes God look like Hell, we can trust that this can never be true.

Something else is true. All of the attributes of God are always present. Everything that is true of God is always at work, all the time. Where we see the fire of punishment in the Bible, there is much more at work than punishment. There is holiness that holds to the devotion of its purpose to make us the thriving children of God. There is justice, that creates a system where what is good grows stronger, and more and more joyful and thankful. There is love, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never, never ends.

There was a time, many years ago, when I was betrayed. People who knew more than I did told me later that they should have warned me. It damaged me for a long time. But, soon after that betrayal closed in on me, I preached a sermon about absolute forgiveness. At the end of that service, I was told by one of the ambushers, that my sermon about absolute forgiveness was the most negative messages they had ever heard. That same morning, I went to shake the hand of another one of them and, as I reached out my hand, their face got dark and grim and they pulled their hands behind them and backed away from me. I was not being what they wanted me to be at the time.

Forgiveness and grace can be an enormous punishment and pain for those who refuse it. Love can become darkness and fire for those who want to make themselves less, in their attributes, than God created them to be, when they don’t want to combine the fires of holiness, justice, and love.

In the story of the sheep and the goats, neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of doing anything for Jesus. They had only seen the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger (which means alien, like the Samaritan who was an outsider and an enemy of God’s people), the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. These were among the types of people that the God who looks like Jesus tells us to care for. He cares.

The sheep were people who went where Jesus would go in order to love those whom Jesus would love with all the attributes of God. The sheep were the people who shared the attributes of Jesus. They would refuse to be anything less. In a real sense, they had no idea what they were doing, but they did it anyway.

The goats never went near the people with whom Jesus identified. They were content and they led perfectly happy lives being less than what God created them to be. They were never anywhere near where Jesus would be, and so they never really did anything for Jesus.

The sheep must have often found themselves in places where they were very uncomfortable, and yet they were on the road to heaven. The goats led their comfortable lives and never even started up that road. The life of the goats turned out to be all about themselves. Their souls shrank as their holiness, justice and love shrank. In the end, they were held forever in the arms of what they had refused to be. The unwanted fire of love will never end.

If a child is pouting or having a tantrum, the thing they hate most is to see you moving in toward them to love them, smile into their faces, and tickle them. This is the way to make them really howl. Love can be Hell. If you love someone who wants to be less than they were created to be, or love someone who is happy to be less than they were created to be, and if you try to love them into being something more: know that you will make them miserable.

But don’t stop. You want to be careful about this. Never let anything or anyone make you consent to be less than you were created to be. Never dream of being any less than Jesus. To choose to be les is the mentality of hell. Don’t go there!

In the beginning of the Book of Revelation, when John first sees Jesus, among the many details he notices is something about those eyes. The eyes of Jesus look like fire. For those who know Jesus, a different form of fire tells us who God is. This world, and the best institutions and laws, and all the people in it, punished Jesus for being all that he is. The punishing fire took the form of a cross, and nails, and a crown of thorns, and the wounds of a whip, and a spear in his heart.

There was much more hanging on the hell of that cross than punishment. The fire of God burned there. The fire of holiness, and justice, and love burned there and took the punishment and the curse of our sins. As our hearts give way to that flame, we die and rise with Jesus. The light in Jesus’ eyes becomes his power and fire in us to break our hearts for change and a new life. Let’s live in that fire forever.

Faith's Underbelly - Expectations Versus Surprises

Preached on Sunday, July 23, 2017

Scripture readings: Exodus 14:10-15:3; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Walking around the Feather River: Live Oak, CA
June 2017

You could say that Moses and the Israelites were caught between a rock and a hard place; but in this part of the story they were caught between a superpower and a wet place. Each of us, in our own way, has been caught like that, over and over again. After that, we never struggle with faith, ever again! Or not?

Well, the word of God gives us a pattern of getting caught and getting faith. In our reading, it says: “And when the Israelites saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.” (Exodus 14:31) This is said at the end of chapter fourteen and it will remain absolutely true all the way until chapter sixteen.

The scriptures are inspired to tell us who God is and what he does. They are also inspired to tell us who we are and what we do. I believe what it says, because it certainly fits me.

About God: what we’ve read this morning tells us that God is a warrior (Exodus 15:3) and that he will fight for us (Exodus 14:14). About us: this is the first place that I know of, in the Bible, where Israel is called an army (Exodus 14:20); and what applies to them, applies to us.

This is pretty impressive, until you take a real look and see how they acted. When they saw the Egyptian army coming for them, in the distance, the Israelites basically told Moses, “We told you so!”

“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” (14:11) This is an old, old joke, because of the pyramids. You know: the pyramids were graves. No one could miss them. Everyone could see that there were graves in Egypt. It’s a four-thousand-year-old joke.

The Bible has a sense of humor, because God does. God has to have a sense of humor just to handle his own people.

The Bible shows us that there is a running battle between our expectations and God’s calling for us to trust and obey. But what does it mean, in our readings today, to trust and obey? We are to obey…but how? The guy with the faith is Moses, and even Moses doesn’t know quite what to do next.

The Lord seems to scold Moses for not guessing the improbable (or seemingly impossible) surprise that the Lord has planned. “The Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me?” (14:15) It’s almost as if, by telling his people what to do, Moses is telling God what to do. Moses had a running battle with his own expectations.

Moses gave the people these commands: “Do not be afraid.” “Stand firm.” “You need only be still.” (14:13-14) In some way these all say the same thing. There’s a line from Psalm forty-six, where God says: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) This doesn’t mean, “Do absolutely nothing, and you will know that I am God.”

“Being still” is an inward determination to trust. It’s a kind of peace that enables you to do something: whatever it might be that God is calling you to do. It might be a calling to stop doing something. It might be a calling to come to attention and get ready to go.

Whatever it may be, it’s a way of standing firm. Years ago, during World War II, a British poster carried the motto: “Stay Calm and Carry On.” Those are slightly different words, but they carry the same meaning as “be still.”

The Israelites were in a mood to be still by putting their hands up in surrender. That seemed, to them, to be the best thing to do, if they were smart. I’ve always had the feeling that Moses thought that something entirely different would be smart. It’s as if Moses was saying: “Face the Egyptians, get in battle formation, prepare arms, and see how God will fight for you (meaning: see how God will fight through you, and on your behalf, as you do your part).”

For Moses, as the guy with the faith, knowing God just a little bit, this seemed, to him, to be the best thing for them to do, if they were smart.

It can seem smart to trust God, and stand your ground, and do what you must. Sometimes this is the right thing to do. Sometimes I’ve been smart enough to do just that.

Apparently, God’s idea of a really smart thing to do was for them to cross the Red Sea on dry land. But who could have had enough faith and trust to have thought of that? It’s as if the growth and survival of God’s people depended on God giving them options that their faith could never hope to have imagined, or foreseen, or held onto.

Another part of the pattern is that, in order to live as people of faith, we seem to need to be confronted by the truth of what we are without God (or without faith). We seem to need to be confronted by the truth of what we may become with God (or with faith).

God’s people, Israel, needed to know that. Even Moses needed to know that. And so do we.

Looking at it another way, even Moses needed to be confronted with the limitations of his own faith. In this sense, faith is not enough. Our faith, or our lack of it, can be so much about us, and not about God.

Moses was showing real faith, but the limitation of that faith was that he was prepared to use faith to make something happen, and faith is something that rests in the faithfulness of God. The faithfulness of God often comes to us in surprising ways.

Surprise is at the core of knowing God and having a relationship with the Lord.

We see this, all the way through the Bible. Moses asked God for his name. God told him that he would be known by a name that wasn’t a name at all, but a verb and a state of being. God was “I Am Who I Am”, or “I Will Be Who I Will Be”. This verb of God is a state of complete independence and self-being (uncreated and unconditioned being, if you can imagine that).

This absolutely independent God needs nothing, and, so, (obviously) he creates everything. God wants to change the world through a nation of people who know him, and so he, obviously, called an old, barren couple named Abraham and Sarah to be the parents of that nation.

The real core of the God who is known through his surprises, is the gospel. This uncreated and unconditioned being, beyond time and space, became a human being, bound by time and space, born as a regular baby, and taught and raised like any normal child, and trained by his father to work as a carpenter. This perfect, uncreated, and unconditioned being got himself killed on a cross by everything that was wrong with this world in order to set us free from everything that was wrong with this world. Even set us free from sin and death. What better way could there be, to beat sin and death, than being killed by sinful humans?

This is what Paul claims to be the foolishness of God and the weakness of God. And Paul claims this foolishness and weakness to be the source of God’s his victory and the source of our new life in God. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 25)

Who would have guessed it? It’s a surprise. How strange it is for God to love surprises. His word tells us that this is his way.

We want to have faith in proven techniques for dealing with God. We want the Bible to provide us with such techniques.

It’s true that there are disciplines for a life with God, and the Bible tells us these disciplines: prayer, servanthood, worship, study, generosity, the love of our enemies, and so on. There are principles of life: laws, wisdom, and so much more; and these are to be found in the Bible. But these are not the core of the message.

The core of the message of the Bible is this completely surprising God. This God is absolutely beyond us, and beyond our control, and this God has a purpose and something he is aiming at. It’s something that he wants to share with us. God wants to take us along with him, and it’s all too big for us. It’s beyond our expectations, and we wouldn’t understand it if we knew what it was beforehand.

The Bible tells us that this God comes to us in our need and our abject slavery; like the slavery of Israel in Egypt. This God gets really close and takes us with him to freedom and life. You can call it an exodus. You can call it the way of the cross and the resurrection. You can call it Jesus: God in Christ; Christ with us. Christ in us. What a surprise!

And so, there we find ourselves, caught between a rock and a hard place, or caught between a superpower and a wet place, and there is some impassible barrier between us and the goal. God makes our own limitations clear, and that makes the impossible all too clear. God says, “Go forward through the impassible, impossible barrier. That is the road to my plan for you.”

Perhaps you have passed through the impossible with God, in Christ. I have. But it’s always something new. I never know what’s next. The Bible tells me so. I have no idea what those surprises will be. I pray to know them when I come to them. Don’t you?

I hope that the church can always be this place where we make it through the impossible barriers and find the road to God’s promises together. The barrier, and the road that takes us through it, will be God’s surprise. Let’s trade in all our smartness, and all our expectations, for God’s surprises.

We should know our exodus. Most of all, we should know our Jesus. In Jesus, we meet the God who is the master of surprise.

Know God - Our Invisible Friend

Preached on Pentecost Sunday, May 14, 2015

Scripture readings: John 15:26-16:15; Acts 2:1-37

After worship a pastor was greeting his people, and one of the members shook his hand and she told him, “Pastor that was a very good sermon.” And he told her, “For that I will have to give the credit to the Holy Spirit.” And she said, “Well it wasn’t that good.”

But that is exactly how it works.

White Bluffs on the Columbia River
Near Hanford Reservation, WA
April 2015

The friends of Jesus were filled with grief because Jesus told them that he was going away (John 16:5-6), and they were afraid because they read, between the lines, a message they didn’t want to be true. Jesus was going away by dying on the cross and he was leaving them in charge of the mission of the kingdom of God. Their job would be to represent Jesus and to win the world for Jesus as the King of the world.

This filled them with grief. No matter how much time Jesus had spent with them, showing them who he was and teaching them what he wanted them to do and to be, Jesus was always better at everything than they were. They were only eager to represent Jesus when Jesus was right there with them (to represent himself).

But that was going to change; or that is what they thought. They didn’t understand what Jesus was saying about the Holy Spirit making Jesus present in the world in a new way; especially through them.

But they didn’t understand most things. They didn’t understand the connection Jesus was making between his going away and his purpose of dying and rising from the dead. They didn’t understand how Jesus dying and rising from the dead could be connected with him being king.

The Holy Spirit could enable them to understand Jesus, and the Spirit could empower them as the friends of Jesus. But the Spirit could only do that if Jesus actually did go away in some sense. The Spirit could only help them understand if Jesus actually died and rose from the dead.

Jesus’ dying and rising from the dead was necessary to make them into a new creation; to make it possible for them to be born into a new life from God. Jesus had to complete his mission in order to give the Holy Spirit the necessary material to build their new lives. Jesus had to complete his mission in order to give his friends everything that was his to give them.

The friends of Jesus needed to die and rise from their old life, So Jesus needed to do it first, so that they could catch it from him.

The old saying was never true. The old saying is, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” In anything that matters, this has never been true. In teaching, you can only give what is truly yours to give.

When Jesus gave his death and his resurrection to the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit could give it to the friends of Jesus, and they would have it in them. They would be able both to do and to teach

There are those powerful words about God’s motivation and purpose that we can read in the third chapter of John. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

There is a special way that God came down to live in such a world as ours. We belong to a world where it is typical not to believe him and not to receive him. This is as true now as it was when God came down in Jesus.

In Jesus we see this special way that God lived among us; and because Jesus has died for our sins, and because he has risen from the dead, we receive a new life like his. We receive his special way to live. We can love a loveless world. We can be faithful in an unfaithful world.

We can give evidence for Jesus, because the Holy Spirit enables us. The Holy Spirit takes everything that belongs to the Father and to the Son and makes it known to us.

So we can live the ways of Jesus. We can love each other, and that is the secret of success.

You know what this means. If we can truly love each other as Jesus loves us, then we can love anybody. That’s a tall order. Think of it. If we can truly love each other as Jesus loves us, then we can love anybody; and we can give evidence for Jesus, because the Holy Spirit has hovered over the creation of a whole new way of life in us.

In a way, the Father is God ruling, the Son is God serving, and the Holy Spirit is God sharing. When various translations of the Bible translate the very strange word that Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit, it comes out as Comforter, Counselor, Advocate, Helper, and Friend. The word means “one called alongside”. Who can you call to be all these things in your time of need: Comforter, Counselor, Advocate, Helper? A true friend can be all of this.

A friend will also speak up for you. The Spirit is the friend who speaks up for Jesus. We are friends of Jesus and speaking up for him is part of that.

Jesus said that the Spirit would, “testify about me.” (John 26) The Holy Spirit is the speaking part of God who speaks invisibly and inaudibly to the heart and to the conscience.

The Holy Spirit testifies, but this testimony is more than a statement. Testimony, here, means to give evidence. The word translated as “testify” can also mean to be a martyr. In fact our word “martyr” has its root in that word.

“Testifying” means “giving evidence”. It even means “being the evidence”, no matter what.

The crowd in Jerusalem (on the day of Pentecost) was focused on the behavior of the disciples more than they were on the message (even though the disciples were full of the Holy Spirit). Peter (inspired by the Holy Spirit) made the case for their strange behavior being the evidence of Jesus. “This Jesus…has poured out what you now see and hear.” (Acts 2:32-33)

Ever since those days, some of the greatest work of Jesus is what others see and hear in us through the work of the Holy Spirit. We called to be the evidence that “God so loves the world”.

“Those who can, do.” The Holy Spirit shares the fullness of Jesus with us; so, if we are Jesus’ friends, his fullness is always lurking somewhere in us. It’s true that Jesus always does it better, but that doesn’t matter. The fact that we are obviously not up to the quality of Jesus, but that we are people who are seeking to live the life of Jesus, anyway, may actually be very good evidence. We are learning to be what we are not, instead of pretending to be what we are not.

That is what makes a difference. That will testify.

The Holy Spirit speaks to the world on behalf of Jesus. The Spirit shows the beauty of Jesus. The Spirit asks the inner consciences of the people of this world how it can possibly be that they are able to reject such beauty. The Spirit asks the world why it doesn’t prefer the kingdom of the cross when that kingdom shows up the world, as it is, every time.

Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would convict the world of guilt in regard to sin….because men do not believe in me.” (John 16:8-9) We don’t have to say much about guilt and sin in order to give the right testimony about Jesus. We can give the right testimony by talking about what we love about goodness, because we learn about goodness from Jesus.

He has taught us about goodness by dying for us to give us his goodness. If we live the goodness of Jesus and if we are not afraid to talk about it, the Holy Spirit will convict the world of guilt and sin.

Jesus mostly talked about sin to the people who thought they had it all together: the people who thought they were better than others. When Jesus told the woman who was caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more,” it was only after he had saved her life, and told her that he didn’t condemn her.

Essentially Jesus testified about sin by forgiving it. This is what made people mad. This is what made people hate Jesus. The people who knew they were sinners didn’t hate Jesus or his testimony. I want to give that kind of evidence. I want my testimony to be like Jesus.

Jesus said that the Holy Spirit will convict the world of guilt with regard to righteousness….because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer.” (John 16:8, 10) The words, “I am going to the Father” refer to his crucifixion and resurrection. These give us righteousness as grace, as forgiveness, and as a gift. If we live our lives as a response to grace, and forgiveness; and if we live our lives as if they were the gift of God (God-centered and not self-righteous); then the Holy Spirit will give evidence alongside us about the right kind of righteousness.

Jesus said that the Holy Spirit “will convict the world of guilt… in regard to judgment….because the prince of this world now stands condemned.” The cross and the resurrection condemned the Devil and his influence on the selfishness and power-seeking of this world.

The cross and the resurrection judge this world because they are stronger than this world. This world and the prince of this world have never been able to overcome the cross and the resurrection, or the people whose lives have been changed by Jesus.

The people of the kingdom of Christ keep going on and on and they keep giving evidence; if they don’t lose heart or go astray. The Holy Spirit drives this home to the consciences of the people who have not seen it before.

One of the ways that the Holy Spirit speaks to us (in a way that keeps us from getting the message wrong) is through the Bible: the Scriptures. Jesus said, “The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” (John 14:26) The Holy Spirit guarded the memories and the thoughts of the disciples and those who listened to them. The Spirit guarded their hearts and minds so that they could record what Jesus said, and what Jesus did, and the reasons behind it.

When we read the Scriptures we read inspired messages from long ago. But the Holy Spirit keeps on working. The Spirit is with us forever, and the Spirit speaks alongside the Scriptures, and within the Scriptures, so that the message goes into our hearts, and our consciences. When the Spirit reminds us of something it becomes like a voice that we cannot ignore except at our own peril.

Most of all the Holy Spirit reminds us that the message is not about a lot of things. The message is not really about information; and it isn’t about techniques, and methods. The message is always about Jesus, and what Jesus said and did. The center of the message is the life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, and the life that comes from him.

Jesus once called the Holy Spirit “Another Counselor”. He said, “I will ask the Father, and he will send you another Counselor to be with you forever.” (John 14:16)

Jesus was the first Counselor the disciples had known. Jesus would die and rise to send another Counselor, the Holy Spirit. The word for Counselor could be translated as “friend”.

In all his bloody and resurrected majesty, Jesus is our friend. The Holy Spirit is also our friend. Friends comfort, and counsel, and help. Friends change us.

Jesus is our servant-Lord who changes us and we become new people. The Holy Spirit is our sharing-Lord. The Holy Spirit may seem like a power that we can learn to harness: a blessing machine. But even though the Holy Spirit is called “the power from on high” (Luke 24:49) the Holy Spirit is not a power, but a person.

The Holy Spirit is a friend, and we never use our friends. We listen to them. We team up with them, but we never use them, and we never study methods to get more out of them. Maybe we could study methods to give more to them. Our friends are our partners.

This partner Spirit is a friend of Jesus: such a good friend that he never gives us anything except to serve as a living connection with Jesus. Jesus (and all that he is, and all that he has done) is present with us through the friendship of the Holy Spirit.

That is how we know God. That is how the world can know God through us.