Telling It - Giving Rest

Preached on Sunday, November 8, 2015

Scripture readings: 1 Peter 2:11-17; Mark 6:30-44

Being Jesus, and following Jesus, can be exhausting. I hate to say it. I would like to protect you from it, if I could, but I don’t think I can.

In fact I have a strange personal history of getting in trouble with people I tried to protect from getting exhausted. Once, in a church I served while I was an seminary intern, the husband and wife of a new family in our church accused me of looking down on them as if they couldn’t do all those things that they were being asked to do by the people of the church who were giving them all the jobs that were exhausting them. Of course they wouldn’t have put it that way because they didn’t realize what I was trying to protect them from. After I left to go on my next internship, they left that church because they got exhausted.

Being Jesus, and following Jesus can be exhausting, and Jesus and his disciples had reached that point. They didn’t even have time to eat. So Jesus said, “Let’s get away from it all. Let’s take a break and rest.” So they set sail across the lake.

I think that Jesus must have let them rest at their oars, and that the wind wasn’t blowing, because the crowds cut them off from their rest. The boat should have beaten the crowd, and the disciples should have been able to slip away before the crowd got to them.

Maybe Jesus even arranged it all on purpose. I wouldn’t put it past him. That Jesus can be a tricky fellow.

So their much needed rest was interrupted. What was it that interrupted their rest? Was it the needs of others, or was it the compassion of Jesus? Well, it was both. Their rest was interrupted by the needs of others and by the compassion of Jesus. And knowing that and conducting your life accordingly is a good way to stay exhausted.

Jesus had a good idea about sparing his friends from exhaustion. He showed the compassion of the creator. Jesus is our creator who has come to live beside us, in the flesh. In the beginning God created rest and blessed it. The seventh day of creation is about rest and renewal.

The interesting thing about that seventh day is that it is a day without sunset or sunrise. It’s a day without beginning or end. It means that, in the middle of our life, we must spend time with eternity, and we must spend time with the God who made us for eternity.

Sunday is one of my days off. I preach on my day off so that I can spend some time today with eternity; and with the God who made me for eternity and died to give eternity to me as a gift.

We need rest to interrupt our lives, and so we are just as needy as the disciples who needed rest and as the crowd that ran to Jesus in order to be amazed. The fact is that everyone needs the same rest and the same amazement as we do.

Separation from God is the opposite of rest. The world clearly needs rest. And Jesus is compassionate and Jesus interrupts our exhaustion and tells us to rest; and to help others rest as well. Our job is to tell the good news that rest can be found with Jesus.

Mark tells us that, on that lakeshore of Galilee, Jesus looked at the crowd and “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mark 6:34) Jesus’ compassion didn’t begin then and there. It began earlier, when he saw that his followers (his friends) needed rest, and he showed them that he wanted them to rest.

Then his compassion made him speak to the crowd and teach them many things. Then the compassion of Jesus made him want to feed them.

Actually it was the compassion of his friends that made him feed the crowd: maybe. They were the ones who told Jesus that that people needed to eat. Maybe the compassion of Jesus made his friends compassionate, just as he was. They were learning compassion, and they showed they cared about the world by sharing the world’s needs with Jesus.

Then Jesus did a clearly tricky thing. Jesus proposed that his friends give all their food to the crowd; and they did. But the trick was to show his friends that, when they came to the end of their resources, they did not come to the end of his resources at all. They exhausted their food, yet they had more in the end than they had before they gave their all.

Sometimes we Christians get exhausted. But it is usually for a different reason than the exhaustion of Jesus and those who follow him. Too many Christians exhaust themselves with church committees, and church work, and it’s true that something has to be done to take care of things.

But our church business often has no compassion in it. Our stewardship of our building, our practice for worship, our determination to be organized often has no heart and no compassion in it. We have compulsion but little compassion. We have forgotten the story of the good news of Jesus even when we are in the church business.

There is no secret of rest in a lot of what we are doing for Jesus and with Jesus. If the rest of Jesus was in it, maybe we would be in a better mood and a better place.

If you read on in the Gospel of Mark, it doesn’t look like the disciples ever got their rest. There was only a lot more drama. But all the drama that followed showed them Jesus in a new way. They found their much needed rest by seeing Jesus in that new way.

Maybe we need that kind of rest: to see Jesus in a new way, to see the compassion that Jesus has for others and for us. Have you seen enough of the compassion of Jesus?

The compassion of Jesus that saw countless people as though they were sheep without a shepherd didn’t begin on the shores of Lake Galilee. It all began in eternity. It began when the Lord looked out over the wreckage of a world that had not even been created yet. The Lord looked out over the wreckage of countless broken hearts, and countless scarred and aimless lives, even before he gave them life.

His eternal compassion brought out the good shepherd in his heart. The Lord knew that he would be their shepherd, and that he would give his life to rescue those sheep from their scarred and aimless lives.

He knew that there would be a power in this compassion that would change them. The power of what he would do on the cross and in the resurrection would set them free, and give them rest.

That is the power of the compassion of Jesus for us. It’s the power of Jesus to make a difference in our lives. It’s the power of the good news that we are called to share with others.

What we call salvation is a miracle that changes everything. It works like magic. We try to work. We try to be responsible. We try to play and rest.

We do the best we can at all of these until the miracle of Jesus surprises us. The compassion of Jesus changes everything about what we do. It changes us.

We are called to tell the good news of Jesus and how Jesus makes a difference in our lives and sets us right. The whole world needs this change. This world of broken people will never work right unless the people of Jesus show the way.

Strangely, what Peter says in his letter about living as strangers and aliens in this world shows the difference that Jesus makes in our lives. Peter talks about living “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13) He talks about living for “the Lord’s will”. (1 Peter 2:15) He says, “Live as servants of God.” (1 Peter 2:16)

Peter told us to “abstain from sinful desires” and we have taken much too narrow a view of what such desires are. It is not just about sex. When we limit these desires to sex we lose a lot of the change in our lives that Peter was writing about.

Our sinful desires affect our reasons for loving our neighbor as ourselves. For instance, we want love to serve our own interests. The New Testament word for the love of Jesus, and for the love he requires of us, is called “agape” (in Greek). Agape means a love that doesn’t serve our own interests. The dominant world of the Greeks and the Romans almost never used that word for love because they wanted their love to serve their own personal interests, just as we do.

The dominant world of Jesus’ time also thought that compassion was soft and weak. They thought that humility was only fit for slaves and other underlings.

Peter told us to do amazing things. Peter told us to respect everyone. Peter told us to love the whole set of those who belong to Jesus as brothers and sisters, whether it fit your interests or not. Peter told us to love those who have legal and constitutional authority over us. Rome was proud of its constitution and of the way the emperor played his part in respecting it. Peter told Christians to honor the system that was persecuting them and killing them.

Peter told us that our fear of God (or our living with God in a state of wonder and awe) was a part and parcel of this holy discipline of love; this strange way of life. It was and is the way to live for the Lord’s sake. It is the way to be a servant of God. It is the way to do God’s will.

We often miss the point of this. The point is that the way of life that the Bible gives to Christians is meant to be the heart of a miracle. “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)

Peter didn’t tell us how this would happen. It’s like the change that Jesus makes in our lives. It is a miracle. The compassion of Jesus wants everyone to love and enjoy what he has to give in a kind of miracle that changes lives from anger to glory.

People who look down on you and people who judge Christians as inferior will be willing to lose their own desires and priorities (as taught by this world) and they will learn to desire what Jesus gives.

This miracle that changes life will prepare the world that looks at us suspiciously: it will prepare them for the kingdom of God. They will learn to love the softness, and the weakness, and the slavishness of a love that does not serve their own interests. They will love humility. They will love compassion.

We are called to tell how Jesus made this difference in us. We are called to tell it by living in this world in ways that can heal the world around us.

The Lord’s Table is the table of the one who pursued us because he didn’t pursue his own interests. This is the table where we find true humility and compassion. Here we find the healing of our exhaustion. We are called here to find rest. We are called here to Jesus and to his great story that makes all the difference.

Telling It - Sounding the Depths

Preached on Sunday November 1, 2015

Scriptures: Acts 26:19-32; Mark 10:17-31

I remember playing checkers with my grandpa when I was about ten. I beat him at the game and that was so exciting.

Looking back, I wonder if he let me win; but I also remember clearly that he gave me a run for my money. He almost beat me, and that makes me wonder.

Walking near Desert Aire/Mattawa WA: October 2015

But one thing doesn’t matter. No matter how the game turned out, it would have been a game of love. It was a serious game of love.

I have to confess that my relationship with Jesus is often a game like that: a serious game of love. In the checkers game of faith, I always loved Jesus, but Jesus had to take all of my men in order for me to lose. Losing the game was the only way for me to win. Jesus knew this and that was why he beat me in love.

Most of all, Jesus outmaneuvered me by dying on the cross. By the end of our game of love (of course it’s not really over yet) I couldn’t get around that move. I was finished. I was done.

I know I shouldn’t say this but, when I share the good news of Jesus, I am playing a game of love. But I learned the strategy of that game from Jesus. Jesus has a strategy of love.

We see Jesus playing this game of love with the character called the rich young ruler. Even though the young man walked away from the game, I like to think that he came back to it later and finally lost to Jesus.

Maybe that happened after the cross and the resurrection. The presence of Jesus came back to him and won the game.

Part of the good news of Jesus is that you are the presence of Jesus in your encounters with others, and especially in the times when you share the good news with them. Jesus wants to meet and win the whole world, including the people in your life and the people you may meet seemingly by chance. Our job is to tell the good news of how Jesus wants to meet them and win them.

When I was in college, I was in Christian groups where we learned how to share the good news. There is a model for sharing the good news of Jesus that’s called “The Four Spiritual Laws.” It sorts out the good news and organizes it in a wonderfully orderly way.

I knew the model of the four laws really well, and I tried to use it a few times, but I could never get my conversation with other people to follow the outline. I was never very good at outlines anyway.

Let me tell you a couple of the four spiritual laws. The first law is this: “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” The second law is this: “Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life.” In the booklet, the second law has a diagram. The diagram shows what it calls the great gulf that separates us from God. This is the first half of the outline of the good news, as Bill Bright, of Campus Crusade for Christ, drew it up in the 1960’s.

The outline comes from the Bible. Even if you can’t make it work for you, it’s good to know.

If models, and outlines, and diagrams don’t work for us, we can also learn how to share the good news of Jesus by looking at how Jesus did it. He did it a different way with every person he met.

And we can learn how to share the good news of Jesus by examining how Jesus shared the good news with us. We can revisit how he did it by working and speaking through others, and by working and speaking for himself, from within us, in the course of our lives.

Mark tells us that, as he was talking with this rich young ruler, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” (Mark 10:21) The spiritual laws ran true in Jesus. Jesus looked at this young person and he saw “the wonderful plan” that was possible for him. Jesus looked at this young person and saw the great gulf that separated him from God. Jesus looked, and loved, and saw that here was someone who could be truly rich, within, if he stopped being rich in his pocket.

Jesus treated everyone differently. Everyone is different. Jesus was able to look, and love, and see what everybody needed. He looks at you, and loves you, and sees the wonderful plan and the great gulf (or what remains of that great gulf). Jesus knows how to deal with that, and how to deal with you through that gulf.

For me, the wonderful plan is hard to put into words. It’s easier for me to be in touch with how Jesus dealt with the great gulf between him and me. The power of Jesus is always in his cross and his rising from the dead, but Jesus uses this power in a way that addresses the differences in each one of us.

I will tell you that Jesus came to me with a plan. I had planned to settle for being myself the way I was. Jesus’ plan refused to allow me to settle for being myself the way I was. Often we can see this in others, but everyone is different.

When Jesus makes you look at someone and love them as he loves them (even if they are a stranger to you), then you can see the special plan that applies to them. You can see the special form the great gulf takes in them. You can sound the depth of that gulf.

Some years ago I was driving down the road after a rainstorm, and I noticed a hitch-hiker. It was a woman, and I stopped to see what she needed. She needed a ride home. Home was on the Yakima Reservation.

She had been away from home for quite a while. Her life had been going badly. She told me it would be enough if I could drive her to Connell where she had friends.

As I drove, she talked about her life. I listened and tried to respond in love and understanding. I also talked to her (just a little bit) about God’s love in Jesus. She listened very politely, and I felt as though she really was listening.

All of a sudden, the sun came out. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining on the road and hitting us in the eyes as we headed west. I said, without thinking, something like this: “Look how bright the road is ahead of us.” She answered “Yes” and there was happiness in her voice.

It suddenly came to me that I had said the right words to her. She knew that the God we had been talking about would bless her path ahead. She knew that Jesus would bridge the great gulf that she had been struggling with in her heart.

I also realized that the turning point for her wasn’t anything that I had said. The presence of Jesus had made an even better thing possible. That shining road ahead was God’s word to her. It was God’s good news to her.

I had been looking for a way. I had been playing a serious game of love, because I had been seeking to give her the love of God. But, more than that, God was there in Jesus. “All things are possible with God.” (Mark 10:27)

When Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell everything he had and follow him, it was only for the purpose of telling him to do the thing that Jesus was prepared to do for him, and for the whole world. Jesus gave up everything he had in order to bridge a great gulf and make us part of his wonderful plan.

In this plan Jesus gave himself on the cross to give his treasure to the poor: that is to us. Before Jesus went to the cross he gave his followers a life of the cross so that they would know him better. Jesus still gives his followers a life of the cross. Now we know, because of the cross, how much love he has for us when he looks at us and loves us.

When you know Jesus and experience that love, then you have it in yourself to look at others, and to love them, and to help them see the wonderful plan and the bridging of the great gulf that is in their heart.

Then the good news of sharing that good news of Jesus belongs to you.

Telling It - Undaunted Believing

Preached on Sunday, October 25, 2015

Scripture readings: Hebrews 11:1-7, 29-40; Mark 5:21-43

I have been wanting us to learn to tell the good news in a new way. “Gospel” is a famous Bible word and Christian word, and it is so famous that we take it for granted and forget what it means. Gospel means good news.

I have wanted us to learn to tell the good news of Jesus, not just from the old stories of the Bible, but in the story of our lives. I want us to learn to help others understand the Lordship of Jesus, and the cross, and the resurrection from the way in which that Lordship, and that cross, and that resurrection take shape in our lives now. How does all of that make us new people now?

Near Desert Aire/Mattawa WA: September & October 2015

Another part of the good news is the way we receive it; the way it comes into our lives. The good news comes by means of grace, repentance, and faith.

The good news is one single story as big as heaven and earth; but even in such a big story, everything works together as one. Grace, repentance, and faith are not separate things, but interlocking pieces of the story.

Grace means that we receive the good news as a gift. It comes to us as a new life that we have not earned.

Repentance comes from grace. Repentance is a life lived in a new direction; and that new direction is possible only because of God’s grace. In Jesus, God has given us a new heart and mind that can live in that new direction. Our new heart and our new mind can lead us in that new direction because Jesus lives in them. It is their nature to carry us that new direction.

Today we come to faith. Faith is another great word that we take for granted or misunderstand. The great catchphrase, in the New Testament, is “repent and believe.” Jesus put the two words right, tight together. He said, “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

Jesus was there, telling everyone who would listen to him that God was taking charge of the world in a new way. It was Jesus, himself, who was making this happen. Jesus was the king of the kingdom; and he was there where they could see him, and they could hear his voice.

When Jesus confronts you, when Jesus speaks to you; that is when wonderful things can happen (life-changing things). Grace is there. The beginning of a new heart and mind are there.

Life in a new direction is there: grace and repentance. What else could you want? Repent and believe. You want faith. You need faith.

I think, from the example of Jesus, that it’s pretty clear what faith needs to be. When Jesus confronts you in order to take charge, and when Jesus calls you to something, faith means sticking to Jesus and following through.

Faith and believing have other parts to them, but the English language is not very good at helping us understand faith and believing. Faith and believing include the fact that, when you have faith and believe, you know something to be true. But the truth is that you can know a lot of things that don’t make a difference in your life.

Faith and believing mean consenting to what you know. You are not against the kingdom of God being near. In fact you consent to it. You agree that it is good, and that you are on the side of the kingdom. But a lot of people will say that they agree with something and that you can count on them to be on your side, but they don’t do anything.

A deeper word for faith and believing is trust. Trust takes you further. Any trust that is worthy of the name requires you to take a real stand. When you believe and trust that someone or something is right, then you stand up for them. And you stand up against those who don’t.

In the gospel story, in Mark, the president of the synagogue (his name was Jairus) decided to trust Jesus, even though a lot of his colleagues hated Jesus. A lot of his colleagues saw Jesus as dangerous.

Mark doesn’t give us a picture of the mind of Jairus about Jesus. No one really knew who Jesus was, or what he was about, except that Jesus claimed to represent what the kingdom of God was doing.

Jairus bowed at Jesus’ feet. He took sides. Jesus could claim the faith of Jairus, and tell him not to fear, even when the heart of Jairus’ desire seemed to be lost. Jairus, when all of his motivation for seeking Jesus seemed crushed, stuck to Jesus.

This is faith. This is what it means to believe. You cannot live in a new direction without the grace of a new heart and mind. You cannot live in a new direction without faith.

But see the truth here. Faith is not an item that is in you. Faith is not one of your working spiritual parts. Faith is a living connection with Jesus and with everything that Jesus stands for.

Jairus’ family was going to carry a dark mark on them for the rest of their lives, because they would always be a sign of the truth of Jesus as the king of the kingdom of God. For the colleagues and neighbors of Jairus, his living and breathing daughter would always be an unpleasant reminder of the truth of the good news of Jesus. The sight of Jairus, bowing at Jesus’ feet would always be held against him and his family.

The woman who tried to hide in the crowd also had to stick to Jesus. She tried to be healed by simply touching the hem of his clothing, but Jesus wouldn’t let her get away with that. She had to come out into the open. She had to face her fear of her neighbors. She had to tell everything.

The woman who tried to hide in the crowd had a chronic hemorrhage. She had an unstoppable flow of blood. This made her what her people called “unclean”.

Blood was considered holy when it was part of the sacrifice of an animal on the altar in the Temple. There it stood for a life given in sacrifice to God for the forgiveness of sins. When the blood of a sacrifice was sprinkled on you, it stood for the grace and mercy of God given to you. That blood made you clean.

But, out of context, blood was too holy and it made you unclean. People who touched blood (especially when it was the blood of other people) were not supposed to touch other people. If someone who was bleeding touched you, then you were unclean and you had to isolate yourself, and wash, and bathe, and wait. It was complicated.

The woman who came to Jesus made half the town unclean that day. When she told Jesus everything, everyone knew this. Everyone was mad at her. They were mad at the inconvenience she had caused them. It was rude, insensitive, and inconsiderate. They would hold it against her.

The language of the Gospel of Mark tells us (in the Greek) that, when the woman touched Jesus, she was cured. When she came out into the open and told Jesus everything, then (in the language of the Gospel), Jesus declared that she was healed. There was a difference between being cured and being healed.

In fact, in the story of the bloody woman  and the dying girl, both of them were more than cured and revived. They were given something that was saving. It was more than being saved from long sickness. It was more than being saved from death. The kingdom of God had come to them in Jesus.

Jairus and his family, and the woman and whatever family she had, received something because they had stuck to Jesus through their risk-taking and through their facing of their fears.

Faith isn’t something that gets you what you want; because the father wanted his daughter not to die, and the bleeding woman wanted to be healed without getting caught. Jesus had something else in mind for them, and for us. Jesus wants us to have a new heart and a new mind that will stick with him in spite of shame, and anger, and reproach, and fear, and danger, and despair.

Sticking to Jesus was never easy, and it isn’t easy now. The disciples who followed Jesus on the road (as the big twelve) were always aware of the danger from the authorities. And they were mobbed by the crowds. And they were swamped in the storm. And they were given seemingly impossible tasks by Jesus.

After Jesus died on the cross, and rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, the people of Jesus could only live out the kingdom of God by sticking to Jesus through danger, and risk, and being in want. That is faith.

The Letter to the Hebrews and all the other writings of the New Testament tell us the same message. What the new life and the new heart need are to stick to Jesus.

Our reading from Hebrews says, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1, New International Version) I believe the King James Version is better. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Sureness and certainty are things that we feel. Substance and evidence are things that are objective. They exist, whether we feel them or not. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is sticking to what Jesus has given you for substance and evidence, in spite of its mysterious invisibility.

The reference to the creation tells us that what God gives us in Jesus has substance and reality. It tells us that our new life in Jesus has the same reality as the world we live in, even though our new life comes to us every day from God’s invisible work. God continues to make you his new creation.

The hope that your faith holds onto is the coming of the kingdom of God, when God will make all things new. The hope is in the future, but, in your new heart and mind, the future is now. You life is a time capsule that doesn’t contain the past. Your life in Jesus is a time capsule that contains the future. Jesus puts the future in your heart and mind.

The world around us may not see the power of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. The world may not see how the cross and the resurrection will bring a new heaven and a new earth. But you are different. You know this without seeing it. The substance of that future lives in you now.

God first began to call me to the ministry when I was twelve. The Holy Spirit spoke through the stories we were studying in Sunday school. In those stories God called people like Moses and Jeremiah to serve him and they had objections to being called. They had good reasons for why they should not be called. They tried to worm out of it.

I prayed that God would help me understand what he wanted me to do in such a way that I would be certain of it. I thought that if I was certain that I not try to worm out of it.

God answered my prayer for certainty, but I tried to worm out of it anyway. God gave me a vision. I saw a storm and darkness coming over the world. I saw people in fear, and anger, and confusion, and doubt, and despair. I was told to speak to them for God.

What I saw was very difficult and terrifying, and I haven’t forgotten it. But I stick to Jesus, even when it is difficult and terrifying. I finally surrendered to that when I was nineteen. But I couldn’t do anything else. And, from then on, my life changed. The people who knew me best knew that something had changed in me.

In that vision there was light beyond the storm, and there was the voice of God speaking. In you (in your new heart and your new mind) God has planted the substance of your hope: the evidence of things not seen. There ahead of you, hope is able to grasp what no one else can see. Your hope is able to grasp and stick to the kingdom that is ruled by the cross of Jesus and by his resurrection.

Think about how that part of the gospel story became part of your story. Think how Jairus and the bloody woman had to come out to Jesus and take that risk. Think of the fear and the despair that went through them. Think of how your own life has changed by sticking to Jesus through it all.

Telling It - The Good News of Repentance

Preached on Sunday, October 18, 2015

Scripture readings: Job 42:1-11; Mark 6:6b-29

The word “gospel” means good news. The center of the good news is Jesus, who is God himself coming into our world and coming to our side. This is something that happened in history a long time ago, but it is also something that is happening now.

Columbia River at Desert Aire/Mattawa: August 2015

If we are the people of God (the people of Jesus) then we are people who experience the God who came long ago coming to our world, now, and coming to our side, now. This is good news. We have a story of good news in our lives that is based on Jesus. We have many stories of good news, and Jesus sends us out to share our stories of good news (the good news as we know it) with others.

People who don’t know Jesus can meet him in the scriptures, just as the people of Jesus’ day could have met him in their scriptures: in what we call the Old Testament. But that was never enough.

The good news was a thing that had to happen. It had to be lived out; so that stories could be told about it. That is why God became a baby in Bethlehem, and a carpenter at work, and a man wandering on the open road. That is why God was robbed of justice and crucified on a cross for the sins of the world. That’s why God died and rose from the dead.

Yet it was never enough for God to come in Jesus and live out the story so that it could be known. It was always the plan that Jesus would send the people who followed him into the world to tell the world their own stories about him.

It’s your job and mine to tell those stories that Jesus has given you and me. These are stories of good news. Part of the good news is the thing we call repentance. Repentance is a strange thing. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel happy. At least that’s what we’re afraid of before we do it.

And we are afraid that repentance is something you have to do. Doing it seems to involve feelings we want nothing to do with. Job did it and he said what we want to avoid saying at all cost, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:6) It doesn’t sound like any fun.

It doesn’t sound like something related to love. It sounds more like a reaction to expectations. We know that people have expectations of us. People have checklists of things they judge us by. They expect us to repent.

Repentance is not a reaction to a checklist of a bunch of things that God has decided he doesn’t like. There are lists like that, but I don’t think God carries a checklist with him to size us up.

Some Christians might carry such a checklist. I remember, when I was in college, knowing a lot of Christian kids who had a checklist like that. Christians don’t go to movies, or watch television, or play cards, or gamble, or drink beer or wine or margaritas. Christians don’t dance.

I remember a very cute Christian girl, whom I knew when I was in college, with a checklist like that. She asked me if I danced. Without thinking I said, “No, I’m a terrible dancer.” But that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. I’m pretty sure she suspected me of dancing because she knew that I was a Presbyterian and so she knew that I couldn’t be a very good Christian (if I was one at all). If I danced, she would have the proof of it on her list.

I believe a lot of Christians carry lists like that, and I don’t believe that they are very good tellers of good news.

No, repentance isn’t the way we deal with someone’s check list. For one thing that would suggest that God doesn’t love someone until they repent, or that God doesn’t do good things for people until they repent. God is doing good things for everyone all the time whether they pass the grade on someone’s checklist or not.

No one in the New Testament comes to Jesus with repentance first in order to receive a blessing. They are blessed, they are helped, they are accepted, they are healed, and then they repent. They turn around. They see everything in a new way. They see Jesus in a new way. Through Jesus they see God as they never imagined him to be.

Job despised himself and repented, not because of all the trouble he had gone through, and not because he believed his friends, at last, when they told him he was only getting what he deserved. Job despised himself and repented because he was so happy. He despised himself for missing it for so long.

The story of Job is long, and strange, and complicated. Job never did anything wrong. The worst he did was to doubt that God loved him. All his endless arguments come from that.

Long before he repented, Job said, “If only there were someone to arbitrate between us (between Job and God), to lay his hand upon us both, someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more.” (Job 9:33-34)

Job wished there was some go-between to take God’s judgment away. Job was right to want that. He guessed some truth about God.

Then, later, for no apparent reason, he begins to think like this, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he shall stand upon the earth.” (Job 19:25) The redeemer, here, is a word for someone who is your own flesh and blood coming to your rescue. Something told him that God could be this redeemer; and he was right, only no one had ever told him anything like this before.

At last something happened that Job could never have expected. Job had to make a confession. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know….My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:3-6)

In the beginning, with all the tragedy that came into his life, Job felt that God was against him and didn’t love him, and wouldn’t speak to him. At last Job saw God. Job met God. His book never tells us what Job saw, but what he saw was more than enough. He saw it and said it was wonderful; too wonderful to know.

Job, long before the time came in history, saw the God who became flesh and blood for us in order to rescue us by living for us, dying for us, and rising for us. In some miraculous way, the God of miracles showed himself to Job. And Job looked and saw Jesus.

In the book written about him, Job received a new life that was bigger and better than before. In the end, God says that everything Job had said was right and that the accusing friends, with their checklists, were wrong and that they needed to be prayed for and forgiven by Job.

In the Bible, the words that are interpreted as “repent” mean to turn around and to have a new mind or a new heart. We never find the turn-around coming first. It’s always the change of heart and mind that comes first. God’s people see something and we must remember that what they see is something that never went away from them.

What never went away was the God who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt. That God was leading them through the wilderness and later they knew this God as the one who had finally led them to the Promised Land of peace, and freedom, and fruitfulness. They never managed to keep that new mind and heart for long. Without a new heart and mind from God, you can’t know peace, and freedom, and fruitfulness for long. The long troubles of the Old Testament are the continuing saga of what happens when you have no new heart and mind.

There was a family I knew long ago where the husband had been an alcoholic for years and then he recovered and he stayed recovered, day by day. You know, that is one of the places in our world where you see this secret of the new heart and mind. Recovery from addiction requires a new heart and mind every day. But this is true of all of us. It’s the only way to live as the children of God. And it is always a miracle, as well as a responsibility.

The wife in this family would say that the miracle of their life together, as a family, was not that Jesus had changed water into wine. Their miracle was that God had changed the wine into heat, and electricity, and house payments, and furniture.

Timothy Keller writes this, “In our world where everything is about promoting your self, repentance feels brutal. But repentance is the only way to be healed.” Repentance is really the power and evidence of a life revealed by God, in Jesus, for you.

Repentance is like saying you’re sorry. Good parents teach their children to say “I’m sorry.” Good parents know that this is a good way for their children to enter life in a way that they can learn, and grow, and thrive. It’s easier for children to say “I’m sorry” because they have new hearts and minds. Saying, “I’m sorry,” keeps them that way.

Grown-ups often don’t let other grown-ups say, “I’m sorry.” We teach other grown-ups that they’ve had their chance and blown it. If we were children we would believe in repentance

Your story of the power that gives you repentance is also the good news that others need to hear from you. They are waiting to hear your story. Of course they don’t know they are waiting at all. But God has told you that they are waiting for you to give them the good news.

Repentance is always happy, and the only tears from repentance are tears of relief, and love, and joy, and hope. Repentance is always happy because it sees something that makes everything possible.

The funny thing about the Gospel of Mark is that Mark doesn’t tell us the stories of those who repented. He only tells us the stories of people who had their chance, who saw the evidence, and walked away from it. One of these people even killed the evidence.

King Herod Antipas is one of those examples. He imprisoned John the Baptist who was a forerunner and a witness of Jesus. John was the one who baptized Jesus and saw who Jesus was. John knew that repentance was a preparation for life.

Herod loved to listen to John, and John must have only told Herod the truth about Herod’s own life and about Jesus, the Messiah who was bringing the kingdom of God. Herod was tempted by the goodness he heard and saw in John the Baptizer, but he never let what he heard and saw change him, or make a difference. His pride kept him from a new life and he killed the witness to the life of Jesus.

The scariest thing about the gift of repentance is what happens when the gift is resisted, and ignored, and eliminated. Even when you clearly see what is happening to you, you find good reasons to say no. You resist life, and peace, and freedom, and fruitfulness.

There was a girl I often sat with at meals in the dormitory cafeteria in college. She was living a very dysfunctional life. She was looking for love in all the wrong places. She was Jewish but one day she told me that she felt Jesus looking at her when she was in that wrong place. I told her that Jesus was only telling her that he loved her and wanted to give her a new life. Her answer was that if she followed Jesus she would have to change her life.

It was a dead end for her. The new life that would have come from repentance, the new life that would have come from not trying to hide from the eyes of Jesus, would have given her so much peace, and freedom, and fruitfulness. Her new life would have been a gift, just as repentance would have been the gift that led her to that new life.

You need to know that God considered Job to be the best man in the world, of his time, right from the start, before any of his troubles came. Read the first chapter of Job and don’t try to explain it away.

Job’s repentance is one of the most important stories in the Bible. He was the best person in the world of his day, and his temptation was to give up on the love of God, and to give up on the life and the future that the love of God still had in store for him.

One of the most important lessons is that good people need to repent because they don’t know enough about the love of God. They don’t trust that love and they give up on the life and they give up on the future that God still has in store for them. You know this about Job when you read his story to the end.

I’ve known young adults who failed at things that were very important to them. They felt like failures. They felt they were at the end of their dreams. I have told them that they needed to believe that God loved them and they needed to know, also, that they were younger than they thought they were. We all know how old we are, but we almost never know how young we are.

Good Christian people stop believing that God can still do great things through them. Churches stop believing that God can still do great things through them.

Maybe they are right, sometimes. But they are usually wrong and they need to repent, but they probably won’t. It takes a miracle to see, again, the God you have stopped seeing. If you truly saw God, if you let yourself know what God wanted to show you, you would have a new life.

There are times when you fall back on what you have always heard, and on what your prudent mind tells you, and on what other people say. Meanwhile, God has not gone away. His plan for your life has not gone away.

It’s a story that you will be able to tell in the future, if you repent. The Bible tells us that even the good people, even God’s people, need to repent and be people of faith again.

There are always very good and wise sounding reasons for saying no to this. Don’t do that. Be someone who says yes to God. If you believe that God is a God of miracles, then believe in one more miracle and be ready to take part in it.

You need to see the God who is here trying to get you to see that he is looking at you, and that he is ready to give you life. Other people need to hear you tell that next story.

Telling It - The Risen One

Preached on Sunday, September 27, 2015

Scripture readings: Acts 3:11-16; Mark 16:1-8

I got to know a family in one of the small towns where I used to serve as a pastor. I came by for a visit. It wasn’t a pastoral visit, although they had a sister-in-law who came to my church.

Around Tall Timbers Ranch (Church Camp)
Washington Cascades, Above Leavenworth WA
September 2015

It wasn’t a pastoral visit because I wasn’t their pastor in any way. It was a small town where it was fairly easy to know everybody, and I had a friendly relationship with this family.

When I got to their house they did talk to me about what they thought it means to be Christian, and they wanted me to know that they didn’t buy into it. They wanted me to know where they stood, and I appreciated that.

They had all the usual reasons. They had some unusual reasons, as well. Whatever their reasons were, mostly they were talking about beliefs and behaviors.

I listened for what seemed like a long time. I would nod and sort of repeat after them what they had just said. I put in my two cents worth here and there. It was all friendly and sincere talk.

Then a thought came to me. I said something like this. “From your experience, you have good reasons for saying what you say. But there is something about being Christian that you haven’t said anything about. When you are Christian, then you are a person who has died and risen from the dead.”

A couple of them said, “What?” And I repeated what I had just said, “When you are a Christian, you die and you rise from the dead. We need a new life, and Jesus died and rose from the dead to give us a new life. When we receive Jesus we die to our old life and we rise into a new life. We become a new creation.”

They guessed what I meant. One of them commented that most Christians didn’t seem like new creations to him. I said, “That’s true. Sometimes it’s tricky the way it works, or doesn’t seem to work, but that’s how it is supposed to work.”

It’s true and it is absolutely essential. You must die and rise from the dead to know Jesus. Another way of saying this is more famous: “You must be born again.” (John 3:7) But I like saying that you have to die and rise from the dead because it’s more surprising. It’s not a direct quote from the Bible but it is a paraphrase of what the Bible clearly teaches.

It’s also true to say that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus, but what does it mean to believe?

A Christian knows Jesus, and trusts Jesus. A Christian depends on Jesus, lives in Jesus, and has Jesus living in them. A Christian listens to Jesus, learns from Jesus, imitates Jesus, and follows Jesus. A Christian surrenders to Jesus as their Savior and their Lord.

All of this is true. All of this matters. It’s all important. And it all must lead to this: you must die and rise from the dead. There are two verses from the Bible that I love that refer to this. One verse is this: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) The other verse is this: “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Without Christ, in the heart of my human nature, I am full of barriers and obstacles between me and God, between me and myself, between me and others, between me and the whole creation and the way the world works. These barriers blind me. They handicap me from the changes that would give me true life, and the freedom to be and to do what I was created to be and to do.

Christ took my nature upon himself, on the cross, and so (in Christ) my nature has died. When I trust what Christ has done for me, when I surrender to what he (in his infinite love) has done for me, then my surrender to him and to his love are like my being crucified to myself and dying to myself.

Christ gives us a new life with God by trading his supernatural nature for our natural nature. Paul says it like this: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Just as Christ has died for me, he has also risen for me. When I surrender to what his love has done for me (and for the world), and when I surrender to what I could never do for myself, then I die; but I also rise with Christ, because he has risen to give me the new life that I could never create or maintain by myself. When I live in a state of faith and surrender then I am a person who has died and risen from the dead.

This is what my favorite verses mean.

The miracle that made a lame man walk, when Peter grabbed him by the hand, was an example of this. It took a form that people could see and understand. The lame beggar no longer lived. He became a new creation that could walk, and jump, and praise God.

This happened because Jesus had been killed by his own people, and because Jesus had gone on to rise from the dead. Peter told this to the crowd. “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, this man whom you see and know was made strong.” (Acts 3:15-16)

God has designed the whole creation for resurrection: Peter called that future time the “times of refreshing” and the time for God “to restore everything as he promised long ago.” (Acts 3:19-21)

Peter said that Jesus is the prophet that Moses predicted who would come and do great and wonderful thing, like the thing that Moses did in the Exodus (only even better). Moses led God’s people from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land where they could live in harmony and blessing with God and with each other.

Peter said that the blessing that God had given to Abraham would make it possible for the people of Israel to be a blessing to all people. (Acts 3:26) The blessing was fulfilled by Jesus who will lead all the peoples of the earth from the slavery of a fallen world to a “Promised Land World” in which everything, and everyone, will be refreshed and restored.

It’s true that Peter quoted from the words of Moses that tell us that those who don’t listen will be cut off. (Acts 3:23) Think about what this means in the light of what happened to the people of Israel when Moses was leading them to freedom. Not everyone wanted to leave slavery for freedom.

The ones who wanted to stay in Egypt (and to go back to Egypt, when they left) caused so much trouble because they didn’t want what God wanted to give them. Some of their breed made it to the Promised Land and, there, they caused so much trouble that the Promised Land never became what God had promised.

There are people who don’t seem to want to die to their old selves. They don’t want the freedom of being resurrected. They don’t want to become new creations. They want to remain their old selves. When we don’t want to die to ourselves we go on causing endless trouble.

There are people who don’t know Jesus, who don’t know that they have a chance to die and rise from the dead. There are even Christians who want to make belonging to Jesus into something different from dying and rising. But there is no life in that. There is no future in that. The whole universe will die and rise. God will make a new heaven and earth. (Isaiah 65:17) God says, “Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

Jesus came to give the start-up of this newness to his people, and to us. This made the leaders of his people mad, because they wanted the promise of all things new on their old terms. They wanted their same old selves to hold the power as the gatekeepers in that new world.

Jesus acted as if he were the gatekeeper, and Jesus didn’t respect the old rules. He seemed willing to let all kinds of people into the new kingdom of God. Jesus was taking over their thing.

They didn’t know what they were doing and, in their ignorance, they killed Jesus. And then Jesus, as the gatekeeper of the kingdom, forgave them. (Luke 23:34) Jesus did this on the cross, because the gate is the cross. The cross is the door to the new creation. You can’t rise unless you die. (John 12:24)

In the restoration that Jesus brings to all things, he is the way of restoring of all things. He is the judge. But maybe we can understand the coming judgment this way. In the rules, as God makes them, you can’t really judge the world (and you can’t judge anyone) unless you have died for the sins of the world, and forgiven your enemies, and risen to give new life to the forgiven.

Those are the qualifications that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit set for the job. The Son met those qualifications, but he was the only one who could meet them.

Otherwise we would never be able to live in the new creation. But we have to want to die and rise from the dead with the author and creator of that life. It’s the only way.

The time when God restores everything with Jesus hasn’t arrived. The seeable, touchable Jesus is in heaven, waiting for that time. The lame man was a sign, to the people who knew him, of God restoring everything. The lame man was also the sign that God is beginning to make everything new now. So are we.

We are new creations now, if we have died and risen from the dead. We are called to believe in the cross and the resurrection, and we are called to teach the cross and the resurrection. We are called to live the cross and the resurrection.

I have to tell you that we must believe and teach the cross and the resurrection; not just because anyone says so, and not just because God says so, but because God himself has died and has risen from the dead; and that is a mind-boggling way of saying that he is the living God.

We must believe and teach this because this is the truth of who God is. God has nothing else to give us than what he has. There is no life anywhere else than in this truth. This is not theology. This is not a beautiful, meaningful idea. This is God. This is life.

I remember pretty far back and so I remember loving Jesus when I was three or four years old. I remember it from singing “Jesus Loves Me.” I made a commitment to Jesus watching Billy Graham on television when I about nine years old. But church wasn’t very important to my family, and the church as I knew it wasn’t very good at teaching me a lot of things I should have known. And I was raised in a family that was pretty “free-thinking” about Jesus and spiritual things.

By the time I was a teenager, I had essentially made up my own religion around Jesus. I loved Jesus, but I reinterpreted him. My ideas were very well thought out. I also had very good reasons for not taking the church seriously. Those reasons were good reasons that still hold water.

I had to surrender most of what I believed. I had to surrender to the church as God’s idea for us all, even though the church (as I experienced it) was a pretty twisted thing. It is why I can say, today, that I believe, with all my heart, in a sinful church. I was spiritual, and I was not religious, and I had to die to my carefully constructed, sincerely held spirituality. My spirituality had to die in order for me to live in Jesus.

I had to die to my idea of who I was, and who I was meant to be.

I was only eighteen but it was hard to face. The women who found the empty tomb left it in a state of fear and bewilderment. That is what it is like to find out that you have to die and rise again. It’s nothing you could ever take lightly.

As a result, other kids who had known me for a long time saw that I had changed. A girl I had had a crush on for years told me that she could tell that I had changed and that I had a lot more confidence than I used to have. It wasn’t confidence in my self. It was confidence in God: in Christ.

I could do things I couldn’t do before. I could face things I couldn’t face before. I discovered talents and gifts that had never been visible before.

There was an opening that stayed open between my heart and God. That open place between me and God is still there, all the time. God, in Christ, is there all the time, even when I get so mad at him.

(Read the Psalms about anger and God. The Psalms teach us that we can bring anything to God, and God is big enough to handle it, and to handle us and our feelings about him.)

Times of refreshment and restoring came to me. Those times still come.

Some more verses from the Apostle Paul speak to me about this. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-17)

The God who died and rose from the dead teaches us how to die to ourselves and rise with him every day. This is the kind of God he is.

This is how he claims us. This is how he makes us his, and teaches us to love. God is love and love lives by dying and rising. There really is no other way. That is why our message is about the cross and the resurrection. This is where true life is found, and nowhere else.