The Battle Primeval - The Prize for Veterans, Scarred and Schooled

Preached on the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day, 11-11-1918-- Veterans Day, Sunday 11-11-2018

Scripture readings: 2 Samuel 1:17-27; Philippians 2:19-30; Luke 22:24-38

I’ve loved dictionaries since I learned how to read. That makes me a genuine dictionary veteran. My big old dictionary tells me that the word veteran comes from the Latin word “vetus”; which means old. The ancient meaning of veteran is old.

Various Veterans (Pre., During, and Post.)
Members of their families

Yes, I am a dictionary veteran.

OK, I’m on a roll here. My big, old dictionary tells me that a veteran has: “Grown old in service having served for a long period; experience through long service or practice; “as veteran politician”; as “veteran toper” (look it up); … especially of soldiers, having had long service, or much experience in warfare.” “One who has seen long service in any occupation”; …or “field”.

(adapted from “The New Century Dictionary” c. 1927—1940)

Since “veteran politician” is part of the mix, we can see that even though you may be a veteran, that may not always be a good thing. But I’ve always seen it as a good thing.

For me, and for all the kids my age, the word veteran meant our dads, and sometimes our grandpas. For us, when we played war, it was usually World War II, and that was part of our looking up to our dads and wanting to be like them, because they participated, in some way, in World War II.

Even when our dads weren’t always such good dads, being sons, we still wanted to be like them. So being a veteran was always a good thing. It meant quality.

It meant skill, ability, knowledge, discipline, confidence, strength, responsibility, taking care of others, and putting others first. We saw our own personal veterans taking care of their us and teaching us the stuff we needed to know.

Maybe military veterans think that the meaning and result of being a veteran is different from this. Their kids don’t.

When I got older, I was a Republican in college and so, maybe, I was strange in yet another way; but the veterans I knew in college, and in seminary, were the grownups whom the rest of us only pretended to be.

When I was a kid, the most fun veteran I knew was my cousin Larry Oliszewski, who was an officer in the Coast Guard. He treated me like a younger brother and taught me some exciting things about electronics that I’ve forgotten since.

Or else the most fun veteran I knew was my Uncle Eddie Stoll who showed me what fun it was to use your brain to see things the way no one else can see. He could read Dr. Seuss to my little sister and make up verses off the top of his head that were as funny as anything in the book.

My sister knew those stories by heart. She knew what Uncle Eddie was doing and it gave her a fit because she had such a hard time not laughing at the way he was ruining her story. I wanted to play tricks with my brain.

In seminary, there was Tim McClain, or army captain Timothy McClain. He left the service in order to prepare for the ministry. Captain Tim, we sometimes called him, had the greatest sense of humor. He also had a different perspective. Again, he was just more mature than most of us. He had a better sense of what mattered. He had a better sense than we did of what other people would need from us if we were serious about our calling to be pastors.

Another veteran was the youth group leader in my home church. When I was eighteen, I started going back to church again after some absence. Navy Veteran Larry Jenkins taught us to understand the Bible just by asking us questions.

I think he was in the Navy for six years, so he wasn’t that much older than us. He knew how to teach younger people and make them like it. He shared his skills, and taught us to love the Bible and see it as our friend.

Larry became my friend. He was already in college. When I started college, Larry wasn’t a classmate of mine because he was studying computer science. I wanted nothing to do with computers. He was my friend, and he helped me get my driver’s license at last: which is another story.

Years later, I was an interim (temporary) pastor in a church near a naval air station. About a fourth of our congregation was from the Navy: people who lived off base. It was 1988, and the church was having its centennial. As interim pastor, it wasn’t even sure that I would be there for the centennial.

The church leaders worried that the church was too much in flux to organize such an important event. They had some doubts. Would the Navy families even be interested in our centennial, let alone help the rest of us?

The Navy people, the men and their wives and their kids, picked right up on it. They used their veterans’ skills of organization. They were driven by their dedication to the American heritage, which they were sworn to defend, to love our farm town. Their skill in team work showed us that they identified with us, and they taught us to identify better with them. The Navy helped the love within our congregation to grow. Isn’t that what veterans do?

What they had, as veterans, seemed to me, in some way, transferable to the rest of us, if we paid attention to them. We could learn better from veterans to be better veterans of life, of Jesus, and of the church of Jesus.

Jesus didn’t talk much about soldiers, but Jesus found Roman soldiers to be people of great potential faith, especially the key officers called the centurions, who held commands of about a hundred soldiers. A Centurion’s long veteran experience allowed them to look inside you: see you for what you are.

They saw Jesus for who he is. So, they had absolute faith in him when they saw through him.

Jesus is our Lord. He created us. He has the ultimate ability to look through us and to know us for what we are. He sees our weakness and our sins, but he also sees our enormous need as no one else can. Veteran Jesus can see that we are his children: worth dying for.

Our veterans sometimes have a greater ability to look into people, in times of peace and conflict, and size us up. If we study them, and our veteran Jesus, then we will look into people, to know their weaknesses, but also see their great need. We will see children of Jesus, worth dying for.

King Saul was a warrior for many years. This made him a veteran. He was also the king, and so he was commander-in-chief.

Prince Jonathan, heir to the throne was a warrior and a veteran, as well as a prince. Being a veteran helped him protect David from his father, the King.

Grown-up shepherd boy David was a warrior, a veteran, a valued, trusted officer, and the victim of Saul’s insane hatred and many murder attempts. Saul tried to kill David; yet David always showed his respect for Saul, as his commanding officer, even though his commanding officer wanted him dead.

When Saul and Jonathan died together in battle, David spontaneously burst into a song of praise and grief. David celebrated Saul and Jonathan, both, equally, as heroes and friends. As fellow veterans, they still shared a bond that none of them ever forgot.

It was such an unlikely bond of love, but it was real. It would be impossible to even believe in such a bond, unless we shared some part of one of the great commitments which they shared. This bond was their commitment of their lives to the service of the Lord and his people.

We can’t share all their battles. We can’t share all the battles of the military veterans we know. As a body of the followers of Jesus, gathered together, we can share the battles of being a team, a single family, a single unit, wherever we come from, however different our private histories may be.

A veteran named Joe Engel told me, a few days ago, about this instant bond that one veteran has with fellow veterans as instantly as the bond is known.

The apostle Paul never served in the Roman military. But he was a veteran servant of Jesus. Because of this, Paul felt perfectly at home calling other Christians his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t because they were in the military. This was because they were all becoming veteran servants of Jesus.

Being veterans was only part of it. Paul also felt at home calling them sons, brothers, and sisters. He could even be the father of his brothers and sisters and his fellow servants. It was all one for Paul. This is a gift we might see in some military veterans better than we can see it in ourselves: this band of brothers.

Veterans may fight each other, as my dad did and went to the brig for it. Veterans also know their calling to fight for each other, for life and death.

Christians sometimes find it easier to fight each other, than to fight for each other. We need to fight for each other’s faith, and well-being, and healing, and wisdom, and strength. Military veterans know the secret, among themselves, of what we should know from Jesus.

Jesus is the great veteran of our wars. He is the greatest veteran in the battle for the lives and souls of us and everyone we know. Jesus gave his life in this battle. He gave himself so fully that he rose from death. He mortally wounded death in the process.

We can learn from veteran Jesus how to die for him, and for each other. We can learn from Jesus to die to ourselves, and get so connected with Jesus, that we also rise new, every day. Our dying is done with Jesus, and so we rise with him.

Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, predicted that Peter and the others would think that they couldn’t help Jesus unless that had swords, and money, and used them for the success of the cause. To their shame, they found, in the garden of Gethsemane, and on the mount of crucifixion, that Jesus’ weapons are never swords, or money, or any power of this world.

Jesus reminded them that they (and we) are always taken care of in God’s own way. They learned, from Jesus, that the greatest weapon of all is the cross. Our best weapons are the love both of his cross and our own: the cross of our love for him and others.

Veterans know that their greatest gift, and their greatest weapon of war and defense, is themselves. That’s not far from understanding the cross of Jesus.

I think that you become a Veteran when you devote yourself to a cause that is not just a little bit higher than yourself. It’s a life cause. It’s indescribably greater than yourself, and the cause is part of the age-long battle for God’s love to re-win and to remake the world.

There is something in us, and in this world around us, that does not serve God’s cause. We call this sidetracking of God’s service sin.

Our battle comes from this. The battle clearly has casualties. It leaves unhealed wounds. It leaves scars, and changes lives, and gives wisdom, and insight, and strength, and comradeship.

Joining in this battle together, and with Jesus, is a calling to give ourselves to a better world coming. That future world is of the kingdom and the family of God: the very thing for which each one of us was specially, personally designed and created.

Paul's Prayers - Quest for the Best

Preached on Sunday, January 29 2018

Scripture readings: Proverbs 11:30; Philippians 1:9-11

Paul says, “This is my prayer.”

And then, of course, we find that it’s not a prayer. It’s an explanation of prayer. Paul is telling his friends in Philippi what he asks for when he prays for them.

The gist of this is that Paul is telling them, in a polite, and loving, and teacherly way, what they ought to be asking for when they pray for themselves, and for each other, and for their neighbors. Instead of asking this church of his to share their prayer requests with him, so that he can pray for them properly, Paul’s telling them what their prayer requests ought to be.

They’re pretty basic prayers, and everyone who knows us would live a much happier life if we were asking for these things for ourselves. At the same time, everyone who knows us might be royally offended if they thought we were praying these things for them.

“Dear God, make that other church more loving. Lord, please make my children smarter than they are. And, while you’re about it, please make my wife smarter, too, but not too smart for me.”

You see how basic these prayers are. Now the Christians in Philippi knew how Paul always wanted them to get better and better. Read the letter (it’s quite short). It really is one of the most tender, confident, and loving of all his letters. Paul knew that, even now, they were loving, and they were wise, and they were off to a very good start.

Just keep on track. That’s what Paul said. They knew that Paul loved them, and he could say anything to them and get away with it.

Lord, make me more loving. Lord, make me smarter than I am. Lord, make me smarter in a more loving way. There’s the core of that prayer. Make me smarter, make me wiser, in a more and more loving way. Nothing less will do.

There’s no more important way to be smart or wise than to be smart and wise in the ways of love. If you’re wise without love, then you’re nothing better than a wise guy… or a wise gal.

Intelligence without love, according to Paul, can never discern what is best. It’s the knowledge and wisdom that come from a more and more abounding love (think, here, of love like water; overflowing; love that’s much too overflowing to hold it in; wild and joyful love that wants to hug everyone) … only such a love can discern and choose what is best.

It’s the love that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. We really can only grasp who God is, and what kind of love God is calling us to, by watching and listening to Jesus. (John 1:18)

We know who God is through Jesus, because Jesus broke down the barriers that our pride, and selfishness, and sin have built. He has broken down the high walls that have blinded us and hidden God from us. We, most of all, know who God is through Jesus, because (as Jesus said): “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

There are some people who will say that Jesus is God-like, but I think it’s better to say that God is Jesus-like. The Father is like the Son. When “the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” is active and strong in us, it will lead others to glorify and praise God, because they have seen Christ in us and, through Christ in us, they have seen God, well ahead of the day of his coming.

In another letter, Paul says this about God showing the nature of his love for us: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:18)

One of the fruits of righteousness is love: the deepest love is like the love that hangs for us upon the cross. The love and the wood of that bloody cross, that brought Jesus to his death, is our tree of life that gives us life. The fruit of righteousness on the cross is self-giving love.

We are to love our neighbors as ourselves, or love our neighbors and ourselves, because we are all made in the image of God, and we are all made for the purpose of becoming children of God. We become the children of God because God is in Christ, reconciling us, and reconciling the world to himself, through Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

So, we are unable to discern and choose what’s best, or what’s excellent, unless we love like Jesus loves. We can’t work for what’s best in others, and we can’t work for what is best for our families, and we can’t work for what is best for ourselves, unless we love everything and everyone with the love of Jesus on the cross.

The knowledge of what’s excellent is not a love of success, or quality, or simplicity, or comfort. Excellence is dying and rising from the dead for others.

Paul will go on, in Philippians, to say that his own being in prison is for the best, and he’ll explain why. His imprisonment will tell how much more important the freedom and the grace of Jesus is than so many other things that this world counts as important, or influential, or powerful, or successful. His imprisonment will give his brothers and sisters in Christ the courage to live openly as Christians in a world where such faith seems foolish, and childish, and dangerous.

Our Proverb (11:30) says: “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life and he who wins souls is wise.” If you show a life from Christ, and speak for Christ in a way that truly shows and speaks the love of God in Christ, you just may win souls. You may win the wandering children of God. Jesus may be seen and heard in you, and others will learn to love Jesus through your demonstration of that love of God.

If you read around this prayer, you will find other fruit; like joy, and courage, and goodwill. And bearing fruit also means to be pure and blameless.

Pure means that we are to be transparent, like pure glass. It means to be one thing through and through. It means to be full of loyalty, and truth, and sincerity.

To be blameless, means to not be the one who divides people, or wounds them, or offends them. To be blameless, means to not be a contributor to the harm that goes on in this world. It means to not be one of those who bear the blame. To be blameless also means to not be one of those who are shuffling their feet on the sidelines, because we’re too clean to get involved. To be blameless means to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

“The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life.” A tree is always much bigger than its fruit. Our fruit of righteousness is much bigger than we are. We need to remember that. Our love, our joy, our courage, our goodwill, our ability to become partners with others seem very hard. They seem much too big for us to bear. For the fruit we bear is much bigger than we are. We are to bear the fruit of Jesus. That is how our fruit becomes a tree.

What goes out from us to just one other person beside ourselves, can become a tree growing up from them to shelter, and strengthen, and fill more and more people, until the Day of Jesus comes. True, self-giving love loves to be able to love other people into their joyful place, beside us, in that good day.

True righteousness is fruit. It is the sheltering tree. Fruit turning into more and more fruitful trees, which bear more and more fruit, is what the righteousness of Christ was made for. It’s what you are made for. It’s what everyone in this world was made for.

No one is smart enough for this. Sometimes we don’t know if even our love is sufficient for choosing what is truly the best.

The faith that comes from seeing, in Christ, who God truly is… that faith will trust this God until the day of Christ comes. The Day of Christ is the day for seeing Christ’s ability to bear fruit through us.

Jesus gives us the wisdom that comes from love, and that wisdom from love is the gift that is wise enough to choose the best way for us all to get there. 

Living and Dying, Earth and Heaven

Preached on Sunday, May 7, 2017

  

Scripture readings: Psalm 73:21-26; Philippians 1:19-30

“How many of you want to go to heaven?”

An old-time preacher asked the question, “How many of you want to go to heaven?” And everyone raised their hands, except one child. The preacher asked the child, “What about you? Don’t you want to go to heaven?” And the child said, “Yes I do; only I thought you were trying to get together a load to go right now.”

The Heavens
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
March 2017

Paul wrote a strange, radical thing to his friends in Philippi, in the north of Greece:

“For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (1:21)

Paul was living the life of a prisoner. He was chained up in a stinking, underground dungeon. The remains of this dungeon can still be seen today. He was being held for trial before the emperor’s court, in Rome. He was on trial for his life. 

Being on trial for his life was a very familiar experience for Paul, except for the part about the emperor. That part was exciting. But Nero was the emperor now, and Nero had started to persecute Christians as dangerous conspirators, the enemies of humanity and enemies of the order of the empire.

There had been a great fire in the city of Rome. Some citizens blamed Nero who had been making plans to redevelop the city.

Nero needed someone else to blame, so he blamed the Christians, and he had many of them tortured and killed. And once he had painted them as the real enemy, if he didn’t want to look dishonest, he had to keep it up.

Things did not look good for Paul. It was a serious time to settle the mind, to keep focused on what was truly important. But the question was: was it time for Paul pray for inner peace and strength, or else should he prepare to let it all go, and focus on heaven?

Or else, should Paul pray for a dismissal, or an acquittal in court? 

And should he pray about his old missionary plans? Should his goal be traveling west to Spain; or back east again to visit the churches he had started in Greece, and beyond? What should he want?

Paul’s friends wanted him to live. They wanted him around.

But what did Paul want? Certainly he wanted to be around. But should he want this? Should he be ready to die, or ready to live? And what does it mean to die? And what does it mean to live?

Paul tells us what he believes, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Now this is sort of like saying, “To live is great, and to die is even greater.”  If we found ourselves in Paul’s situation, it would be understandable if we considered our life to be over and hopeless. But, for Paul, sitting in the stink of one of Rome’s worst jails, waiting to have his case heard by an emperor who was politically motivated to torture and kill him... for Paul, in that time and place (even there) to live was Christ. 

When he says that “to die is gain” he doesn’t mean “There is nothing left for me here.” There is more to it than meets the eye. Even here, in this prison, in the shadow of death, life is Christ.

I once heard a professional mountain climber being interviewed. This man was well on his way to his goal of climbing the fourteen highest mountains on the earth, and doing it without any bottled oxygen. We are talking about heights of twenty-eight thousand feet, and more. Up there, the air is so thin that the muscles and the brain begin to starve, for the lack of oxygen. The muscles are depleted. The brain loses judgment, and a clear sense of time and direction. Up there, the exhaustion and cold are torture.

Climbing each mountain takes months of training, and preparation, and attack. By the time of his interview, this climber had conquered nine of the fourteen mountains. He loved doing this! For him to live was mountain-climbing.

Paul was a spiritual mountain climber. And he was facing the tallest mountain of his life. And he said, “For me, to live is Christ.”

I want to list for you a few of the parts of Paul’s life that were NOT what he meant when he said “to live is Christ”. Here are some things that Paul, as a follower of Jesus, could point to and say, “To live is a great thing.” Yet these are not the same as saying, “To live is Christ.”

Here is the Christian life as a great thing. For a follower of Jesus, having sisters and brothers in Christ is one of the things that make living great. There are people you belong to, and they belong to you. But this sense of belonging doesn’t happen only because you share a common cause, or because you’ve spent time together, or even because they may be your very own flesh and blood. There is a sense of belonging that can include all that, but it’s much more than that.

There’s a sense of belonging that comes from knowing the fact that we don’t own each other. The greatest sense of belonging comes from knowing that we are given to each other by God. Actually, everyone we know, everyone we meet, is God’s gift.

The most normal thing in the world, when you think of your brothers and sisters in Christ… the most normal thing in the world is to give thanks. In every letter but one (Galatians), Paul starts out by giving thanks for the people to whom he is writing; even when they are driving him crazy with their backsliding, and their immaturity, and their conflicts.

When Paul says that he hopes to remain with them, and he says, “I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you,” the word translated as continue is really a side-by-side-continuing. “I will stay, and I will stay beside you, with all of you.” This staying side-by-side with people who are given to you by God, and made a part of you by God, is a part of following Jesus. It is something that makes following Jesus a great thing.

Other things that make following Jesus great are these: standing for the truth, being witnesses of good news in a world that is crying out for good news. There is having a God-given purpose in life. There is standing for compassion and mercy. There is being prayed for by others, and praying for them. There is being a servant. There is the help of the Holy Spirit, or the supply of the Spirit. This comes when the Lord renews your strength, or gives you insight into life and shows you the way. To live (following Jesus) is great.

But Paul says... “For me, to live is Christ...” This is something more.

Partly, this is a matter of what is important to you. For instance, you might say: “Farming is my life”, or “Education is my life”, “My work is my life”.

You might say: “Success is my life.” You might say, “Survival is my life”. Or you might say: “My family is my life”. Or you might say: “My happiness, my comfort, is my life”. These are answers to the question: What is the most important thing for you? And then you could say: “Christ is my life”. That brings us closer to what Paul is saying.

Now what if you are like me, and you have a lot of different things are important to you? What if there was a conflict between your work and your family, and both were in competition for the center of your life? What if your work was not good for your family life; or your spouse and children hated the work you did? That happens to people working in the ministry.

The Bible doesn’t really say that one kind of work is more holy than another. It just says to work, if you can, and to do honest work.

The Bible says to work so that you can eat. It says to work so that you can have something to give. Otherwise you’re free. You have lots of options; unless God gives you only one.

And then the Bible says to be a good husband or wife. Be a good parent. Sons and daughters: be good to your parents by obeying them. These are not options. Here we are not free. Surely your family life is more important than the work you do. And if they are more important than your work, then they will motivate how you relate to whatever work you do; so you do the right work, in the right way.

If Christ is your life, then Christ will win in any competition with any other part of your life. But Christ will also motivate you in every other part of your life. Christ will motivate you as a worker, and Christ will talk to you about the kind of work he calls you to do, and he will make your special calling become a way of following him in holiness; in the Lord’s unique purpose for you.

If Christ is your life, then the Lord will make your relationships with your family into ministries. Your spouse, your parents, your children will all be holy ground for you. If Christ is your life, then even your relationships with strangers will turn into ministries. Christ will give you your priorities, and he will show you where to sit tight, and when to hang loose.

But you can say “Christ is my life” and still not understand what it means to say, “For me, to live is Christ.”  You can say “Christ is my life” and be only a slave in the way you live for Christ. You can be a drudge for Christ.

To say, “For me, to live is Christ” is more like being in love, which is wonderful, and scary, and joyful, and challenging, and frustrating, and exciting, and confusing, and fulfilling, all at the same time.

The word atonement, in the Bible, which refers to something that brings people together with God, and brings peace with God, means the action of making them “at one”. Atonement means “at-one-ment”. There (in “at-one-ment”) to live is Christ.

It’s like marriage, where two become as one. In love, there is passion and the desire to be together all the time, and even if that seems to cool down, there are always thoughts like: “She would love to see this.” or “This is something he wouldn’t like.” To say, “For me, to live is Christ” means “He is my reason for living. And he is not only my reason for living; he is the very source of my life. He is the love of my life. He is my joy and my peace.”

“For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” I think this means something like, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is to gain more of Christ.” Paul surely says this very thing when he writes: “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far...” (Philippians 1:23)

But better than what? Better than being of use to his friends and family in Christ? Paul loved being useful.

Heaven will bring us the pure enjoyment of love and thanks in a way that is separate from usefulness. This is very strange. When Paul talks about staying, he talks about his presence with his people being necessary, and then he talks about leaving that behind.

Going on to be with the Lord will be something different from usefulness. It will be the end of being of use, and of being necessary. Or it will be a graduation to something better. Perhaps there is something more wonderful than being of use, and much better than being necessary.

I do believe that there may be some kind of joyful work or service to do in the everlasting life, after we depart to be with the Lord. It’s possible. But we will not do it because we are indispensable, or even merely useful. We will not be loved for what we do; we will do because we are loved, and because we love.

If we want to know anything about the Lord, we have to know that the whole message of the good news of Jesus Christ is that he did something for us that we could not do for ourselves. Until we get that, we don’t get anything. And here we fret and we think that our life has no purpose if we cannot do things for others, or even for ourselves. 

But that isn’t true. We have a purpose because God made us, because God loves us, even when we are helpless and useless. This is the truth. But it is very, very hard to grasp.

A new born baby has a purpose in life. An unborn baby has a purpose. A flower in a vase has a purpose. A hug and a kiss have a purpose. The clasp of a hand has a purpose. A song has a purpose.  A sunset has a purpose. None of these things are of any material, practical use to us at all. But they are priceless: absolutely priceless. 

Craig Barnes was a young pastor when he faced a long and difficult battle with cancer, and the treatments left him too sick to be of any use to his congregation, or his wife, or his children, and he didn’t know if he would ever recover. This made him feel completely helpless and hopeless. Then, one day, he felt that the Lord was telling him this: “You are too important to be necessary. You deserve to be loved.”

Part of heaven will be the experience of this love. “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” To die is to gain more of Christ.

Often the Bible compares death to sleep. The body stops, and takes a long, long rest.  Other times the Bible talks about death as moving away from our bodies and this world, into the presence of the Lord. “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory.” 

“I desire to depart and be with Christ.”

The word that’s translated as “depart” tells us what it means to die. The word could be used a number of different ways. It literally means the loosening or the untying of something. It’s the word people said when they struck camp; when they loosened the ropes and the stakes on their tents, to pack them up and move on.

When I was a kid, we went camping every summer, and it was one of the great rituals, setting up the tent. And it was just as important a ritual to take it down exactly right, so it would go up exactly right, next time. And when we struck camp for the last time, then it was time to go home.

The word “depart” means loosening, and untying of the moorings of a boat, so that it can launch out.

In one of the churches I served, we went for an annual rafting and kayaking trip every summer. On these trips, we had this great ceremony in the mornings, when the rafts were packed and ready, and everyone was in their places, we said a prayer, the knots were untied, and we pushed off down the river.

The word we translate as depart also means, of all things, unraveling a problem, it means finding the solution. There’s a time and a place where all the hurts are healed and all the questions are answered. Those who wait till the end will understand.

There’s a phrase from an old prayer that goes like this: Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are ended, enable us to die as those who are ready to go forth and live, so that whether we live or die our LIFE may be in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.

Paul said, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Earth is for life. Heaven is for life. Living is for life. Even dying is for life. In Christ, it is like being in love.

This is what Paul believed. This is what the Bible teaches. This is what we believe.

Anchors for the Storm - Faith Alone (2nd Edition)

Preached on Sunday, September 14, 2014

Scripture readings: Genesis 15:1-6; Philippians 3:1-11; John 6:25-51

A faithful home above Vantage, WA:
September, 2014

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I drive too fast (actually more than sometimes). I never drive faster than it is safe to drive (well, almost never).

But I am a lawbreaker. I make excuses about it. Some people think it’s funny, and they tease me about it. But it’s true. And it is perhaps much truer than I realize that I shouldn’t even be talking about it from the pulpit without true repentance and the desire to change. I am sharing this because it is the very least of so many ways I am a puzzle to myself.

In this little puzzle to my life, what if I were to claim that my speeding wasn’t so bad because I make up for it by the fact that, when I am stopped by an officer of the law, I always know that I am guilty, and that it is my fault, and that I deserve a ticket.

I never pretend otherwise. I avoid making excuses. I never get mad at the officer. I do get mad, but my anger is aimed at my self.

My other claim to virtue is that I never plead for mercy on the basis that I am a minister. I never tell the officer that I am a minister. For one thing, I don’t believe that this would work, and I don’t believe it ought to work. So I don’t. And yet I really am a puzzle to my self.

This puzzle brings me to a Christian word. It’s a Bible word. That word is righteousness.

Righteous is a funny word, in the sense that we don’t use it much outside of church: except as slang. Isn’t it still used to say something like, “That car is righteous,” or “That dude is a righteous dude”?

I believe that this righteous slang word gets it right. This is what righteousness is all about. A righteous car is a car that does everything that a great well-maintained car ought to do.

I’m not going to comment on the word “dude”. But a righteous dude should be what a great human ought to be. In the world as it is, the slang righteousness is the only thing that saves righteousness from sounding like self-righteousness.

Righteousness is not weirdness, or what we call being “goody-goody”. It’s about being solid and real in the best way. You could expect fairness, and integrity, and truth, and compassion. You could expect the ability to look, and listen, and think things through, and to see them through, and not to quit. You could expect some degree of fearlessness. That would make a righteous dude or a righteous dudette.

The funny thing about being truly righteous is: who can measure up to it? I mean, we want to think of ourselves this way. Some people totally pull the wool over their own eyes about this, and those are the ones who aren’t fooling anyone but themselves: not for long.

We try to make excuses, to find reasons (and there are some). We try to justify ourselves.  We have our good qualities. But we are not righteous; not really.

The world is the same way. There are fear-mongers and hate-mongers and anger-mongers out there. And there are real things to fear, and to hate, and to be angry about. There are horrible things in this world: terrible things.

But there is also beauty, and love, and tenderness, and innocence, and faithfulness as well. There are people who love truth, and justice, and goodness; and these people stand up for the righteous things and fight for them.

The world is beautiful, and wonderful, and righteous. The world is horrible, and deadly. It is all of that; and so are we.

The Bible tells us that this world was made to reflect the glory of God, and so were human beings. The whole human order of things in this world, with marriage and family, and with friendship and community, was created to reflect the glory and beauty of God: to be righteous.

But it is also a fallen world. We all belong to that fallen world. We are made for the glory of God and we all fall short of it.

Some people will say that the world and its human inhabitants are a mixture of light and darkness, and they will advise us to try to live within the light. But there is nothing very grand, or bold, or victorious about this.

But we believe a grand, and bold, and victorious thing. We believe that there is a righteousness from God; a righteousness that has come into the world from the outside.

It has come into a fallen world in order to make a new world possible; to make new lives possible. This righteousness has come into the lives of some of the people in this world, and it can come into us. It is “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” (Philippians 3:9)

The righteousness that comes from God and is by faith (this righteousness that God wants to give to the whole creation) is something God started in a single family; the family of a desert nomad named Abram (or Abraham). Earlier in Abram’s story, the Lord spoke to him and said: I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing…and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

The challenge and the difficulty of this promise was that Abram and his wife Sarah were old and childless. Yet the promise was based on a child that they were supposed to create between them.

They were in their seventies when God first made his promise to them. The years passed. The promise was renewed over and over again, and nothing, nothing, nothing at all happened.

Every time the promise was repeated they thought about that promise and they wished that it would come true. Every time the promise was repeated, guess what they must have done in the privacy of their tent. Guess what they must (at least) have tried to do. And nothing, nothing at all happened: nothing.

Then, in the verses we read from Genesis, God does it again. After years of making this promise, God repeats the promise again, and (even at this point) there are still years to go when nothing, nothing at all, will happen.

But one very strange thing does happen. This time we are told that Abram believed God. This was a very strange thing. It was a miracle. Here is how the Bible puts it: “Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6) The Lord made faith to count as if it were righteous.

If being righteous required you to do what it took to be all that God intended you to be, then Abram and Sarah had a requirement that they had to live by. There was a law from God that ruled them. It gave them something they had to do together over, and over, and over again to make it happen, and it didn’t work. No matter how they tried, they could not be what God’s promise had promised them they would be.

They obeyed that law over and over, in the privacy of their tent; but something much more radical was essential.

The surprising and radical thing that God wanted was faith. Faith was essential before they could become what God wanted them to be. Faith was like the hinge on a door that enables that door to swing open. (John Calvin “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, 3.11.1)

Some people, even some Christians, seem to think that faith is something you do as part of a bargain to get God to do something for you, or that faith is something you give to God so that God can give you something in return: like the thing we call salvation, or like the things we call the answers to our prayers, or like the things we want that have to do with success, and peace, and plenty, and happiness.

Faith has very little to do with anything we want. It has everything to do with what God wants. Real faith only wants what God wants. That’s why God will give anything to those who only want what God wants.

But even saying that does not go far enough. Faith has everything to do with who God is and who God promises to be for us. When you are in the middle of a storm in life; when you are struggling under the weight of worry, or fear, or anger, or failure, or pain, or loss, and your stomach hurts, and your heart palpitates, and you can’t sleep at night because of the anguish you feel, faith has everything to do with who God is, and who God promises that he will be for you, in the time to come.

Faith is like a fire within that does not light itself. Faith is the gift of fire that comes from seeing the love of God and the new life that is promised by God’s love. Faith is God’s gift of fire to a life without a spark. It is not your gift to God. It is God’s gift to you.

Paul says it in Ephesians 2:8. “For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

The fire of faith gives you light to see what you cannot see without it. It gives you warmth to thaw you out; so that the mind of faith can think, so that the heart of faith can love, so that the feet of faith may take you where God wants you to go, so that the hands of faith enable you to do whatever the work is that God wants you to do. Faith makes you alive so God can give life to others through you.

You can guard that fire of faith and feed it; but not light it. As long as it burns it will never cease to do the work that a living faith does. It will make you grow in its warmth. It will help others grow. It will give to others in their great need. It will do what is good, and helpful, and useful. It will be a force for good in the world around you.

Faith is always based not on who you are or on what you can do; but based on who God is, and what God does. And we meet God in Christ. We see who God is and what God does in Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus doesn’t call this gift “fire” but he calls it food. What God does through Christ is the food that the Father and the Son give to all who come to him, and we come to him by believing. We come to him by faith.

This is why he says. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” And Jesus says, “Don’t work for the food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of Man (he means himself) will give you.” (John 6:27-29) And he says, “I am the bread of life.” (6:35)

Working for the food that spoils means doing what you think will make you all that you can be. But believing that Jesus is the bread of life is completely different.

Believing means having faith. It means trusting in God as he is (as we meet him in Jesus). It means trusting the cross and trusting the resurrection.

This is the work that is not work. This is the work that abandons itself and trusts in God’s work. Faith is not your gift to God but your journey out of yourself and into the gift of what God is, and into the life that God can give you.

Faith is based on God, knowing God as he is. What we know about God is what we see in Christ, in his life, his death, and his resurrection. We know God by seeing his sacrifice for our sins on the cross. We know God by seeing his power to defeat sin, and death, and hell.

Paul speaks of this in Philippians. He says, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:8-11)

The Jews worked to prove their status as God’s people by keeping the Old Testament law (the Torah). This was the work they thought would prepare them for the Kingdom of God and to make that kingdom come. But that preparation accomplished nothing but hardness of heart, and pride, and the inability to be the blessing to every nation that God had called Abraham to be.

Faith was the heart of the promise; and God had come, in Christ, to give the power of his righteousness to those who saw what God had done; to those who made the daring surrender of faith.

Those who trust in Christ have new forces at work within them. They have the cross of Jesus working in them. They have the resurrection working in them. They have the Holy Spirit.

We can never bargain for this. There is no gift we can give for this. We can only believe what God has done. Then it goes to work in us.

Paul wrote, “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” (3:7-8)

Faith means going outside ourselves, in Christ: letting go of ourselves, and so there are things that are worth losing for his sake. There is the obvious rubbish of our selfishness and our lovelessness; the obvious rubbish of our sins.

Then there is the rubbish (the garbage) of good things. I am a hereditary saver and hoarder of good things. I have thousands of books, and trinkets, and artifacts, and memorabilia. Some day my treasures will be someone else’s garbage. There may be habits and marks of my character that are not bad in themselves, but they are clutter: sheer clutter. They stand in the way of my love for God and for others.

All Christians are called to be disciples. All disciples are sent out into the world as witnesses of Jesus in their words and actions and lives. We are all missionaries; whether we are officially ministers, or elders, or so called ordinary church members.

We are not called to be church members. The church matters, but church can turn into a club where we preach, and pray, and sing hymns, and take offerings. We are called to be members of Jesus: his arms, hands, feet, voice, and living presence. The organization and the responsibilities we assign each other can become clutter and an escape from being Jesus in this world. They become a substitute (or a crutch) for living as a disciple of Jesus by faith.

There are things we think of as our treasures, our strengths or our rights or our dignity. These get in our way of loving God with all we’ve got, and loving others as ourselves. These are not the great good things we think, no matter how tight we hold onto them.

We think of them as our strengths, when they may be nothing but strong crutches, and we don’t have enough faith to part with them. We don’t want to replace them with the strength of God that comes from faith.

There are people who say that faith is a crutch, but faith actually requires us to throw away our crutches. Faith gives us freedom from all our bad limitations and from all our good clutter. Faith makes us free indeed.

The author George MacDonald imagined God saying this: “My child, you must be strong in my strength. I have no other strength to give you.” This is “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”

There is no other way for it to come. It is by faith alone.