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

Preached on Sunday, August 26, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Agur prays because he knows great things about God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pentecost and the Power of Connection

Preached on Pentecost Sunday, May 20, 2018

Scripture readings: John 15:26-16:15; Acts 2:1-21

We all know people who are connectors. Some people dabble in matchmaking.  Some people always want all their best friends to be friends of each other. But there are plenty of other areas in life where we need to make connections or be the connector.

Walks Along the Columbia River and Crab Creek
April 2018

Sometimes a generation will be the connector in a family. Usually it’s the oldest generation that keeps the branches of a family in touch.

Some of my ancestors were Irish. They owned a farm in county Tyrone, in the old kingdom of Ulster in the northern part of that country. The farm was too small to support all the kids when they grew up about 1850, so all but the oldest son left the farm. Some went to England, some to America, and some to Australia.

They kept writing letters from the very start. Since about 1850 the cousins in Australia and America have been writing to each other every generation. I’m the family connector in America. I write the letters and connect the news on either side of the Pacific. I hold the family together, on my side, as well as I can: to keep going a connection that has lasted one hundred and sixty-seven years.

Someone told me about a grandchild who kept the older generations of a family together, after a divorce had broken up part of the family and made enemies among that older generation.

The child forced the peace. It can be a hard job for a child (and not really a fair job, for a child). Children often show a powerful instinct to be connectors.

Jesus is a connector, building a bridge for us to peace with God through the cross. All the talk, in the Bible, about the faithfulness of God says that it is the nature of God to pursue, restore, and maintain connections.

It is the special work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, to be “The Great Connector.” The Holy Spirit connects us with all the reality of Jesus. Jesus said that the Spirit, “Will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:14-15)

When the Holy Spirit connects us with Jesus we are connected with nothing different and nothing less than God himself: The Spirit, the Son, and the Father. The Holy Spirit is our living, personal, supernatural connection with all the reality of Jesus and all the reality of God.

Jesus calls us to be his witnesses, so that others may know him through us.

The work of being the church and the work of being a witness to the world, and to your family, and to your neighbor is the work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The connector, Jesus, gives his connection work to the Holy Spirit, who gives the connection work to us. A witness is a connector. A disciple in the family of the church is a connector. But I want to concentrate on the connection work of witnessing to others.

A witness is a person who has special knowledge, or experience, or a special relationship. A witness is a person who knows what they know, not by hearsay, but by reality. They have seen what they have seen. Or, what has happened has happened to them.

Jesus says that the Spirit “will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” Now, what has the Holy Spirit made known to you, out of the things of Jesus? Or what is there about Jesus that you have discovered, through your connection with the Spirit?

I don’t know whether this is really a good thing or not; but I find that as I get older, I have seen, over and over again, the same pattern taking shape. The pattern of my life is that anything of any importance has taken me a long, long time to achieve.

Some of the most basic parts of living have taken a lot longer for me than they normally take for anyone else. Tying my own shoes, riding a bike, driving a car all took me a lot longer than they normally take anyone else. I look at my personal history, and I see how I have tried my own patience, over and over again; to say nothing of the patience of others, but I have never, somehow, seemed to have tried the patience of God.

I learn that my life must be full of examples of the patience of God, or else I must go crazy. But I also find that the patience of God must be more than only a theory that I can talk about. After all, the patience of God could be nothing but a figment of my imagination, or my wishful thinking. That patience had been a gift that has worked and enabled me to serve God in a way that is a bit different from the gifts of others.

The Holy Spirit is the living, powerful, personal, supernatural connection between the patience of God and the story of my life. And, so, I believe that I could be a good and faithful witness of the patience of God.

If I don’t have that living, personal connection to the patience of God, then I will not be qualified as a witness to that patience. Patience is part of the grace of God. And, if I don’t have the Spirit-connection to that grace, I will not be very convincing.

For one thing, if I am not totally convinced of the grace of God, then I will not be convincingly gracious or patient in my words and my life. I will probably not give much grace to anyone who really needs it. Or, if my words and behavior are gracious and seemingly patient. Others will be able to see though me. My grace and patience will be strangely fragile, or else have a pretend quality to them.

Once, years ago, my dad said something that I thought was the most screwball idea I had ever heard from him, and I told him so. We argued for at least a half hour. I never lost patience with my dad’s ability to listen to reason, when reason was surely on my side. We went on and on and on with this and finally my Dad stopped, and looked me deep in the eyes, and said, “Son, the trouble with you is that you don’t know when to stop.” See how genuine he thought my patience was? (Ha!)

We are, none of us, perfect. That goes without saying. And so, people who have the Holy Spirit’s connection to the grace of God will have lapses and breakdowns of graciousness.

They will need yet more grace for themselves. And they will earnestly, and prayerfully, and repentantly turn to the Lord for that living connection to grace. But, if that is not there, it will become clear.

Does it sound odd to say that when we are being a witness to Jesus, in telling others what we know about him, then we are bearing witness to something that does not belong to us, because it is a gift?  Does it sound odd to say that this is how it is supposed to be? Scripture teaches us to call God “My God” and to call Jesus “My Lord.” But to call him “mine” or “yours” is a gift, and not a possession. It is this way, because what we have is a gift that we call a personal relationship.

You cannot possess a person. A relationship is always a gift.

            I think even being in touch with reality is a gift. We cannot take it for granted.

What we have is like a telephone connection, or an electrical connection. Sometimes, when you are on the phone, the connection goes dead. Suddenly you realize that you may very well have launched into some brilliant or very touching observations, and none of it was heard, because the connection went dead and you didn’t even notice.

Without your personal connection to the reality of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, your connection with the patience, or the grace of God, may have gone dead, at least for the moment. You have to hang up and dial again. Or let the Spirit call you back.

What are you a witness to? What can you make known about Jesus and his Father, because of what the Spirit has brought home to you? Are you thoroughly connected to grace? Are you thoroughly connected to holiness? Are you thoroughly connected to the truth? Are you thoroughly connected with peace, or the servanthood of Christ, or the fellowship to which Christ calls us together?

Or, better yet, can you stand in the crowd that stands on a hill just outside Jerusalem, at the foot of the cross, with others who were the enemies of Jesus, or those who were indifferent to Jesus, or the friends who denied Jesus and ran away? 

Do you have a living, personal connection to that scene, and do you know that it happened for your salvation; that it happened to give you a new life?

Jesus implies that the Holy Spirit is a great connector. That is what he means when he says that the Spirit will witness, will testify, about him. And, since that is so, we are to testify, too. We are to make ourselves available as junior connectors to the Great Connector.

But it was not enough for the disciples to simply have been with Jesus from the start. They could have tried to be witnesses of the things they had seen, and heard, and experienced. But without the living, present connection, working within them, it would not be enough.

Remember that Jesus said the Spirit would be their new Counselor, their new Comforter? Jesus had been their first Counselor.

Part of Jesus’ job had always included explaining the disciple’s behavior and words to the people who were offended by them: like the time when the disciples walked through the wheat fields, and plucked grain on the Sabbath, or when they ate with unwashed hands.

Jesus had to make the connection between his friends who were trying to be his witnesses and the people they were supposed to be witnessing to. From now on, Jesus said, that would be the work of the Holy Spirit.

We need The Great Connector to do his great connecting between the people around us and ourselves. The miracle of the many languages of Pentecost was just as much a miracle of effective hearing as it was a miracle of effective speaking.

We need the Holy Spirit to graciously explain us and interpret us to others, because we do not often deserve to be understood or listened to. We need that grace first, in order to share the grace of God so radically given in Christ. The work that God has graciously assigned to us will always require his grace to make the real work happen.

And then, if we have this living connection with God’s reality, we will see God at work preparing connections with people, and we will do our best to be on the spot, when and where God is working.

To be in the Spirit is to live in a world that is full of connections in various stages of contact or unraveling. To be in the Spirit is to be amazed at the gaping need for connection with God, and the connection with love of God reaching out to those in need. This need is everywhere.

The test question is: Are you connected with this? And the question that goes along with it is: Can you stand in that crowd, at the foot of the cross, and know that that cross is the price paid in blood for you and paid in blood for the whole world?

You cannot be a witness of Jesus, carrying all our sins on the cross, without that living connection of the Holy Spirit to that cross.

And, still, this is what Jesus promises to give you, through his love and grace.

Passionate Jesus - Hope for the Hopeless

Preached on Sunday March 11, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 34; Mark 5:21-43

Walking along the Columbia River
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
February and March, 2018

I know a woman here who can raise the dead:

Provided that they are houseplants.

That woman’s name is Ruth Naser.

She’ll have to tell that story here sometime.

In the Gospel, the woman whose hemorrhage had been getting worse for twelve years, even though she had spent all she had for physicians’ care, and folk medicines’ cures, and healers’ prayers, had come to believe that Jesus could do anything. She needed someone who could do anything.

Jairus (whose twelve-year-old daughter was dying) was ruler of the synagogue in Capernaum. This means that he wasn’t a rabbi. He was a layman. You could say he was “lay-president” of the synagogue. You could say that he was like Rodger York, because a Presbyterian Clerk of Session is like that.

Jairus had also come to believe that Jesus could do anything. Jairus now needed (and his daughter now needed) someone who could do anything.

Jesus can do anything. The truth is that Jesus always wants to do even more than we ask. The way Jesus answered the hopes of these two people shows us what Jesus really wants, because his methods show us the heart of God, where Jesus comes from.

Jesus once said, “He who has seen me has seen the father.” (John 14:9)

This would have been true before the creation of the cosmos. Even now that Jesus had become a human being on earth, it was still true. What Jesus said, how he said it; what Jesus did and how he did it; whatever happened to Jesus, and how he responded to it all worked to reveal his Father. It all worked to tell us who God is and what he made us for, and what God wants, and what God promises, and how he gives it to us: the life of God on this earth.

The everlasting Son, who dwelt among us as a human being in Jesus, the whole course of his life and every day of it, as told to us in the Bible, was designed to reveal who God is and God’s relationship with us.

In one single day in the life of Jesus, in Capernaum where Jesus had based his ministry on the shores of Lake Galilee, two desperate people spread themselves flat and face down on the ground in front of Jesus. Their state of mind was almost identical but, otherwise, they were nothing alike.

They both received answers to their prayers, but the answers were substantially different from what they thought and hoped to receive. Having their prayers answered required a great deal from them for Jesus’ answer to run its course, the answers of Jesus filled them with fear.

The woman had a sickness that made her physically and spiritually unclean. She had a female hemorrhage.

It was a matter of blood. Blood was holy. Blood represented life. The blood of animals was shed as a sacrifice to show that sin and evil could only be overcome at the price of a life.

Mark, and the other gospels, tell us that the blood of Jesus (his blood being both truly human and yet coming from Word Made Flesh (“And the word was with God and the word was God,”), living a human life, had such a power that it could make the unclean clean and pure. Christ dying for us, the body of Christ wounded and tortured for us, the blood of Christ poured out for us is the giving of a life that can take away all the sin of the world.

But the blood that comes from purely human activities and life, or that comes from wounds or sickness (because wounds and sickness represent the fallenness of the world) represent what’s wrong with our world. Such blood represents what is unclean and contaminated in our world. Such blood was taught to be a sign to the people of Israel of the sins that contaminate others; because sin and evil can contaminate us.

So, this woman who touched Jesus’ robe was untouchable (almost as bad as a leper). She wasn’t allowed to touch anyone. And no one could touch her without being contaminated until the end of the day. If she was going to be around people, she needed to be very sneaky. If her sneakiness failed, then she would get in a lot of trouble. She would get the whole town after her.

The man Jairus was a leader. He was popular: popular enough to be elected as lay leader by the big, rich congregation in Capernaum. He probably had lots of money. Maybe he was elected because people thought he would be more likely, that way, to pay money out of his own pocket to repair a leaky roof on the synagogue.

Jairus dressed well. He was prosperous enough to have a real bath in his own house and so he was cleaner than most people, and you couldn’t track him down by sniffing the air. He always washed his hands, and you could shake his hand, or pat him on the back, without wondering where he had been and what was rubbing off on you. Most of all he was devoted to doing what was right and clean in God’s sight. He was clean, and the opposite of the unclean woman.

He was also devoted to his twelve-year-old daughter, and she seems to me to be like an only child. A year, or two, or three after her twelfth birthday she would be leaving home to get married. They did that so young in those days: usually to a man who was about sixteen years old.

She was growing up. Everybody knew it. But she was daddy’s little girl. Let’s call her Talitha, since Jesus called her that. It would make a very pretty name.

Here, again, this was the opposite of the unclean woman. She had to live the past twelve years away from her family, at least not in the same room, and never closer than an arm’s length.

I’ll try not to say anything more about them than I need to. I was going to call the unclean woman and the very clean man both hopeless, but one commentator stressed that they weren’t hopeless, only desperate. I guess it must be better to be desperate than it is to be hopeless. Do you really think so?

I don’t think that Jesus would make a difference between the two states of mind, any more than he made a difference between the unclean woman and the synagogue-man.

Once, Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.” (Luke 17:6) Some preachers say that if you want to get your prayers answered, you have to build up your tiny, tiny faith until it’s at least as big as a tiny mustard seed. But the point is that, even though Jesus knew (and everyone knew) that there were smaller seeds, the mustard seed was the poetic symbol for the tiniest things. Jesus meant that, even if you have the smallest faith in the world, God hears your prayers and grants them according to his will, and his will doesn’t always work by our standards, all the time.

Jesus said a wonderfully gracious thing to the healed woman. “Daughter your faith has healed you.” You could say she had enough faith to touch Jesus’ robe, and that’s true. It’s also true that she didn’t have enough faith to ask Jesus for healing.

What would we normally say about someone not having enough faith to ask the Lord for help in their great need? I believe that Jesus praises her faith by completely different standards than even God’s people (or church people) use.

We make rules about what God will or will not do, and we jack up Bible verses under our rules to make them look good to ourselves and to others. You are the daughter, or you are the son, of Jesus and you can come to Jesus any way that Jesus leads you.

Just come to Jesus, he knows you’re there. His power goes out to touch you and meet you in your need. He doesn’t usually follow the rules that his own people set.

I’ll tell you where her faith came in. It was only just about to come in.

Jesus asked her to do a terrible thing. Or it seemed terrible to her.

She had to come out of hiding. It was only when Jesus healed her that she was required to do what she never would have done on her own. She had to confess what her treatment by others had done to her. She needed enough faith to confess her own sneakiness. She needed enough faith to point to what Jesus had done for her without her telling him. She needed enough faith to hear herself being set free by Jesus.

She wasn’t healed so much because of her faith. She was healed for the sake of her faith. She was healed because she would be given the real faith that she needed so badly if she were going to live a truly new and healed life.

Jesus looks ahead. He always does.

Don’t let your present ideas about Jesus (and about life) keep you from him. Don’t let your thought habits keep you from whatever it is that Jesus asks of you now.

Maybe that is another kind of faith that Jesus is looking for. Surprise yourself. Let yourself be surprised by Jesus. That’s the key to the gospel.

Jairus, the synagogue-man, had the faith to bow at Jesus’ feet and ask Jesus to answer his desperate prayer. He had enough faith to ask; and this was a hard thing for someone like Jairus to do. It was very risky; especially because he was on the same leadership team as people who were thinking about whether it might be a good idea to kill Jesus.

That leadership team was motivated by their concern for their own authority, and Jairus was openly going against them. Jairus had some power in that synagogue, and in that community, but they outnumbered him by something to one.

Jesus said “yes” by following Jairus up the road to his house. Then, suddenly, Jesus seemed to be distracted by an interruption. Jesus took his own sweet time to deal with an invisible person in the crowd. Jesus had to out-wait the woman’s fear, and then encourage her confession. We don’t know how long that took.

For Jairus, it felt that Jesus was taking forever. The woman was an interesting case. Jairus, himself, might have sat in a synagogue trial to judge such a woman’s case.

And then it was too late for Jesus to answer his prayer. The time was up. It was too late. His little Talitha was dead. She could no longer be healed. Why trouble the master any further? So, Jesus asked Jairus to do something much, much harder than to have enough faith in Jesus to trust him to heal his sweet, sick little girl.

As things stood, it was no longer possible for Jesus to answer Jairus’ prayer with a “yes”. Jesus, in effect said no to healing Talitha.

Jesus intended to do a rare thing, even for him. In all of the gospels, we only have a record of Jesus bringing three dead people back to life from the dead.

There could have been cases that were not recorded. The whole world couldn’t hold the books to tell all that Jesus has said and done. But other kinds of miracles definitely outnumber his raising of the dead. And no one ever seems to have thought to ask Jesus to raise anybody from the dead. We never read of that happening.

Jesus decided to do what Jairus never seems to have heard of Jesus doing before (although there is one case that may have happened before).

If we’re not aware of the Lord ever doing a certain thing, chances are that we won’t even think of asking for it. We can’t ask for; we can’t pray for; something that we don’t even know about. But Jesus can answer such a prayer without our being able to ask.

The unclean woman didn’t have the faith to ask. Jairus, as smart as he was as the synagogue-man, didn’t have the brains to ask. Not because he was stupid: Jairus simply didn’t live in a world where the knowledge of what Jesus intended to do existed.

Jesus took Jairus beyond his personal boundaries of the possible, even though Jairus was a man of faith who was willing to stand up for his faith in defiance of the power of other people who could easily remove him from his position. Jairus had faith, but now he had crossed into new territory for himself, where he couldn’t do anything but feel afraid.

Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe.” In a sense, Jairus had to close his mind to fear. That is one of the hardest things to ever have to do. Jairus’ success at closing his mind to fear couldn’t have been very successful in the face of the loss of his little girl.

I believe that Jesus knew that he was going to raise Talitha from the dead, and that Jairus’ fear wouldn’t and couldn’t stop him from raising her.

Jesus only wanted Jairus to be able to take it easy. It would simply be easier for Jairus if he wasn’t afraid. Jesus isn’t really tripped up, or incapacitated, by our fears.

Jesus is not afraid of our fears, just as he isn’t afraid of what we fear. Jesus had watched evil, and ugliness, and grief, and death rule the earth for ages and ages, while he sat in heaven in fellowship with his Father there. Now he had come, in flesh and blood, to heal many people like the unclean woman and to raise just a few people like little Talitha.

Jesus’ intended mission plan was to heal some people, and to raise three people on earth from the dead, and then go on to heal the whole world by letting the world do its worst to him, and then to defeat this world while he was tied up in all the chains and ropes of this world that bind us, but which could not bind him.

Jesus was going to raise Talitha from the dead, then he would die himself and raise himself. Jesus was not afraid. That was his answer to Jairus; an answer beyond Jairus’ comprehension.

This is beyond our comprehension, but this may also be Jesus’ answer to you, and me, and our fears.

The Lord’s Supper is beyond our comprehension. We have so many prayers for Jesus’ presence, and power, and compassion, and here he comes to us as pieces of bread and little cups of grape juice that we call wine. But you have to admit that the power and reality of what we are offered here, and what we receive here, at this Table, is also beyond our comprehension. It's beyond anything we can understand well enough to ask for.

Jesus is not afraid to give us bread and wine and tell us that this is the way for us to come together to him and to receive all that he is and all that he does, at this table. Jesus’ answers are often like this, but this is only the beginning of where he will take us. This is only the beginning of what we will learn from him. Because he is able to be here, in this way, now, Jesus can do anything.

Paul's Prayers - Empowering Our Teamwork - Super Bowl Sunday

Preached on Super Bowl Sunday, February 4, 2017

Scripture readings: Proverbs 3:5-8; Romans 15:14-33

Walking along the Columbia River at Desert Aire/Mattawa WA

Once upon a time there was there was a town with a church football league. One of the teams was in their Sunday school classroom that they used for their locker room, while the coach gave them a pre-game pep talk. He wrote the words “Being on Jesus’ team”, and he said, “Always remember, men, there is no “I” in Jesus, but there is an “us”.

By the time I was in high school, in P. E. class, I had earned quite a reputation in sports. The team captains always fought over me, to keep me off their team. I think my un-coordination skills were without equal in the whole school.

I was a geek. I was a nerd. I seemed to be the only real history geek in my class, so, in order to spend time with other kids like me, I became a science geek. It really wasn’t that hard. I liked science too. So, I spent my free time at school in the science room.

But even when you get to talk and play together with chemicals and with the strobe light in the back room you don’t learn a lot of social skills in the science room. Neither was there any science club where we might work together as a team to win competitions with other schools.

Along the way,
 I got adopted as a mascot for one of my favorite teams:
The Dogs

So, I was known as the quietest kid in my class of sixty kids: the shyest kid of them all. Even if we had a science team, I would have been too shy to join it.

I had one cool friend, named Chris, who asked me one day, “You’re a lone wolf, aren’t you?” Even though I was seventeen I really wasn’t familiar with that phrase. I asked Chris what it meant. He told me. And, so, I knew myself in a new way: yes, I was a lone-wolf. I still am.

I had made a commitment of my life to Christ when I was about nine years old; while watching Billy Graham on television. I loved Jesus, but there were problems with the church. We stopped going, and though I read the Bible and prayed lot, there was something missing that I have told some of you about before.

I went back to my old church when I was eighteen and I went with the youth group to a youth rally at one of the county fairgrounds. Toward the end of the speaker’s message I knew that the Lord expected me to go forward to make a new commitment up front. But I was too embarrassed to do it.

I prayed with agony and struggle to get out of this, “Lord you know I love you more than anything!”

The Lord was very firm with me. I felt that he was talking to me from the cross, as he said in my heart, “Are you willing to be someone who can say ‘no’ to me?” This almost knocked the breath out of me. I couldn’t face being a person who ever said ‘no’ to Jesus on the cross. I had to go forward.

The counselor up front coached me to pray things that I knew very well how to pray. I had known for years what God wanted me to be and how it is that we come to him and let him come into us. I still commit my life to Jesus every day.

That coaching in a prayer to commit to, and to receive, Jesus as my Lord and Savior was not God’s point that night. The point was that I had to surrender what ruled my life. I had to surrender my fear and my shyness. I had to surrender my way of life as a lone-wolf. I’m still a lone-wolf, but I’m a “surrendered-to-God” lone-wolf.

Just as alcoholics can find the freedom of sobriety by surrendering in every way to their higher power, still that sobriety depends on their ability to say, “I’m an alcoholic”. This is a kind of surrender of one of the deep and powerful things in their lives.

There is a surrender that destroys you, and there is a surrender that gives you life. This surrender gives freedom, and strength. This life comes from that Higher Power which is God. But it also comes from joining a team where you take care of each other.

A couple of my nerdy-geeky friends were also surrendering to Jesus in their own ways. By going forward in front of other people, including the members of my youth group, surrendering my shyness, my fear, my awkwardness to Jesus, I became an honest and a self-surrendered lone-wolf before God.

I joined a team of honest and surrendered followers of Jesus. You could call it “The Jesus Team”. It’s been playing and praying together for over two thousand years. This Jesus Team is a group of people who aren’t afraid to be honest, and humble, and surrendered with each other. Everyone on the Jesus Team comes from the same place and we all know how to say, “Hi! I’m Dennis, and I’m a sinner. Hi! I’m Dennis and I’m rescued and made new by God’s love and grace alone given to me in Jesus. I’m rescued and made new by his life in me.”

To be able (all of us) to say such things together is a sure give-away that however different our lives may be, we have prayed, pretty much, the very same prayers, and made the very same deep offerings of our heart, and soul, and life to God.

At one time that offering of ourselves cut so deep that it seemed like a human sacrifice of ourselves: almost like an amputation. But now we see that this offering is the greatest thing we have ever done; and, far from losing ourselves, we have gained a new self we would never part with, because we see that our life has become a gift from God. God has given us our new selves as his gift, through the cross and the resurrection; through dying and rising again.

It isn’t only Jesus who dies and rises. Now we can do it with him, in our heart and mind. Now we are free and whole, because we can die to ourselves, and rise in the love of Jesus every day.

For me, this particular lone-wolf became part of a team; the Jesus Team. That team meets and struggles together in a lot of places, and the Jesus Team meets here, right now. Prayer is a necessary part of this.

We are a team partly because we have all needed to say much the same kind of prayers for much the same reasons. We are also a team because we all take care of each other through our prayers for each other. We pray for our performance in the most important game in the world.

Paul shows us this kind of team prayer in his request to his team members in Rome. He asks them to pray for him, but not just for anything. Paul asks them to pray for his ministry: to pray for Paul as he carries out his mission, his program for the game, for the team.

Paul has a difficult and dangerous play ahead of him. Paul is running to a part of the line where he will draw their fiercest opponents to himself.

There was talk of a famine in the land of Judea. The Christians there would see the worst of this because those with the biggest resources to give to those in need would refuse to give that relief to Christians. The biggest resources to buy food and other aide for the famine victims were kept in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Christians were considered heretics and traitors, and they would receive no help in Judea.

Paul was going where he was very well known as one of the team captains of the heretics and traitors. Both he and the money, or the bank receipts he brought with him (in the form of a scroll, or a tablet of wax or clay) were huge prizes in this game.

Paul was running willingly into danger, and he needed all the will-power he could muster. Paul had been imprisoned, and shackled, and beaten, and tortured, and nearly killed more than once before. If you ever had a surgery that really didn’t make you better, and your doctor was recommending another try at that same surgery that hurt you so much and never helped you, then you would look forward to that surgery just like Paul was looking forward to running to the relief of the Christians in Jerusalem.

So, Paul asks for prayer. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me. Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there, so that, by God’s will I may come to you….” (Romans 15:30-32)

“Join me in my struggle by praying to God for me.” The way that this is translated, here, teaches us that our team, with our teamwork together, gets strong when we pray for other team members for their work on the Jesus Team. Prayer makes us sweat together for our teamwork.

On this team we take care of each other by praying to God for the work, and for the effort that the others are doing for the team, and for Jesus, the captain of the work.

Imagine that you’ve been assigned to be a member of a team of two. Your other team member needs you to take care of them because of some weakness in their health. Your part, on that team, is to play the care-giver position.

It’s a common experience that the care-giver grows closer and closer to the one needing care simply because of their devotion to care-giving. Prayer-giving is care-giving that strengthens whatever weaknesses our other team members struggle with.

But the translation could be better. Paul is saying something like: “Agonize with me in your prayers for me.” I remember, when I was in high school, going by the football field in August, when the temperature was often close to one hundred degrees, or more, and I could see the football team working out. I knew something about the agony they were going through because P. E., in September, would find me playing football in gym class, and sometimes September was hotter than August in my home town.

That team was sweating together. They joined with each other in the same agony, and that made them a team: sweating together. They were becoming more and more the team they needed to be in order to play their game and win. Their sweat and their sore muscles were building team work.

As the Jesus team, we have important work to do. Taking care of each other in our sacrifices together, and in our sacrifices for each other, through agonizing prayer, helps us to grow strong together. This prayerful agonizing together makes us the team we need to be in order to play with Jesus and win.

There’s a team word hidden from us by our English language. It’s the word about the contribution to God’s people in Judea. The contribution to the poor Christians on the Jesus Team in Judea wasn’t merely financial.

In Greek, the contribution is called a “koinonia”. “Koinonia” means communion. It means fellowship. But those are old English words that sound strange to modern ears, and to those who don’t know the slang and lingo of Christians. Koinonia, communion, and fellowship can mean “partnership”.

The contribution was the teamwork of the Jesus Team. To work as a team, they needed to agonize with Paul. To work as a team with the poor in Judea, they had to agonize with them as well. Doesn’t that sound terrible?

I was never on a team willingly until I joined the Jesus-team and, even then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with it. The Lord told me, when I was twelve years old, that I had to be something like a pastor on this team, and with all my heart I wanted nothing to do with it.

That’s what was really wrong with me, until God asked me for something that I couldn’t refuse. I had to be a person who would no longer say ‘no’ to God. It went against my very nature, and against everything I had learned by experience.

I had to take the position in the line that I feared most. I had to take the position of agony. I had to play a position in which I would agonize for the team in order to become a member of the team.

At the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, every September, there would be a football game between the married students and the single students. That was unfair in itself because, obviously, the married students had to be more studly than the rest of us. And there were more married students than unmarried ones, so they had a lot more team members to choose from.

Fred Halde, one of my best seminary friends at the time, was our captain. Fred put me in the line opposite Dave Ulum, who had played college football before coming to seminary. It was one of those tiny, Christian, Liberal Arts Colleges that you find all over the Midwest, but Dave was still a big kid. The lines would hit each other, and I would hit Dave as hard as I could, and hitting Dave would always send me flying through the air backward flat on my back. Over and over again, I would hit Dave Ulum so hard that I would just fly; fly through the air backwards.

This bothered me a lot. I asked captain Fred to please let me take some other spot on the line, but Fred said that I was the only one on the team that could free up the better players to play at their best for the team. So, I went back to face Dave.

Dave looked at me and his voice almost cracked as he pleaded with me, “Please, Dennis, please, go somewhere else!” Dave was a softy despite having been in college football.

My answer was, “Sorry Dave, I have to stay here.” And, so, we played on, until the Singles lost to the Marrieds.

Dave was a friend too. I know that he was praying about this. That would be just like him. And I was praying too: a very agonized prayer. And this is what builds us together as a team for the work ahead.

You have work to do on the Jesus-team. This work is much more than church-work. You have Jesus-work to do.

Church-work is important, but it’s designed for the support of the Jesus-work. Our church-work can be a place where we can sweat together because it’s one part of our training places. It’s like the weight room is there.

We’re glad if we can do our church-work together, but the church-work is for the sake of the Jesus-work. Sometimes church-work makes it possible to give the hospitality that we want to offer the community around us, in Jesus’ name. And church-work is like the locker room where you do the team-work of psyching up together for the game, or the cooling off for half-time and for later.

My position in the line-up requires me to take care of you in such a way as to strengthen you, and train you, and teach you whatever you may need in order to do your Jesus-work, not by yourself but bringing in the whole team, praying for each other because we know and share your Jesus-work just as well as you know and share our own.

If we do this we can cut against the grain of so much that the conventional wisdom tells us. The conventional wisdom of our time tells us: “Go your own way. Take care of yourself. Be a lone-wolf. If you happen to be a Christian, then be a Christian lone-wolf, but not a surrendered one. Be a hold-out lone-wolf, not fully stuck to God, not fully stuck to others.

Let’s learn to tell each other what the Jesus-work is that Jesus is calling us to do on the team. Then we can know how to pray for each other. Then we can know how to build our line of the team in Desert Aire and Mattawa. When we know everyone’s position, then we can plan our next play: and the next, and the next. And we can hit our work and fly through the air with it: only forward and not backward.