Kingdom of the Caregivers - Power in the Scars

Preached on Sunday, January 13, 2019

Scripture readings: Psalm 38:1-22; Matthew 4:18-25

I’ve never preached from Psalm Thirty-Eight before. And, now’s the last time I can say that.

A Walk near Crab Creek, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
Dec. 2018

The truth is that I have read this Psalm every year for many years, but (for this sermon) I was reading it for you, so it was important. I opened the door to the Psalm, and stepped into the shadows, and, all of a sudden, I found myself falling down, and down, into a three-thousand-year-old brain. Well that kind of thing happens all the time, when you read the Bible.

I asked this three-thousand-year-old brain what was going on. As you can guess, it was hard to understand him.

The page in front of me (at verse nine) said, “I groan in anguish of heart.” But the three-thousand-year-old brain was screaming something like: “My heart is feebly sighing itself away, and I roar in pain at the mere sound of it.”

Verse four reads: “My guilt has overwhelmed me.” The ancient brain seems to say: “I’m in way over my head. I’ll never climb out this. I’m buried alive.”

Do you like crawling under a house? The ancient brain in the Psalm feels like he’s trapped in a passage under a house and can’t get out.

Verse four reads: “My wounds fester.” The ancient voice seems to say: “My body’s a stinking puss-ball.”

Well, there’s quite a bit of that going on here, as usual. The ancient guy cries that this is because of his sins. It’s because that sin made him so stupid, and made his life such a disaster. Nobody wants to go near him. You know why. They’re all saying: “I don’t want to remember him like that.”

This is what he’s talking about. The funny thing is that he never tells us a single thing about what he’s done wrong.

What sins could go so wrong as his have? He doesn’t say. I probably wouldn’t want to say what I had done either. Sometimes my sixty-seven-year-old brain does that.

The best thing I can say about the ancient brain is that: “This guy needs help.”

To shorten up this sermon: What this ancient guy really needs is for someone like Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John to come by and be the fishers of men that Jesus told them to be, and please, please fish him out his mess.

After all, that’s what Jesus wanted them to do. Jesus was starting up his kingdom. He was starting to fix the whole world. Jesus was fixing to start a whole new heaven and earth. He’s not finished yet, but it’s our job to help Jesus, as disciples just like the first ones: fishing people out of their messes, until the kingdom comes. “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matthew 4:19)

Jesus is pretty smart and he must have deliberately looked for the fishermen first. If Jesus had found Matthew the tax-man first, I don’t know what we would do with the concept: “Follow me, and I will make you tax collectors of men.”

The concept of “fishers of men” is such a strange thing because there’s something in it that makes us sure that we know what Jesus must have meant by it. But it certainly doesn’t tell us what to do with the people after you have hooked them, or netted them, and pulled them into your boat, or in to shore.

Once you’ve got them, can you ever be done with them? No! Jesus never works that way. Fishing the guy out from under the house comes much closer, because it really gives you a story that you both will share a part in as long as you live. You can always relate to the guy you fished out from under the house.

Jesus and his kingdom (which the church is part of) is about much, much more than seeking, and finding, and pulling people in. The next time we hear about the kingdom of God, the context is this: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23) For Jesus, fishing for people was more about helping them out of their old life and into a new life.

Scholars argue over whether the main problem of the man in the Psalm was his sin or his sickness.

Maybe it was neither one. In the end of that Psalm, the guy seems to say that his suffering and his sin came from trying to do what was right. “I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin. Many have become my enemies without cause; those who hate me without reason are numerous. Those who repay my good with evil lodge accusations against me, though I seek only to do what is good.” (Psalm 38:18-20)

This strange state of affair gives us two basic options. One is that this man has come down to lying rather than confess his actual wrongdoing. But I know that God gave us this Psalm here for a better reason than that. Most of us know that it’s not so hard to do the right thing in the wrong way and completely screw everything up: including those you wanted to help the most.

I go with that one.

To be a fisher of someone like that; to try to help someone who doesn’t know what to make of his own actions; someone who has struggled so long that they have given up on themselves and they just want to wait until God helps them know what to think and what to do: that’s what it means to be a fisher disciple.

Everyone else seems to have failed him. Everyone has put their two cents in and thrown up their hands and left him to himself. What will you do if you are a real fisher?

The sin-sick guy of the Psalm is a person of faith who just needs God’s help. He needs the kingdom of God to come to him and give him a new chance, and a new life, and wisdom to live by. Speak Lord. “Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Savior.” (Psalm 38:22)

Someone who belongs to the kingdom of God (like Peter, Andrew, James, and John; and you and me) needs to come and fish this guy out (whatever that happens to mean), and that could mean anything.

Any of us can feel like someone trapped under a house and taking forever to find their way out. Any of us can feel like a puss-ball. Even believers can spiritual go to a place like that when they get worried, or fearful, or cocky. We go out on our own and we shouldn’t be surprised at where this takes us.

Being a disciple means helping people in their need. Their need can be not knowing who God really is. Their need may lie in their not knowing that God, working in Jesus, on the cross, is what gives us a new life and all the help that the love of the family of Jesus can give.

The Lord’s Supper is the gift of the Lord to call us to come to him for forgiveness, life, and every kind of help we may need.

If we’ve ever been trapped under a house, that makes us experts of going in and fishing anyone out from there. Our having been trapped is like a certificate of qualification for helping others in distress. Jesus earned his scars on the cross, in order to save us from Satan himself, and sin, and death. Carrying and dying on the cross is hard, dangerous work (like burrowing under a big, big house) that qualified Jesus to rescue us when we are stuck under such a place ourselves.

By the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, our own scars can be made into our certificate of qualification to be an official helper of others in their need in the kingdom of God, signed and sealed with the blood of Jesus. The scars of the sins of others may bring the strongest help of all, just as the scars of grief are the strongest comfort to others.

Jesus is building a kingdom full of Spirit-empowered little Jesuses running around and blessing people with the help they need. If this is not true, then his church is not being his church.

God, in Christ, comes to us. He comes to the whole world wherever it hurts and wherever it is going wrong. There, the Lord bears the hurt and the wrong and makes us new people.

Jesus goes straight to our need and gives us what we need. Jesus goes to our need and makes us what we need to be for love’s sake. Because this love of Jesus knows no limits, we ourselves can go to other people’s places of need. We can go to the world’s places of need and bring what’s needed as only the wounded God, and the fellow-wounded of Jesus can do.

The Battle Primeval – Don’t Worry Be Thankful

PREACHED ON THE SUNDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, November 18, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 104:1-24; Luke 12:22-34

A woman was at work when she got a call from her babysitter. The sitter told her that her daughter was very sick with a fever.

A Few Family Photos Over the Years

So, the woman left work, and raced to the drugstore, to get some medicine for her daughter. When she got back to her car, she found that she had locked herself out. She ran back into the store, and she called home, and she told the babysitter what was wrong, and the babysitter told her that her daughter was getting worse and that, maybe, she could get a coat-hanger to open the car. The store-clerk gave her a hanger and she ran back to her car.

She was panicking now. She suddenly realized that she had no idea how to unlock a car door with a coat-hanger. She prayed desperately for God to help her.

Suddenly a beat-up old car, covered with bumper-stickers, pulled up next to hers. Out came this hulking-bearded guy, with tattoos, and a biker’s jacket, and a skull rag on this head.

He asked if he could help. The woman told him about her daughter and her keys: “Can you use this hanger to unlock my car?” And he says, “Sure thing!”

In a few seconds, he gets the door open. The woman jumps on him and hugs him tight. Tears running down her smiling face, she says, “Thank you, sir! Thank you, sir! You’re such a nice man!”

The guy says, “No ma’am, I’m not nice at all. I just got out of prison this morning. I was in for car theft. I got released just a few hours ago.”

The woman laughs, and cries, and hugs him again, and prays, “Thank you, Lord! Thank you for sending me a professional!”

OK, the verse we read from Luke don’t have the word “thanks”. Jesus is talking about worry. Actually, he’s talking about the antidote, the treatment, for worry. Worry is one of the enemies of thanksgiving. We, on the other hand, seem to have designed our special Thanksgiving Day to be full of stuff to worry about: perfect travels, perfect timing, perfect meals, and no family feuding.

Thanksgiving Day is the celebration of being people whose very nation is built on the heritage of giving great thanks. The Pilgrim’s experience taught them to think of their presence in this land as a divine miracle, and that the Native Americans were a part of that miracle, and the Pilgrims shared that celebration day with them. At least that’s what they say. They must have done something right that day. Plymouth Colony never fought the Native Americans and never needed to.

What if we thought that our presence, here in this land, was not our own doing, but a miracle from God, so that we didn’t have to worry? If you know that you are living a gift from God, you worry less and give more thanks.

So, Thanksgiving is a celebration, and you can’t celebrate when you’re worried. You might be able to fake a smile, but you’re not really celebrating. You can’t.

One of the treatments Jesus prescribes for worry is to think, and to think again. Jesus names this kind of thinking: “consider”. “Consider some things.” “Consider the ravens.” “Consider the lilies.” Considering has something to do with how you think, and how you see.

Worry doesn’t start with a feeling, and neither does thanks. Worry and thanksgiving come from a state of mind, from a way of looking at your surroundings and your life.

Jesus says, “Look around you.” And it’s true that Jesus is being selective in what he wants you to look at.

Jesus points to the grass of the field. Well, you can walk out into some field in the spring, and you can enjoy the fragrance and the wildflowers; but you could also choose to think about snakes in the grass. In a cow pasture you might choose to worry about other things hidden in the grass. Maybe you ought to take it all in, but don’t let the snakes and the cow patties make you worry and forget about the wild flowers of the field.

Jesus says, “Look at the world around you.” Look at how things fit together. See how they work. See how everything has a place. There is beauty. There is order. There is precision. There is design. This world is a work of art created by God. And you are a part of it. You also are a work of art.

Here is something we can see more than ever before, through the gift of science, which reveals more and more amazing things every day, things that cannot be explained. Oh, science can explain a lot: how it works, a bit of how the whole thing is inter-related, what it’s made of. But science can’t really explain why everything is what it is; at least not in terms of purpose: past, or present, or future.

Look at your hands. When I was in high school a girl once told me that I had nice hands. Of course, they’re getting wrinkled now. How complicated they are: and the feet, and ankles: so many little bones. And the skin: how different it is on the tops than it is on the palm and soles. Each person who has ever lived has a unique set of fingerprints, and probably toe prints, too.

Yet, if you looked inside your hand, at one, single cell; and if you were able to see what goes on inside that cell, how it’s fed and renewed, you would see a process that was just as beautiful as anything you could see with your naked eye, or more so. Then, if you could look deeper into that cell if, you saw the atoms, and the subatomic particles, and the pure energy making everything work by its attractions and repulsions, and how it was all like some faint cloud, maybe a shining mist interacting with other shining mists, which are each other.

There’s no end of design: no end of beauty. Infinite skill! Infinite wisdom. Infinite care. Not so much because they have no end, but the end disappears into the heart of the artist where they came from.

Jesus says: consider, look, think, wonder. If you are still worried, think again.

There’s a word called “providence”: Such a fancy word, and not just the name of a lot of hospitals. It has to do with God: with God providing. The teacher J. Vernon McGee had a definition of providence. He said, “Providence is the means by which God directs all things – both animate and inanimate; seen and unseen; good and evil – toward a worthy purpose, which means His will must finally prevail.” Put more simply: God, in his love, does what’s best for us, and gives us what we need. Thanksgiving comes from thinking, considering, and seeing this.

Another treatment for worry is to consider that you are important, that you matter, that you matter more than the birds and the grass. You are the objects of God’s faithful care and love.

Some people have trouble with this; and there are lots of reason why this is. Some people have been told they are worthless, or else they’ve been shown this through others mistreating them, or abusing them.

Shame, guilt, anger come from this. All of these, and more, are a kind of unsettledness akin to worry because something has gone wrong, or something hasn’t been resolved.

Sometimes the frequent defeat of our hopes, and purposes, and plans discourages us and causes us to doubt our value. Yet there are those whose lives have been marked by never having anything or any prospects, and they may have great loves, and great ambitions, and because they dare to hope, they will attempt seemingly impossible goals (which are simply about being safe, and knowing the people you love are safe, and secure, and well).

Such people may be more thankful than the richest, and the most powerful, and the most beautiful people in the world. Nothing stands between them and God.

There is something different in human beings that Jesus says is of special value. Jesus says that life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Do you realize how strange that could sound? How can life be more than food if you will die without food? How is the body more than clothes if, outside, in Desert Aire and Mattawa, in winter, your body will certainly die without clothes?

What Jesus is saying is that there is something in human life that is not physical and not material. The word that Jesus uses for our life, here, is the word for soul. “Do not worry about your soul, what you shall eat. . . for the soul is more than food.” (Luke 12:22-23)

You are a soul. You have a spiritual life that is stronger than your physical life and accomplishes more. Jesus wants you to know that this makes you a being of tremendous worth to him. This is the Lord who so much loved your life within your body that he became human with a body of the same status as your own.

His death on the cross, that was made possible by his being one of us, is part of the treasure that makes his love so beautiful to us, and still makes us more beautiful to him. But there is something eternal in each one of you and me that the Lord Jesus treasures.

Consider this, when you think about your worries, and your defeats, and your survival. You are a treasure to others. You are a treasure to God. Keep thinking about this.

There was a girl who was asked what she looked for in a guy. Her answer was, “How he fits his blue jeans.” (Well, there are boys who look for similar stuff in girls.) These are values and expectations that won’t last, especially not long past forty.

There is something spiritual, eternal in us, that is made for everlasting life with God, made for an everlasting home. Caring about that life, in ourselves and in others, will give us values that last.

Those who know the Lord have a different set of concerns. We have our hearts set on different things. We’re motivated by different loves. To be in your garden in the morning, to look in on your children, or grandchildren, or so on, when they’re in bed (and not just to say, “Thank God they’re asleep.”), to look into the face of someone you love who is still willing to put up with you, to make something that runs well, that works well, that looks good, or tastes good, or to hear or read a word that God speaks to you…in an instant you know, at least for a moment, that your life is an awesome gift, and that you and they mean something. This is an antidote for worry.

You already know that this is part of thanksgiving. Just don’t forget it. Some people forget.

Jesus says, “Do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them.”

Jesus isn’t saying, “Don’t work.” Jesus worked as a carpenter to support his mother, brothers, and sisters. When they were old enough, Jesus left that work, for something much bigger and harder, in the end.

Jesus’ work on this earth made our work just as holy as his first work creating time, and space, and the structures of the cosmos. Jesus’ work on the cross and in the resurrection enable all our work, and all that we work for, to have eternal significance.

Jesus says to work for ourselves and for others, and to work and live for bigger reasons and for bigger gifts. Live a life that’s different from what many others work for, because you know that your life, and the lives of others, is a treasure.

Jesus says, “Seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”

There was a native Christian pastor in Laos some time past. The communist government there wanted to stop him from preaching. They wanted to stop his church from meeting and growing. They sent soldiers to his house. The soldiers gathered the pastor and his family together. They held a gun to the head of the pastor’s twelve-years-old son. They told the pastor to deny his faith. But, before the pastor could say anything, the boy spoke up and said that he would never betray Jesus. So, the soldiers shot him on the spot. The same thing happened with the pastor’s wife. They took the pastor away to a prison work-camp.

Eventually, he escaped to Thailand, where he devoted himself to sharing Christ among the other refugees. Even though, by some standards, it could be said that he had lost everything he held dear in life, yet, by his standards, he had not lost everything. He followed Jesus who had lost everything for him, and who held everything the pastor held dear in his own hands.

He heard the voice that says, “But seek his kingdom, and these things will be give to you as well.” He shared this Christ with others out of a thankful heart. People who know the Lord find that their hearts are set on different things, and that they are motivated by a different love.

Jesus says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted.” Here Jesus says: know what counts and live accordingly.

When Jesus said to cut off your hand or pluck out your eye, if they cause you to sin; he was using strong, shocking language simply to say: take this seriously or you will be saying “no” to my life.

When Jesus said to be ready to sell what you have: he was using strong language simply to say: make a real choice about where you stand. How will you live, and what will you live for, if you believe that your Father has been pleased to give you his kingdom?

What does “his kingdom” mean? A kingdom is wherever its king rules, wherever the king’s will is done. It means that you live a life in which God truly rules. God provides for you. God works with you, and in you, and through you, and around you. You live where God’s plan is at work, under God’s protection, in God’s peace.

Heaven is yours. The coming kingdom is yours.

In a very real way, God has given you his kingdom already. You have come home. You have come inside.

God gave us his kingdom when Jesus died for us on the cross. Jesus carried whatever separates us from God and each other. He carried those things on the cross. So, that separation, whether it formed a wall or a chasm, has been broken down and bridged over with the cross.

This is the same thing John was talking about when he said, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

Knowing the Lord is all about receiving a gift from someone who loves you, and whose love you can trust. This is the antidote for worry. This is where real thanksgiving comes from.

Memorial Day – Seeing God at the Heart of Things

Preached on Memorial Day Sunday, May 27, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 46:1-11

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
April 2018

In the Psalm we read this morning, no clue remains as to who wrote the psalm, or when it was written, except that it was written after one of the many times that war came to the doorstep of Jerusalem and almost destroyed it. It was written by someone who had stood upon the wall of the city, because everyone in the city had become a soldier, and looked out at the thing that might destroy him, and everything in life that was familiar to him, and everyone he loved.

It was ugly. There was a heavy terrible smell in the air of fire, and old blood and gore, and fresh blood and gore, and death. The air was full of sound: hoarse shouting, orders barked, battle signals, cries of the wounded, the groaning and cracking of war machines (catapults and battering rams) the whizzing of arrows and the rattle they make around you when they don’t hit something soft.

There was a lot to watch, as well, if you wanted to show your face long enough to take it all in: the changing of troops, new trenches (within bow-shot now of the city) for the enemy archers, signs of tunnels dug to undermine your walls.

How many are out there? What are we up against?

There are too many for us. The enemy’s bigger than we are. It was a human hurricane, an ocean of armies, raging outside.

The defenders called their home Mount Zion, but they didn’t feel as if they lived on a mountain now. Zion had never really been a mountain. Now, the mountain felt more like a sand bank in a rising tide.

Then, we aren’t told how it happened, but the crisis passed. The enemy was gone. There were enemy dead to be buried or burned, and their own dead to be buried. There were the shattered weapons and the wreckage of war to be salvaged or disposed of.

There was exhaustion, and grief; and relief, and a wild crazy thrill of hope that swept through them as they watched broken spears and useless chariots consumed in bonfires. They had met the impossible, the terrible, and they had come through it.

How had they done this? The writer says that they had a secret weapon, a hidden defense within their walls. He says, “there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.” They had something on the inside that kept them going when things went wrong on the outside.

An ancient city and its nation, however high its walls, couldn’t protect itself or stick it out in a siege without a permanent, reliable supply of water. This was a problem for Jerusalem, because it had only one source: the tiny trickle called Siloam.

The spring Siloam was tunneled under the city to be safe from invaders. When a siege was long, and the cisterns were empty, everyone drank from the same small stream. It wasn’t a river at all. It never had been. It was just barely enough. But it was enough.

The city, and the nation it stood for, could rely on the stream of Siloam to refresh them when everything else depressed them. Siloam symbolized all the gifts and traditions that enabled them to hang on.

First, there are two things that go together. Siloam stood for what was good in Jerusalem. Siloam stood for what they had to be proud of. Siloam stood for everything that what we call patriotism focuses on.

The odd thing here is that what the psalm held onto as the great goodness of his people and his home had very little to do with the common ideas of greatness. Siloam represented what was small. The spring of Siloam was small, not a river at all, but it was what they had. Jerusalem, the great city, wasn’t more than a town, and Mount Zion was only a hill.

The good things in Jerusalem were the little things. The greatness and goodness of Jerusalem weren’t in its high walls, or in the palace that Solomon built, or the golden shields of the royal guards.

Long ago, Moses had told Israel what its greatness would be. He said, “What other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you.” (Deuteronomy 4:8)

The greatness of those laws didn’t consist of being an impressive system of do’s and don’ts. The greatness of those laws were fairness, compassion, honesty, generosity, and freedom, and protection for the vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, and the alien. (Exodus 22:21-23)

It was a greatness that they seldom appreciated. It was a greatness that they often broke. It was a greatness of the heart that came from God. And that was the secret of where true greatness lies: depending on God and imitating the heart of God who loves whatever is little and calls the little things his home.

When the nation finally lost that, the spring that refreshed them dried up: not literally or actually, but it dried up so that what they fought for was a fiction. The truly memorable sacrifices aren’t made for glory, and power, but to protect a way of life that is found in what this world sees as the little things: a sweet little stream of decency and compassion.

The writer of the Psalm had a love for little Jerusalem, and its ways, because they were God’s ways that loved the little things. It was a love of home, more than a love of gain and glory. This is what made God’s people strong. This is what made the words of the Psalm so beautiful. It’s the same thing that makes a family great. It’s the same thing that makes a church great. It’s love.

The second thing the stream stood for was unity. There was only one place to go for a drink, whether you were rich or poor, young or old. You knew that you were all the same. You were all in the same boat. You knew that you depended on the same things, and you worked for the same things.

I think that Memorial Day means most to people who simply love. They love the people who have loved home and the little things that are beautiful and that are made to be shared by people who will work hard and take care of others.

Memorial Day is about home. Memorial day lives in people who have not let themselves be divided into groups of “us and them”. It’s for those who have decided that we are all in this together.

But the most important meaning of the river whose stream make us glad is not a thing at all, but God Himself.

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall.” (Psalm 46:4-5)

The poet on the wall thought, at times, of what it meant to fight for his little Jerusalem, that huddle of houses, the women who gossiped in line as they filled their jars from little Siloam, the families who were so great because of the way of life they had tried to follow. This thought strengthened him, as he drew his bow, or dodged the incoming arrows. If he thought about it, he realized that his life actually depended on the fact that someone was fighting for him.

This was the secret for hanging on. The good things that he loved: his land, his city, his people, all that was good was there because God was there.

Of course, God is everywhere, but these people tried to love goodness more than greatness. In some strange way, God is great because he doesn’t care about greatness: God cares about goodness in the little things and he stays faithful to that and makes his home there.

The universe seems to honor power or energy or creativity. But the unseen world values love. The universe will come to an end, but the unseen world will go on forever, because it is built on love.

The people on the wall of the city trusted this. They had the will to fight the impossible battle because they depended on this. There is a strength and morale that is boosted by knowing that you stand for something, and by having confidence in it.

But it’s even more important to know where this goodness comes from and to see our nation, our town, our church from God’s point of view. God’s point of view is not from the outside looking in. God is inside the things that are most worthy of love. God is inside whatever is most worthy to worry about, even though God tells us not to worry. God lives with those things and he is at work. We have to see this: “God is in the midst of it.”

When we look at nations, governments, cities, towns, churches, it might not be easy to see exactly what God is doing, but we have to see God at work, and we have to make a commitment to work where ever our Lord is at work.

In Jesus, God came into the midst of things, of home, and town, and church or synagogue, and nation, and everyone had to decide whether they would let him be there, in the midst of everything with his heart on display, standing for the little things and the little ones. Displaying his passion for the little things, he stood with them, and with the scorned and the rejected.

The little things, the little ones, the childlike, the vulnerable, the scorned, and the rejected stood with him. Those who spoke most about power and being smart rejected him and crucified him: and so, in Christ, God died for the sin of the world.

In our wars, in our nation, in our towns, in our families, in our church we stand in the midst of things with Jesus: or either with Jesus or against him. We have a nation which, at its best, has stood for the little things and stood up against those who stood for power, and gain, and glory. We’ve stood for the humble, and the little, and the free. We’ve stood for those who needed grace, as people who know that we need grace.

Part of the Lord’s grace to our nation is that even those who don’t know him by name have still stood with him for the little things. And, so, we have fought and lived, as one, for these little, humble things that make families, and homes, and nations good and worth fighting for, just as Jesus has fought and died for us.

Without knowing the Jesus who was to come, the writer of our Psalm and the people of Israel needed to see the presence of God at work in the heart of their nation.

We need to see where the Lord is at work in the world as it is, and not in the world as we want it to be. We need to see where he wants us to work with him in the little things and make our home with him there.

Jesus - The Perfect Parent for all Parents

Preached on Mother's Day, May 13, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 3:1-8; John 10:11-18

It is said that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, Lord!” Then there are those who wake up and say, “Good Lord, it’s morning!”

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March, 2018

Psalm Three was written by one of those who could go to bed at night thinking, “O Lord, how many are my foes!” and wake up saying, “I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.” (Psalm 3:5) That, by the way, is surely Bible-Talk for saying: “Good morning, Lord!”

It doesn’t seem possible. It doesn’t even seem normal. According to this Psalm, it is the gift of God to wake up well-rested and well-prepared in the morning, when life in this world seems to have you surrounded, and out-numbered, and out-gunned.

We are listening to God speak to us through this Psalm on Mother’s Day and, in a way, we shouldn’t. This Psalm is a warrior Psalm and we don’t usually think of mother’s as warriors, but they are: and so are fathers.

Mothers are mama-bears or she-tigers. Their children and their husbands know this. This Psalm applies to mothers and to all the rest of any family. The Psalm applies to any warrior, and all the people of God are warriors.

And this makes me want to go off on a tangent, because, in some strange way we were created to be warriors. I wonder why, because, if we were created for perfection in a perfect world, as we were at the beginning, why would God have made us warriors?

When God set Adam the Human in the Garden of Eden, God’s mission for humans was to “dress and keep it”. The plan was that we would start with that garden and spread our mission to the whole planet. The word translated as “dress” is “abad”, and it means to serve, and then in the odd way Hebrew has, it also means to be served. Which has a cool farmer’s way of seeing the land: if you serve the land, it will serve you. “Keeping” (or “shamar”) is the real warrior word here because it means to guard and protect the earth, even at the level of fighting for it if necessary.

This tells me that, even when everything is perfect and everything is right, love is ready to serve, and love is vigilant and ready to jump, and save, and fight. True love has to carry a tiger in its pocket. Good marriages, good families, good churches, good communities and nations should all be like this. And there would be a joy, and a proper pride, and discipline in this; because true love is not soft.

I know we’re born for this. A little boy walked up to his mother and said: “I don’t want to be your little lamb anymore. I want to be your little tiger.” We are all created to be warriors under authority and discipline of God.

Jesus was a warrior, and so he shows us what God’s love is like. The tender love of God hides a tiger. Jesus could be really scary; invading the Temple in Jerusalem with his disciples, making whips out of cords, attacking the merchants, whose businesses were based in the Temple to supply animals for sacrifice and the proper currency and coinage for purchases and offerings, turning over their tables and counters, and driving them out. (John 2:13-16; Mark 11:15-17)

By doing this Jesus stopped the sacrifices that most people wanted to make in the Temple that day. He didn’t want them to worship the usual way, because he was there to be the warrior-love who defeated the sins of the world. Jesus made himself scary to do this.

When Jesus and his disciples did this, you must know that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Temple security. Jesus succeeded scared away the Temples armed police force, because his love was a tiger in his heart. He was scary because he knew he was doing the right thing for everyone he loved: for the whole world that he loved. Jesus showed a warrior-passion for this.

He was claiming the people of Israel, and all those who came from other lands to worship God as his children. He shouted, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of robbers’.  (Mark 11:17)

Jesus shows us that even men can be mama-bears and she-tigers. Jesus was completely committed to his children. He was passionately committed to us; his children to be.

Jesus held nothing back. And yet he was someone whom little children and their parents would never fear. (Mark 9:36-37; 10:13-16)

Like every Jewish child who went to synagogue every Sabbath and to Synagogue school during the week, Jesus grew up singing this warrior Psalm until he knew it by heart. It shaped him, as all the Psalms did. It shaped Jesus’ own awareness of who he was, and what his mission was, and how he would accomplish it.

It was a song of the warrior King David. It sang about his fight to bring order to his kingdom when it was tearing itself apart. There was corruption, and deception, and hypocrisy, and bitterness tearing the kingdom of Israel, and David’s own family was at the heart of that destruction. David knew this, and he hated it, and it devastated him, because he was at the heart of what was wrong.

David had actually played along with what he hated. He had made his own contribution to it. You can read about this in Second Samuel, chapters fourteen through nineteen.

It was David’s failure as a father that caused the crisis, and this failure surrounded him with enemies lead by his own children. But although David had failed, he still trusted God to help him to do his best and to set things right. David had to lay his own life on the line to heal the land.

Part of the song said “Many are saying of me, ‘God will not deliver him.’” David himself was aware that he had made too many mistakes and failed too many times to be “delivered” by God.

David knew that he should be beyond help and beyond redemption. The amazing miracle, the contradiction that seems too good to believe, was the truth that, “From the Lord comes deliverance.” (Psalm 3:8) This is what God stands for, for everyone who has no ground to stand on.

When Jesus learned this song, as a boy, he knew where it came from. He knew that horrible and tragic story behind David’s family and their battles against each other. And he had himself called the Son of David.

Jesus knew that David’s own life had laid him low and left him prostrate, belly and face in the dust, unable to stand in his guilt and his blame, in the presence of the greatest king who is God himself.

“From the Lord comes deliverance.” God was David’s shield when David had no defenses left. God was David’s glory when David had nothing to show but his shame. When David felt too weak and unworthy to do more than lie down in the dirt, God lifted up his head. Jesus came to be the kind of king who does this.

You need to know that this lifting up of the head business was part of a king’s mission. This was something that a king did, when he was faced with a subject, or a servant, or a surrendered enemy, who came to him and groveled before him, face down, in the dust. A king (if he decided to do so), in mercy and grace, would put his fingers under the chin of the person sprawled on the ground, and lift up his head. It was the king’s permission for that person to rise, to get up, to stand, and to know he was accepted, and free, and that he or she would receive an answer from the king that was better than anything they could ask for.

David found this grace from God. It gave him hope and, in spite of all his troubles and all his enemies, he could rest and wake up, prepared to meet the day. I had a pastor who recommended praying this prayer as soon as your eyes open in the morning: “Good morning Lord! What are you up to today? Let me be part of it.”

Jesus learned this warrior song as a child, and he grew up to claim the song for himself, as no one else could. Jesus saw that he had come into this world to have more enemies than anyone could count and, still, lift up their heads.

Every sin, and evil, and injustice in this world is Jesus’ enemy. Every action of ours, and every motive of our heart that works at cross purposes to Jesus, is his enemy. We are his enemies, and Jesus faces us without fear.

But what he wants to do most is to be the lifter of our heads. Jesus does all his fighting for this kind of victory.

In this desperate battle, Jesus was ready and willing to lay down his life for the kingdom. Jesus was willing to have no defenses and no shield against us. He was willing to have no glory that we could see. He was willing to have no pride or weapon, except for the nails in his hands and feet, and the thorns on his head. He was willing to have no shield or glory except for his death on the cross for our sin, and for the sin of the world.

Jesus knew that, giving up himself to all of this, he would be able to lift up his own head, and stand up for us as our king. That makes him the one to lift up our head in his presence.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.” “The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again.” (John 10:11, 17)

Jesus knew that, after carrying our sins on the cross, he could lie down in death and wake up again. He could go into the world of death that seems to swallow up everything that is dear to us, and finally to swallow us up as well. He could sleep that sleep, and wake up and rise again, because the Father sustained him. (Psalm 3:5) Then he could offer us grace, and abundant life, and everlasting life.

This was how Jesus claimed that warrior song as his own. David had written a song that was far better than he had realized. It was a song that only Jesus could fully claim. Jesus claimed this song for himself so that he could give it to us; to shape our faith in him.

When I was child there were times when I would get the chance to see puppies. There is a stage where puppies, just like babies, don’t have any teeth. You can put your finger in their mouth and they will chew your finger. They will chew, and chew, and chew; but they can’t bite you. They can’t hurt you. My dad would say, “Watch out, that puppy will gum you to death!”

Psalm Three tells us of God breaking the teeth of the enemy, as if our enemies could bite us and tear us apart. Our enemies are our life’s hurts and injustices. Our enemies are our own sins, and failures, and foolishness.

These have terrible teeth. The teeth do the worst damage, but God can break the teeth of our enemies. We are hurt, but we are not torn. We are crushed, but we can mend. We have consequences to pay, but this does not kill us. They bring us down, prone in the dust, but we can rise, and stand, and fight again, because the Lord lifts up our heads.

In Jesus, God lifts us up. God breaks the teeth of our enemies because the humility and suffering of Jesus give us mercy, and strength, and healing.

Mothers and fathers have many enemies because they have children. They fear for their children. They pray for their children. They know their children will make mistakes. The parents are aware of their own mistakes, too. Parents pray that God will break the teeth of their own failures and regrets, for their children’s sakes.

Mothers and fathers pray that the world will only gum their children and leave them unhurt. But the world is old, and it has long teeth. So, parents pray that the world’s teeth will be broken and that their children will rise again, and again; and that they will be strong, and brave; and that they will be able to rest and wake up prepared for the next day with Jesus, because Jesus will lift up their heads.

The power of Jesus who lay down in death and rose from the dead is our power to rise. Parents receive that power from Jesus in the fellowship of the cross. Parents may often feel crucified for their children. And the parents who know Jesus pray for their children to have that same power of Jesus in themselves.

Jesus came to make that warrior song come true for all of us, as people who take care of others. Jesus came to lift up our heads, to make us warriors who can rise again.