Faith's Underbelly - Anger Gone Wrong

Preached on Sunday, September 10, 2017

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

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

The Hills of Southern California
June 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith's Underbelly - Stepping over the Line

Preached on Sunday, September 3, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 14:1-25; Romans 11:25-32

Santa Monica Pier, Southern California
June 2017

In the latest episode of the Exodus, right when they seem to have arrived, right when they stand ready to enter in, God’s people decide that entering into the Promised Land will be the death of them. They want to survive at all costs, even if it means going back to slavery in Egypt.

All through this saga, God’s people never come out with the adult equivalent of the child’s question, “Are we there yet?” They’re always thinking that they were better off before they left Egypt. There’s a home of freedom ahead of them; but they’re always hankering for the home they left behind them.

It’s Moses, for all his maturity, who is always reminding the Lord of how important it is to get them to their new home. He’s always reminding God to fulfill his promises.

The Lord’s reputation for faithfulness was on the line at the expense of his anger. Moses warned the Lord not to let the nations say, “The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land he promised them on oath.” (14:16)

Moses kept insisting on what he knew about the true heart of God. He had seen that heart many times. Moses says to the angry God: “In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now” (14:19) This was the real rule of God’s heart.

This had to be how Moses knew that it was possible for God’s people to successfully, effectively enter the Promised Land: their new home of blessing, their new home of freedom. Moses knew God’s faithfulness, at its most tested, and he trusted that source of strength in the heart of God.

This is what true faith does. Faith has layers. Those layers go deep, or else they go high. Faith takes us somewhere. Faith is more than knowing. Faith is trusting what you know. That requires you to allow the God you trust to take you somewhere.

Chapter eleven in the Letter to the Hebrews is called the faith chapter. It gives us a number of working definitions and examples of faith. It contains a long list of the people of faith and, in each case, it tells us where faith took them, or what faith enabled them to accomplish that they would never have accomplished otherwise.

One of the definitions of faith is found in verse six of the faith chapter. It says: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6)

In that sentence, you can see at least two layers of faith. Faith begins with a conviction of the reality of God. You meet God. You know, at some point, that there is a higher power that requires some level of mutual recognition. That’s essential, but it’s not nearly enough.

To say that “God is the rewarder of those who earnestly or diligently seek him” implies change. It implies a process of trust, and the crossing of a line, and entering in. The reward is a goal. It’s the end of a quest. It changes you and it makes you a new person. Hebrews will go on to tell you that faith leads you to run a race, and that it’s the sort of race in which only faith will enable you to “not grow weary and lose heart.” (Hebrews 12:3)

The people of Israel knew that God existed. The Lord was right there in the pillar of cloud and fire. The Lord never left them alone although it seems like they often wanted him to leave them alone.

They knew that God existed, but they took their faith no farther. They didn’t turn their faith into trust in the heart and the faithfulness of God. They wanted survival, and they thought that God’s chosen future for them would put their survival in jeopardy. In spite of the faith of Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Caleb, God’s people lost heart at the thought of entering into a new world and a new life.

They formed the majority, and they won that day, and they also lost. Moses and his friends, in the minority, won the day, but they had a very strange victory. Moses’ prayer for the love of God to prevail was answered. The plan for God’s people to enter into a new life was on track, again, but it would take a lot longer now.

One of the things we learn, here, is that faith is not about survival, per se. Faith is about a higher calling. Maybe we could say that survival, itself, at its best, is about more than mere survival. Any survival that is worth of the name is about a higher calling, or a farther calling.

Something that Jesus said puts these things together. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

There can be a real difference between life, and life to the full. Jesus said that life is not about mere survival, because he said this: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25)

Faith is about a higher, fuller life; and God, in Christ, calls us to this kind of life. It’s part of the life of a higher, fuller faith that trusts the heart and the faithfulness of God. Such a faith steps forward. Faith crosses the border and enters into that life.

This is essential to simply being a Christian and following Jesus in a genuine commitment. I made a commitment to Jesus when I was in the fourth grade and watching Billy Graham on television. It wasn’t hard to do. I always love Jesus. I always prayed and read the Bible, or Bible stories. And I tried to do what Jesus wanted me to do; like, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (Matthew 7:12) I understood that.

It was also easy to stop going to church when my family stopped, when I was about fifteen. And my church didn’t seem to know how to give me what I needed. I was the last to keep going, but it was easier to let the majority rule. I suppose it still is.

Then, when I was eighteen, God told me to go back to that frustrating church. I had to do that by myself, on my own. It didn’t seem to matter to God what I felt, or what I expected.

This turned into something completely different than I expected. There was a really good youth group leader who seemed to understand what I needed. And he took the youth group to a huge youth evangelism rally. And the Lord told me to go forward.

I told him that I didn’t need to go forward, because I already trusted him and belonged to him with all my heart. Which was true except for the fact that I was too chicken to do anything for him out loud or in public. So, I had to go forward, for that very reason.

I also had to go forward because the Lord seemed to be pushing me to understand that the only alternative to my not going forward was for me to be willing to be someone who said no to him. I didn’t dare not go forward.

Faith requires you to do things in order to know God better, and in order to move, and change, and enter in. You can’t do that by saying “no”.

This applies to much, much bigger issues in life. Marriage and family would be such a bigger issue. I think I’ve really tried to get married before, but my best efforts never worked. Someone once offered to help me get a bride from China, and I said no to that, but I think it was right for me to say no to that.

I’ve been in the pastoral ministry for a long time. I didn’t want to do it, but the Lord kept making a point of his requirement that I not say no to him. No one who knows my life would ever accuse me of being in the ministry as a matter of survival, because (a lot of the time) it hasn’t been that easy. I certainly have learned much more than I meant to. Faith (such as it is) will do that.

The people of God need a faith that goes much farther than mere belief that God exists, and even farther than believing that Jesus died for our sins. The faith of the people of God must trust God enough to move out, and step over borders, and enter into larger and higher callings. We must trust God enough to be ready to do the next thing he shows us. Maybe he will point the way soon.

What if we fail? The Bible teaches us that God doesn’t fail, and that his people remain his, and God’s plan goes forward. Paul says: “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29) The failure of one part of God’s people simply allows God to include more people in the growth of his plan and his kingdom.

In the present episode of the exodus, the Lord declared his pardon of his people. It was a strange pardon that felt more like a punishment. God’s people, who didn’t want to enter the land, would not be allowed to do so. They had complained that it would be better for them to die in the desert than to try to enter the land and, so, the Lord granted their wish. They would die in the desert exactly as they claimed to prefer. But they took this badly.

They expressed the fear that, if they tried to enter the land, they would be losers and their children would be taken as slaves. So, the Lord promised a solution to their fears. The Lord promised that their children would enter the land as conquerors, in their place.

God’s people wanted to choose a leader of their own choosing and, so, God really did punish them, this time. God gave them back Moses to lead them for the rest of their dreary lives. Moses was given the blessing of leading those pathetic, faithless people for the rest of his life.

The punishment was that there would be more hardship ahead, for a very long time. The forgiveness was that there would be plenty of miracles, and the chance for their children to learn the strength and the faithfulness of God that their parents had yet to learn. The children had the chance to live a larger, deeper faith. It was part of the punishment, to be sure, but it was also part of the forgiveness. It was God’s faithful blessing of his people, in success and in failure.

The mystery is that God’s people were pardoned because an overruled minority believed what they didn’t believe. Even such a minority counts for something in the effectiveness of the grace and power of God.

Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Caleb would faithfully walk the path of hardship, and delay, and punishment with their people. Faith and faithfulness do this.

Jesus came to walk the same path with us. God came down, in Jesus, to walk through the wilderness of this world with us. He walked through the dangers, and injustices, and anger, and hatred, and hypocrisy of a world torn by unbelief, and selfishness, and rebellion, which are the result of sin.

God, in Christ, walked the longer path of suffering that led to the cross, and sacrifice, and loneliness, and pain, and death. The Lord does this in good faith, in the power of his love to overcome all that is wrong in our hearts, and minds; all that is wrong with the world.

The Lord died and rose from the dead to open a door to a new life, a life of freedom from the power of sin and death. By faith and by trust in the heart of God, we can die with Christ to ourselves and we can cross the border, and enter into that higher life, that abundant life.

We have this call, as children of God and as the people of God, the church. Let’s hear the call, and trust the one who calls us, and let us move forward.

Faith for Life - Embracing God's Wonderful World

Preached on Sunday, January 22, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:1-21

Last Fall, Some Colors and Encounters
Desert Aire/Mattawa WA - November 2016

There’s this song. You’ve heard it. I’m really not good enough of a man to deserve to sing this song, but I will anyway because God always gives us good news that we don’t deserve to sing about.

“What a Wonderful World”

I see trees of green........ red roses too
I see them bloom..... for me and you
And I think to myself.... what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue..... clouds of white
Bright blessed days....dark sacred nights
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world.

The colors of the rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are also on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin’.. how do you do?
They’re really sayin’......I love you.

I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more.....than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world

(George David Weiss/Bob Thiele) Herald Square Music, Inc. on behalf of Range Road Music, Inc. and Quartet Music, Inc. ASCAP

I can’t think of any better way to put into words the meaning of the verse, “For God so loved the world.”

What kind of world do we live in? How would you describe it? Does the world fit the song, or is the song inadequate? Is the song unbiblical and blasphemous? Could God sing this song?

I think we can understand what kind of world we live in, and God’s purpose for us in this world, if we can understand these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

I’ll tell you my answers right now: about the song. I love that song. Do I think the song is adequate? Do I think it tells the truth? I think it tells the truth: maybe not the whole truth. Who could think that it did? And yet I believe that God himself could sing this song; because God so loves the world.

What kind of world do I think we live in? John 3:16 says it. We live in a beloved world, a truly wonderful world. And we live in a perishing world. 

These must be truly seen together, and not forgotten. Unless we understand the absolute depth of its belovedness, and the depth of its perishing, we won’t know who we are, or where we are, or what to do next.

John 3:16 makes us very wise, because it tells us that there is good news. It tells us that the good news is important. The good news is the beginning and ending of all things. But it’s especially important because there is also bad news, and we’ll never get through the bad news unless we know the good news.

I once knew a denominational officer who, at meetings, would sometimes say: “I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news. Which do you want to hear first?” After the meeting, I usually told him, “We’re all Christians here, and we all believe in the happy ending. So, let’s have the bad news first.”

But that’s not quite biblical, either, because (biblically) you start with the good news, then you get faced with the bad news, and then you get the great news (the wonderful news), as the final word.

John 3:16 tells us about the good news of the love that God has for the world. There is great news in seeing how far the love of God for the world will go when bad news raises its ugly head.

But we must remember that the love of God for the world came first. And God’s love for the world is the final, final word. But the love of God for the world is also God’s first word on everything.

The word “world” in this passage means, mostly, the human world. It’s the world of individuals, and neighbors, and strangers, and friends, and enemies. It’s the world of families, and relationships, and communities, and nations, and laws, and politics, and economics, and international relations. It’s the world of social issues, and culture wars, and wars of blood and carnage.

I also think that Jesus’ use of the word “world”, as it’s used here, includes the world of nature. It includes the environment that we are all a part of. It means the creation that surrounds us, as we belong to it.

Although we have reason to fear the world of nature, there’s nothing wrong with that world, except as far as we have gone wrong right in the middle of it. There is a curse, in the form of a punishment for our human rebellion against God.

The curse sets us at odds with the creation. Creation will not work for us the way it might have done, if we had been willing to be faithful to the love of God. Our perishing ways have blighted the natural world; but that’s our fault.

It’s not nature’s fault.

You see the bad news most clearly in the human world. That’s where you can see the “perishing” part at its darkest. That’s where you see darkness, and the hiding from the light. That’s where you see evil, and ugliness, and condemnation. Where life has gone wrong, you see perishing taking the place of life.

Jesus mentions a snake, on a pole, in the desert. This comes from that story in the Book of Numbers, where the people of Israel have won some great victories, and then they sit down and complain.

In the story of the journey of God’s people, wandering through the wilderness to the Promised Land, the Lord has been making sure that his people have enough food and water along the way, but they complain about it anyway. And then they run into a plague of snakes, really aggressive, deadly snakes.

The snakes have come as a result of their complaints. When they confess their guilt to Moses, Moses prays, and the Lord tells him to make a bronze copy of the snakes, and put it on a pole, and the people who look at the bronze snake will be healed.

Moses does it; and the people do it. The people are healed. The bronze snake is a picture of the people’s sins. It’s also, strangely, a picture of God’s holiness. It’s a picture of God’s faithful love.

When the people look at the bronze snake they see these two things; and both of these things are true: they see their sins, and they see God’s love.

That’s the good news; but, for now, we are looking at the bad news. Their stubborn habit of complaining tells us of a strange desire that human beings have to live outside of the environment of the love of God, and its obligations: the obligations of love and faithfulness.

We want to be in charge. We want to do, and to say, and to think, and to feel just what we want, whether it’s good or not; whether it’s healthy, or helpful, or not; whether it’s life-giving or not.

There’s nothing wrong with a snake being a snake, but there’s a lot wrong with people being like snakes. That’s what those people were. They were bitten by their own medicine.

We are the same. The human world, in the way that it’s divorced from God, is a snake-bitten world. It has venom running through its veins, and the venom is contagious. It needs a remedy, but it cannot heal itself. We cannot heal ourselves.

The temptation is to think that those people of Israel (the ones who were bitten by the snakes) were bad people. They weren’t bad people. They were ordinary people. They were just ordinary sinners; and they were scared, and frustrated, and crabby.

They were tired of always, constantly, having to live by faith. They felt that living by faith didn’t give them enough attention. Living by faith didn’t give them their due. And, so, they did their share of biting, and they got bit back.

It’s the same with us; decent, sincere people that we are: in other words, decent, ordinary sinners. Nicodemus was also a decent, sincere man who was capable of seeing God at work in the world around him. He showed that he was capable of seeing God at work in Jesus, and he was capable of wanting to know more about it. And, so, it was quite a shock for him, as it is for us, to hear these words: “You must be born again.” (John 3:7)

Nicodemus was very wise to see and suggest that this wasn’t possible, because he really almost understood what Jesus meant. He knew that Jesus meant a completely new life; and he, himself, had probably tried being a new person a thousand times. It hadn’t worked. Nicodemus had only succeeded in appearances.

What Jesus expected seemed so impossible that Nicodemus couldn’t think of anything except to make a crude joke about it. “Shall I go find my old mother and climb inside her?”

The Greek word that’s often used in the New Testament for being born makes us see birth in a way that’s different from our normal way of seeing it. It’s related to the word for Genesis, as in the creation of the universe. Jesus told Nicodemus, and us, that we have to become a new creation.

What Jesus says must be done is something that’s impossible for us to do. It has nothing to do with the things we can do. It has nothing to do with starting a new chapter in your life, or turning over a new leaf. It has nothing to do with growing or evolving. It has nothing to do with stopping being yourself, or with finding yourself. It has nothing to do with a makeover. (Sometimes kids set out to recreate themselves, but that has nothing to do with being born again.) It has nothing to do with a new attitude, or a new discipline, or a new spirituality.

Back in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, there’s a picture of the Holy Spirit of God hovering over the shapeless creation. The shapelessness is described as “the waters” or “the deep”.

The “water and the spirit” are Jesus’ way of describing the new creation of a human being in the miracle of being born again. When he says, “Spirit gives birth to spirit,” he means that the new life is spirit-centered. He means that the new life is God-centered. Being born again means being recreated in the power, and the holiness, and the image of God, through the Holy Spirit.

When we are born again, we are no longer purely children of a perishing world. We are no longer living in perishing ways. Through Jesus, our perishing life has perished. We have come to an end of ourselves. In our heart, we are children of God who will not perish, and we will live in life-giving ways.

It’s very important to understand how God does this thing that’s impossible for us. We come back to John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

“He gave his only begotten son.” That’s the key. God gave his Son.

Jesus told Nicodemus that the Christ, the Son of God, would be like the snake on the pole that brought healing to those who saw him. Nicodemus knew the story well, but he had never thought of it, before, as relating to the Messiah.

He couldn’t imagine it at all; although, later on, he would see the real thing for himself. Nicodemus would stand at the foot of the cross looking up at Jesus, and he would help to take Jesus down from the cross, and bury him.

Crucifixion was considered to be a cursed death (especially by the Jews); because of its bloodiness, its ugliness, its monstrosity. It revealed the reality of evil and sin. It was like visible darkness.

Only the worst and the lowest people were crucified. Jesus came to identify himself with this world of evil and darkness. He allowed himself to be treated as if he were the worst, and as if he were the lowest, by taking it all upon himself. Jesus became the very picture of this wonderful, perishing world that is so loved by God.

Jesus’ plan was for this terrible and cursed death (this picture of the world at its worst) to bring us life, and to make us a part of a wonderful world. He died in place of us. He was like the snake on the pole. Those who looked at him would see their own sin. And they would see the faithful love of God. In seeing both, they would be healed, and they would live. They would do more than live. They would be reborn.

Having faith in what we see on the cross (having faith in who we see on the cross) is a self-emptying thing. We die to ourselves when we accept it as God’s gift to us. And the Holy Spirit gives us a new birth into a new life.

This is what believing is about. It means stepping into that different thing; that previously unknown thing; that new thing. You enter in.

Sometimes we feel the perishing life closing in on us, holding us like a tightening clamp; but God gives us everlasting life, life that never runs out, life that never ends. God gives us a life where the lights come on.

In that light, we can see the mess better much better than we could before (when we were blind in the darkness), and we can also see the disappearance of so much that we were afraid of. So, we come to the light.

This is not a thing that we can make happen. It truly, only, happens to us because God so loves us, and so loves the world to which we belong. When we know this, then we understand the kind of world we live in, and then we can understand our place and our job in such a world.

Our job is to join Jesus in bringing others with us, into this wonderful world. But we have to live in the presence of this wonderful world if we are to be any good to anyone else, if we are going to be any good for the world that God so loves.

We know that we live in a perishing world. But, most of all, we know that we live in a beloved world. Our world is made wonderful by the love of God. We can go on out into it; into God’s world, and live out the truth and the power of God’s love, and share it with others.

A New Kingdom - The Partnership Restored

Preached on Sunday, January 18, 2015

Scripture readings: Numbers 11:16-18, 24-30; Matthew 3:1-17

I must have been five years old, the first time my family went camping together. It was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. My sister Kathie would have been about three, and my sister Nanci was not going to be born for a few more years.

After that, we camped for a week or two almost every summer. We always slept in a tent, because my Dad said that it wasn’t really camping unless you slept in a tent.

We carried our water (for drinking, and cooking, and washing dishes, and washing ourselves) in buckets that we filled at a faucet in whatever campground we used. Carrying water became my job fairly early on.

The buckets were heavy. The handles pinched my little hands. I didn’t mind it much because we all had our jobs; much more than we did at home.

Photos taken at Desert Aire, WA, December 2014

I liked to help putting up the tent. My help was probably more trouble than it was worth, but it made me feel important and necessary. I was a collaborator. I was a kind of partner.

I believe the Bible teaches us that this is what we are created for: to be partners with each other and even partners with God.

The God who can do anything without any help at all created us and made us his partners. Adam and Eve were going to be partners in God’s creation by working the earth and caring for it. (Genesis 2:15)

Who knows how that partnership would have grown, if they had stayed committed to it? That partnership was part of God’s image in us.

In a mysterious way it is an image of our partnership with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We can see that in the story of Jesus’ baptism. The Son gets wet. The Spirit comes down. The Father praises his Son. God himself is a kind of partnership that we describe when we say that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) God is one, and God is togetherness.

In some strange way, in the original human sin, we tried to be God in the place of God, and so we broke the togetherness. We broke the partnership. The image of partnership was not completely destroyed, but it became dysfunctional. It stopped working right.

We see the dysfunction in the injuries we do to the earth in our original partnership made in the Garden of Eden, because of the separation that sin makes between us and God. I see our bad partnership in caring for the earth when I drive on the freeways through Los Angeles to visit my relatives down there.

We see the dysfunction of the partnership portion of our nature in all our human partnerships. We see it in marriages, in families, in communities, and in government.

We can even see it in the church, because we don’t stop being sinners when we start being God’s partners again. The church always has sin in it, but the love of God is stronger than our sins.

In the Old Testament, God shared himself, in the form of the Holy Spirit, to recreate a partnership with his people, even though they continued to be sinners. We see this in the people called prophets. Moses was given the gift of the Holy Spirit to help him be partners with God in order to bring God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and take them to the freedom of the Promised Land.

The story we read from the Book of Numbers shows us how Moses needed human partners in order to be a good partner with God. God shared Moses’ gift of the Holy Spirit with seventy other members of God’s people. There was some confusion in the way this happened and so Moses said, “I wish that all of the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.” (Numbers 11:29)

What God wanted to do, in order to make a new kingdom, was somehow guessed at (and wished for) by Moses. God would make a new kingdom, a new creation, by sharing his Holy Spirit with everyone who came to him, with everyone he called to himself. “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” (Joel 2:28; Isaiah 4:2-6)

John the Baptist was the last of the Old Testament prophet-partners of God. He was the bridge into the New Testament. He was a partner with God and he would serve as God’s partner by equipping God himself, who came into our world in Jesus.

John didn’t know what he was doing. He knew only that he didn’t deserve to do it. Yet God brought him into this world in order to do what none of us deserve to do; to be partners with God and partners of the kingdom of God. John was given the gift of helping make that kingdom happen and bring us to God, in Christ.

In Christ (in Jesus) the plan of God and the guess and the wish of Moses came true. All of God’s people became prophets. All of us who meet the Lord Jesus (who is God who has come into our world as a human being) receive the Holy Spirit. (See Joel 2:28)

As John the Baptist said, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” (Matthew 3:11) When the disciples received the Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, Peter explained it by referring to the word of the prophet Joel this way, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” (Acts 2:17-18) (God started the last days when he came to earth in Jesus, because he changed the way the world works. He changed the way he deals with sin.)

The Holy Spirit is the presence and the power of God. In the partnership of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit (who always work together) the Holy Spirit holds us in the presence of Jesus, the Son. The Spirit holds us in the presence of the Father. The Holy Spirit safely holds within us the presence of all that God is.

We become prophets: partners with God. We speak for him and work for him; His words and his work become real in our world through the growth and the change of our character, and our lives, and our service. The love of God who recreates us as his partners through the Holy Spirit, enables us to live and act and follow him in such a way that shows God’s love for the world and all the people in it.

At his baptism, Jesus said that righteousness was at work in the way that it happened: in the way that he made John do it. Righteousness means everything working right as it should. A righteous car will be all that it is specified to be, or (even better yet) all that you have souped it up to be.

For a human to be righteous means for that person to work right toward God, toward others, toward this world, and toward himself or herself. Righteousness means that our relationships with God, and with others, and with this world, and with our selves are wholesome, healthy, faithful, solid, and right. It means that all our partnerships are in working order. This would be a huge and welcome change in this world.

Jesus said that this strange partnership, in which a human baptizes God, is what the new creation is based on. It is based on God identifying himself with us. In Jesus, God bends his knee to us in love.

Our partnership is based on God taking on the role of being a creature like us, to offer himself as a human being to God. He did this in a way that we have all failed to achieve. In his baptism, he showed the humility, the repentance, the change of heart, and the new beginning that come so hard to us.

His baptism was part of great scheme to restore us to fellowship with God, with others, with our world, and with ourselves. On the cross he would pay the price of the consequences of the separation and the injury that come from sin in all our partnerships.

Sin takes us outside of God who is the source of all life. And so sin takes us into death. God came down in Jesus and identified himself with us on the cross. On the cross he took our separation on himself. He took our death on himself. He paid the price and took the consequences in order to give us a new birth into himself; into life.

He died for us. Then he rose from the dead to give us the life we could not achieve for ourselves. He gave us life as the man who conquered death because he identified with us.

In our baptism we have become identified with the one who identifies with us. Just as what we did became a part of him, so what he has done has become a part of us and he has given us life.

Just as he has given life to us, as the beginning of his plan to give life to the world, we are now part of that same plan to give life to the world. We are called to be his prophets, his collaborators, his co-conspirators: his partners.

The place where God puts us, and the people around us, are the mission fields of our partnership with God. We are called to help things work right. Just as God put others first, including us, so we are called to put others first. He identified with others and so must we.

The Lord’s Supper is a reminder of this, to keep us on track. Here is the place where all that he is and all that he has done feeds us and quenches our thirst. Here we receive Christ by faith and we go out carrying the bread of life within ourselves.

In a sense we become the bread of life for the world because that living bread is living in us. We carry the bread of life into a world that he loved so much that he identified himself with it.

We carry the bread of life into a world for which he poured out his blood. So, for us, in a sense, the whole world is our communion cup. Going out into the world is our way of being with him. As we serve Jesus, in this world, we see what he loved and died for and our thirst is satisfied.

This is a very different way of seeing the world. This is a very different way of living in this world. It only comes from joining a new partnership with God.

The Great Story - Wandering: Our Road to Life Is a Detour

Preached on Sunday, October 13, 2013

Scripture readings:  Numbers 13:1-2, 13:17-14:4; Deuteronomy 30:11-20

Around the Palouse River, September 2013

For many years when I was a kid, my family owned a 1957 Ford Ranch Wagon. It was a station wagon with an extra seat that could be folded up in the back. At first it was our only car.

When my mom learned to drive it became our second car. It became the car my dad drove to work.

When I got my driver’s license it became my car. By that time it shimmied a lot, if I drove it fast. So I didn’t drive very fast in those days. I make up for that now.

While the car was still good enough for adults to drive, it was our family outing car. When my Uncle Don and Aunt Joyce came over with our three cousins, we could squeeze all ten of us into that car. We would go for picnics and sight-seeing together, and we would sing while we drove.

  C                                                              G7
I love to go a-wandering along the mountain track
                     C                      G7                     C
And as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back
            C          G7         C         G7          C
Chorus: valderi, valdera, valderi, valder ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
         G7       C       F                  G7    C
valderi, valdera, my knapsack on my back.
(By Friedrich-Wilhelm Moller)

It’s a song about a happy person who hopes to wander until the day they die. “Oh may I always laugh and sing, beneath God’s clear blue sky.” It’s a happy song. It’s a song about the love of God’s creation, the love of people, and the love of life.

When my family sang this song we were in the same good spirits. We were loving life. We were lively. We were happy wanderers.

In our reading from Deuteronomy, God tells his people to choose life. “See, I set before you today life and good, death and evil (or life and prosperity, death and destruction).” “Now choose life.” (Deut. 30:15, 19)

He means life with God: life that leans on the covenant and the promises of God; a life of love with God. The truth is that the other kind of life is not truly life; not fully alive. To choose something other than a life of love with God is to choose death.

The danger that God’s people were in was that they were not happy wanderers. They had not truly chosen life.

Yet they were on the brink of entering the Promised Land. It was the land where they would have the freedom to live fully as the people who were faithfully loved by God. But they wanted something else.

They were loved by God, but they weren’t happy with God; at least not unless they could change him into the kind of God they wanted him to be. This is part of the reason why, all the way to the Promised Land, and all through their long detours, they were not happy wanderers.

The great story of the Bible is full of wanderers. Abraham and his family wandered around the edges of the Promised Land, but never really entered in to make it home. But they wandered the edges of home, as if they were spying through the windows of someone else’s house. They had been told that the house would belong to them, someday. They did their spying while they wandered with God, in faith and hope.

The evidence is that they were not always happy, but they always remembered that they belonged to the God who described himself as belonging to them. He was the God who was never ashamed to call himself “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”. When they were restless and unhappy it was only because they dearly wanted to see the promises of this God come true in their time.

The people of God who wandered through the desert with Moses were restless because they dearly wanted to go back to their lives as slaves. They didn’t want the freedom and the risk that comes through faith, and they wanted to be owed something by someone.

That is why they were attracted to idol worship. The gods represented by the idols were gods you could bargain with. They would owe you something if you gave them something.

The first time God’s people stood on the border of the Promised Land they got scared. The freedom of a land of faith was almost within sight. But God gave them no other way to enter that land except by the risk that seems to come with faith. They were too scared to choose faith and the life that comes with it.

The land itself was a covenant. It was a promise. They had to enter the promise as if it were a gift through faith, and not as the gift of something that was owed to them. They would have to choose to live their way into that land, and not just walk into it. They would have to choose life.

Instead they chose fear, and grumbling, and anger. They would prefer to choose the life of a slave: the fear of the lash, the grumbling under a task-master; and the anger of injustice and being forced to be, in some essential way, less than human, less than themselves, less than alive.

The only good thing about slavery was that it didn’t demand you to go forth and live. It didn’t require faith, or hope, or love.

The odd thing about human nature is that, according to the Bible, we went wrong, back in the beginning, when we wanted to be like God. We wanted to have the knowledge of good and evil so that we could choose our own standards and choose our own way in the world.

The wish to be a god doesn’t seem like the wish to be a slave, but the desire to be free from the need to have faith in another, or hope in another, or be bond in love to another is a kind of slavery. Doesn’t it ring true that being your own god is the same thing as idol worship? And they did worship idols when they were slaves in Egypt? (Joshua 24:13)

Running away from the choice of faith, hope and love based on another (the choice of commitment) is a way of running from life. It is a way of choosing death.

I think that the people who seem to wander away from God and from others (even when they seem to choose to live with an intense and ferocious freedom), are often simply reacting to something. They are reacting with a kind of fear, or grumbling, or anger at what they think that a relationship with God or with others might require of them.

I don’t understand wandering very well. I never rebelled against my parents, and so some people may be right when they see me as a perpetual pre-adolescent. I was never a rebel at all (although, for most of my adolescence, I tried to love Jesus at the same time that I wanted to not listen to what he wanted me to do with my life).

In the Bible, choosing life means choosing faith that works through love and loyalty. If we simply look at what happed to Israel, we see that fear and faith are enemies. Choosing to serve their fears instead of choosing faith and life required God’s people to take a detour. It required them to go back and learn forty years of hard lessons, and still not be very good at the life of faith. Fear was a real obstacle to entering into faith and life.

I am shy. I’m timid. Fear is a problem for me. I can see how fear has stood in the way of my choosing life. I merely lay that before you.

For Moses, the problem proved to be anger. In a story that we have not read this morning, God’s people were being led through a part of the desert where there was no water.

Even though God had taken care of them in thirsty places before, they were afraid, they were angry, and they grumbled. They said they wanted to go back to slavery.

God told Moses to take his walking staff, and speak to a big rock, in the name of God. He promised that the rock would open, and a spring would flow for the people and their livestock. Instead of talking to the rock, Moses got mad and said to his people, “Do you want me to give you water? I’ll give you water! Take that!” (Numbers 20:11) He struck the rock instead of speaking to it. God told him that, because of this, he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land.

This seems harsh. Moses had been angry many times. The truth is that he had always been angry for God’s sake (for the love of God). He had never taken the fear, and anger, and grumbling of his people personally; at least not out loud.

Suddenly, something in Moses snapped. He became angry for his own sake, not for God’s sake: not to honor God, not in faith. I think he must have been keeping this bottled up inside him for some time. Personal and loveless anger and a lack of faith often go together.

God meant to give his people the grace of water. Moses, in his anger, did not give them grace. Moses responded in a way that did not give his people life. So he did no choose life. He chose anger. He chose death.

Anger can stand in the way of life. It can stand in the way of our being what God wants us to be. It can stand in the way of doing what God wants us to do. It stands in the way of the promises of God, to us and to others.

I have known of people in the ministry who did not love their people. They harbored anger in their heart towards God’s people.

Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I try to find refuge from my anger in being willing to simply be confused and mystified. Better than that, I try to find refuge from anger in faith and love. I think, so far, I have succeeded.

Grumbling is the other thing we see so much of in the People of God who were with Moses in the wilderness. With fear and anger (and the people were often angry at Moses, as he was at them), grumbling was part of the cause for forty years of detouring from their arrival at life.

Grumbling is a form of self-brainwashing. It is a way of conditioning yourself and others. Grumbling is like never opening the curtains on your windows.

I like music set in a minor key. That music can be grand and strong and wild and fierce. It can also be sad. Sometimes I have to be careful about my choice of music. Grumbling is like listening to sad music all day long, day after day, and making others listen to it as well.

Grumbling is a subtle way of carrying your independence from God under the radar. It seems like a little thing. There is no drama to it. You can’t see that you are actually doing anything bad or wrong. No one can accuse you of anything directly.

Grumbling is just an absence of love. It’s an absence of hope. It’s an absence of faith.

It is the determination to not be happy. It is the determination not to be fully alive or to choose life.

It stops good things from happening to you and to others. It stops you from being what you could be, and from doing what you could do, for faith, for hope, for love; for God; for others.

God was never far from his people. They always could see his presence. God was never far from them, but they were far from him, in their attitudes, their thinking, their heart and will.

The surprise is that, when they didn’t want to go where God wanted them to go, and when they wanted to go back to slavery, God did a third thing. God led them by detour. Instead of going forward, God circled with them. He led them forward by leading them back.

God led them by delay. God led them by reversal. God, in his grace, may lead us away from life because of our fears, our angers, and our grumblings, but he is always ready to steer us back to life if we will let him; if only we will see what we have lost and surrender our fears and angers and grumblings to God, in faith.

The fact is that, when God’s people wandered, he kept wandering with them. This is in his nature, because God’s love is faithful. This is something that we can see. We can find him wandering with us in our wanderings. He quietly puts up with us over, and over again.

This is what our life in this world is about. Our world was made for life with God, and we vandalized the human heart so that it became our nature to shut God out. When we vandalized our heart, we also vandalized the world we live in. So God changed our world from being a main road to life into being a detour to life.

The history of the world, ever since the human race became a rebel race, is all about God winning us back by coming to wander with us, and living in us by grace. The whole history of the world, as we know it, has been one long, horrific detour on the road to life.

When I am taking a detour, it isn’t strange for me to wonder whether I am really on the right road. I wonder if one of the signs is missing, or if I have missed one of them by mistake. We need to know that this is the way of a faithful God, to make our life in this world a detour that we can take with him.

This detour is the road where we must learn to choose faith, or not. This detour is the road on which we learn to choose life or death.

This is what God showed us, when he came down from heaven to show us his face in Jesus. He took the same detour as the whole human race. He became a wanderer in Jesus, even more than when he wandered with Moses and Israel in the desert.

Jesus said this about himself. “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20)

In the end the only places where God, in Jesus, could lay his head were a cross where he was willing to be the sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the world, and that niche inside a stone tomb where he let sin and death do all they could. He laid his head where all human wandering would lead us, if not for him.

Then he got up again. He got out. Even though he sits on the throne of heaven, he also continues to wander with us, through the power of his Holy Spirit. He lay down his head in the midst of our sin and separation from God, where we were so determined to shut him out, so that he could get in and stay with us wherever we may go.

Where does Jesus want you to go? If you stopped choosing fear, where would he lead you? If you stopped choosing anger, how might he change you? If you stopped choosing grumbling what would he give you to do?

I have obstacles that stand in the way of my choosing life, even when I live with a crucified and risen savior. So do you. Maybe we have these obstacles in us as a church: fear, anger, and grumbling. Maybe we all share fears, angers, and grumblings that blind us to what we could do together, if we were willing to choose life by choosing faith, and hope, and love.

We need to repent and surrender to the life that only God can give us in Jesus. Only through what God has done in Jesus can we be free from our obstacles to life.

Then we can become the happy wanders; full of life. Then we can wander with a purpose, until God leads us home.