Now Showing: The Coming of Fire and Philanthropy

Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2012

Scripture readings: Psalm 97:1-12; Titus 3:1-8



2012 Setting up Nativity Scene, Washtucna Community Church

There was a news story, recently, about the New York City policeman who saw a shoeless beggar apparently living on the street as winter was drawing near. The policeman walked straight into a nearby shoe store and bought some shoes and gave them to the shoeless man.

There were people who were determined to follow up on this story. They tracked down the homeless man and they found that he was not really homeless. He lives in public housing. Being shoeless may have been a gimmick for begging, or it may have been the result of the murky thinking that comes from substance abuse, or it may come from actual mental illness.

The result of this story is that some people are criticizing the policeman for not being smarter than he should have been. Maybe he should have checked up on the shoeless man before he helped him. Or maybe the policeman should have just taken the shoeless man to some agency or charity that would have checked up on him, and not given him such nice shoes that he didn’t deserve.

Some people are definitely criticizing the shoeless man for being shoeless, and maybe for being dishonest. Maybe he is also to blame for being a drunk, or a drug addict, or just plain crazy.



The Main Door

Now I see this story relating to the Psalm we have read and our reading from Titus. The Bible teaches us all kinds of things. It teaches us how to think, how to have faith, how to love, how to live.

Often the Bible teaches us by boiling down issues to their greatest simplicity. It often tells us to see the world as if it was made up of two kinds of people. (Sometimes I boil down human nature to two kinds of people: the kind that throws away old magazines and the kind that subscribes to National Geographic.)

Paul, in our reading from his letter to Titus, gives us a picture of two kinds of people. The surprising thing about these two kinds of people is that they are exactly the same people; in a before and after picture. There is the picture of the kind of people they were before the appearance of the kindness and love of God, and there is the picture of them after the kindness and love of God appeared.

A change took place, “when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared.” The amazing thing that happened was that the kindness and love of God their Savior actually saved them, and this transformed them.

The love of the savior worked. It made a difference. The saving was that they were saved from what they once were, and they were saved for a new life (“the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit”).

Paul often thinks backward, so he has already told us what the new life is like; the life that comes from the God who appeared in Jesus. The new life makes us subject or respectful to law and authority. The new life makes us obedient and ready to do whatever is good.



Church Windows

Notice that Paul tells us that our new life that comes from God makes us ready to do whatever is good. Nowadays the word “whatever” is the word of a person who doesn’t care. But Paul’s “whatever” describes a person who cares about everything; ready to do whatever is good. Otherwise I could say, “I don’t have to do that for you, I am doing enough already.”

You could say that you don’t have to work on your temper because you are already an elder and you are planning to bring a dish to next Sunday’s potluck. “Whatever” includes whatever good things that God loves, not just the good things that you have put on your own personal list. It means being ready to do everything good.

To slander no one, means to speak evil of no one. I always think of what my parents told me when I was complaining about someone or something: “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

We are “to be peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility toward all people.” Humility, here, translates the same wonderful word that the King James Version translates as meekness, yet meekness is such a horrible word.

My Greek professor, in seminary, defined meekness as the quality possessed by a well-disciplined war horse. Meekness is a strong and beautiful horse that responds instantly to every signal of its rider. In this Greek idea, a war horse would be trained to walk when commanded to walk, to charge when commanded to charge; to turn, to stop, and to retreat, on command.

Meekness tells us to laugh when laughing is the good thing that pleases and glorifies God, and nothing so glorifies God as a well timed and well told joke. Meekness knows when to stop laughing and to be angry, and when to listen, and when to shut up. Meekness knows when to give shoes to a shoeless man. This comes from the new life that the Holy Spirit gives us.

After Paul describes the new life, thinking backwards, he next describes the old life. “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.”



Hangin' o' the Greens

Why would Paul go and remind us of what used to be? I think he does this to make us think twice about ourselves and feel the variety of humility called shame.

I love it. Yes, I can remember back to the time when I used to be foolish; can you? Once I was young and foolish. Now I think I am getting old and foolish. It’s true that there is some real difference (isn’t there?) in the new life; only not enough difference to give us very much confidence.

There is just enough difference between my foolish past and present to serve me as a warning. I wonder if, until I become perfect, there might be something to be gained from an occasional, wholesome sense of shame at the thought of my past foolishness; a little bit of instruction and guidance, perhaps.

What should we think of that old, foolish, hateful and hating self of ours? Don’t you just want to hate it?

Until we become absolutely perfect, I think we are wise to hate it. Why? At least we hate it for safety’s sake (our own safety and the safety of others).

Think about the psalm we read. There are two kinds of people there, in that psalm. One kind is the people who are called wicked, and the enemies of God.

The other kind is the lovers of God. They are called the righteous and the upright. The righteous upright are the one who know how to do the right thing at the right time. They are like the well disciplined war horse that knows its rider’s commands and responds instantly; to go forward, to turn aside, to back up, and to stop.

Doing the Tree

They know how to respond. The righteous life is the responsive life. To be responsible is really simply to be responsive to the situation and the needs around us, as well as we can understand them.

We think of righteousness as arrogance, but it is really humility. It is holy meekness, in the war horse sense of the word: strength and beauty under control and ready for action.

In our translation these people are called “his faithful ones”, but this is an odd word. The King James Version calls them “his saints” (God’s saints). But this is an even odder word.

They are people with a relationship to love. There is more than one Hebrew word for love, and the quality of faithfulness and sainthood, in this Psalm, is an odd word that works two ways. It works between the giver and the receiver. The giver of this love makes the receivers of this love into his faithful ones. The object of the lover’s love becomes beloved, and that gives to the beloved a new identity.

This word for the love that makes a person faithful means a “covenant love”. It is a love that is based on the promise of the giver of the love. It is a pledge that binds and changes the receiver. God’s people are his faithful ones because they are the target of God’s faithful love: God “covenant-promise love”.



This is the love that makes sinners into God’s faithful. It is the love that we call the grace of God. Paul tells us that this is the sort of kindness and love that God gives us us. “He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3:5-7)



The Theme is Candy Canes

God’s faithfulness is an inseparable part of God’s righteousness and justice, which (the Psalm tells us) are the foundation of his throne. They are at the very core of what God is as the true God and Savior. This faithfulness based on the foundation of righteousness and justice is part of what makes God truly God.

When the Psalm says that God reigns and rules it means that what God is, and what God does, works. It gets done.

The Psalm tells us that (one way or another) the enemies of God are consumed. First it tells us that they are consumed by fire, and then it implies to us that they are consumed by shame. It is the shame of their choices; the shame of their foolishness.

What about the enemies of God that Paul describes to Titus? Who are they? They are the foolish, the hateful, and the hating.

But think some more about who they are. They are the people who used to be us. And what consumed the people who used to be us? It was the kindness and the love of our God and Savior who appeared to us in Jesus. This consumes our old lives and the Holy Spirit makes us new.

And what happened to those people who were the enemies of God? They became us. What about the fire of God? Sometimes we do burn with shame, and our old self is consumed by that fire. The faithful fire of God’s love makes us God’s beloved.



There is a picture of this in the Old Testament; in God calling Moses to lead his people out of slavery and into the freedom of the Promised Land. God, in his burning compassion, appeared to Moses in a burning bush; a bush that burned with flame but was not consumed by that flame. Moses’ life was changed by his encounter with a flaming God.

In the New Testament the flaming God has not really changed. The glory of the Lord that came shining on the shepherds of Bethlehem, at the birth of Jesus, frightened them because it told them of the arrival of the flaming God.

Another odd word in Titus is the love that is paired with the kindness of God. This peculiar love is called, in the Greek text, “philanthropia” (“philanthropy”). Philanthropy is the brotherly love of the human race.

God made himself our brother when he came into this world as the child of Mary. God made himself our brother in Jesus to love us all with a brotherly love and thus to make us his brothers and sisters. It was a work that began in Bethlehem and it continued all through his life. It was completed through his death for our sins on the cross, and through his resurrection that destroyed the power of death.

We become his faithful ones who will never fail to love him because he loved us into eternity. He loved us into his kingdom that shall never end.

Isn't It Beautiful?

The hatred we read about in the Psalm is the right way to feel about anything that keeps anyone away from this love and sacrifice of flaming God. It is right to hate whatever it is in us that we use to hold God off, at arm’s length, and keep ourselves in charge. It is right to hate, in others, the things that destroy, within them, the image of God that comes from their creation and from God reaching out from the cross to save them.

The psalm tells us that God wants this movement of his faithfulness to be seen and heard by the whole world, even though it can make the world tremble. Perhaps a love that is infinite and absolutely relentless and undefeatable can look as dark as a storm and as scary as lightening.

We don’t always want to receive love from just anyone who wants to love us, and we may seek to drive that love away, or make it ineffective. Even the best children sometimes try to test their parents love. That is the time for parents’ love to burn like a raging inferno, and to show what it is made of by not being driven back.

The great industrialist, robber baron, and philanthropist of the nineteenth century, Andrew Carnegie, said that philanthropy, after all, is about “doing real and permanent good.” A burning love never settles for less.

In the story of the policeman and the shoeless man, how do these two individuals fit the two kinds of people? The policeman who bought the shoes stands for the faithful love of God who seeks to change the life of the receiver of his love. The shoeless man is the kind of person who may be burnt by the fire of love, but whose life may yet change because of it.



Mostly Finished

What about the other people in the story, the ones who followed up on the story, the ones who criticized the shoeless man for being shoeless, and the policeman for giving him shoes? I would say that they are the foolish and hateful people in God’s terrible simplicity of thought.

And who are we?

Aren’t we the people who have seen and heard? Aren’t we the ones to whom the kindness and philanthropy of God our Savior has appeared in the birth of the baby God of Bethlehem?

This is the love that still burns when we touch it. This is the love that wants to make room within our hearts reach itself out through us to others.

Now Showing: The Coming of Holiness and Hope

Preached on Sunday, December 2, 2012: The First Sunday of Advent

 

Scripture readings: Psalm 96:1-13; Titus 2:11-14

For several years, when I was growing up, my dad was the chairman of our town’s fall festival parade. In those years, the only complaint about the parade was that it was much too long and that it had way too many antique cars.

Pictures Taken: Fall 2012 Bassett Park Washtucna WA

My dad’s parades did have a lot of old cars, because he loved old cars, and he liked sharing what he loved with others. But the parade also had a lot of other things; lots, and lots, and lots of other things. The way I remember it, his parades were all well over an hour long. My dad often seems to have lived by the theory that you couldn’t get too much of a good thing.

There was a time when my dad’s attention zoomed in on one good thing. He decided to get Bing Crosby to be the grand marshal of our fall festival parade. My dad liked Bing Crosby. Who wouldn’t? Bing Crosby was the singer and star of stage, screen and television from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-sixties. And Bing Crosby came to Sutter County every fall to hunt.

Western Sutter County is one of the oldest, and best, and most accessible places in the state of California for bird hunting: all kinds of birds. Bing Crosby loved hunting all kinds of birds.

In the wetlands and fly ways of Sutter County, there were Bing Crosby sightings every year. Only you had to look closely because he dressed in boots and blue jeans, and he never wore his toupee.

My dad found that he had connections; that he knew people who knew people who had connections (or said they did) to Bing Crosby, and he played those to the hilt. He pursued Bing for two years in a row. The first year, we were politely turned down. We had tried to schedule him too late.

The second year it became clear that we were not worth his time. Bing Crosby would never make a grand appearance in the Live Oak Fall Festival Parade.

Our Psalm for this morning and our reading from Paul’s Letter to Titus tell us about another grand appearance: the appearance of God in our world. The Psalm says, “Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.” (Psalm 96:12-13) And Paul says, “We wait for the blessed hope; the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ….” (Titus 2:13)

In the Psalm, the grand appearance of God is seen as a future event, although it tells us that we can see him even before we see him. It tells us that we can see that the Lord rules and we can sing about it. “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all the peoples.” “Say among the nations, ‘The Lord reigns.’” The Lord rules! (Psalm 96:3, 10)

And yet the Psalm gives away some reasons why we should not see God here at all, and reasons why God should not appear. The Psalm looks forward to the appearance of God because, “He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.”

This Psalm is telling us that we will see righteousness and truth take over the world when the Lord makes his appearance, meaning that we don’t see it yet. We live in a world where righteousness and truth are not apparent. We may not see them at all. Why should a holy God grace, with his presence, a world without righteousness and truth?

And why does this world lack righteousness and truth? This world deliberately ignores a righteousness and truth that stares it in the face every day. This world can look up at the sky and see the righteousness and truth of God. “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.” (Psalm 96:5)

We may think of idols as statues and pictures of false gods and goddesses, and it’s true that there are such statues and pictures. But God’s people, in the Old Testament, had a curious way of describing these. They didn’t call these statues and pictures “statues and pictures”; they called them “nothings”. Idols were real things that were “nothings”.

Pretty much everyone but the people of God worshiped real things that were “nothings”. Even some of God’s own people straddled the fence and worshiped those real things that were “nothings”.

What were they? They were gods and goddesses of weather, and harvest, and wealth. They were gods and goddesses of sex, and intelligence. Yes, even some of God’s own people secretly worshiped such gods, such idols, such “nothings”.

Doesn’t the whole world still worship these? Isn’t it the greatest scandal world? Isn’t it the greatest embarrassment in the world, when someone finds out that you don’t worship these gods like everyone else does? We may not bow down and pray to the statues and pictures of these things any more, but we don’t dare to call them nothings. We don’t dare to neglect them.

Jane McCormick’s father essentially called them nothings. Jane grew up in a home with lots of brothers and sisters. I think there were nine children in her family, growing up together. In later years Jane joked with her father that, if he had raised pigs instead of children, he would have been a wealthy man. He looked at her and said, “I am a wealthy man.” He knew what real wealth is.

The Psalm was teaching its people to look forward a world where God would make his grand appearance, and would show that world what real wealth is. We think of righteousness as a quality that makes us better than other people. The people who think they are righteous may look down on us. True righteousness is a life that makes things right; that sets wrongs right.

God’s judging the world in righteousness doesn’t mean just that he is right and we are wrong, and that God means to assert his rightness over us. God’s judging the world in righteousness means his life reaching into our world and reaching into our lives and setting us right, making life good.

What if you devoted yourself to making life right and good for your husband, your wife, your children, you neighbors, and your world; being a person serving the purpose for which God created you; not turning away from that? What if you did this because you were letting God set you right? Imagine God making your right with him, and making you right within yourself; working on the process of you heart, and mind, and imagination. Imagine God working on your desires and dreams and setting those things right.

A ancient king would travel around his kingdom and serve as its chief justice. The king’s justice existed to set things right in his kingdom. That is what God’s grand appearance is for.

Paul tells us that this grand appearance has come, and the justice that God brings is grace. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope; the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ….”

But Paul surprises us to say that there are two grand appearances. Jesus Christ has appeared already and, as Paul says, he “gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”

Our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, has appeared, Paul says, and this God and Savior gave something for us in order to do something to us. Jesus came and took away our worship of nothings. So he purified us through his coming.

And what did he do to take away our nothings when he came? He came as the baby for whom there was no room. He was a baby that a king and his soldiers tried to hunt down and kill.

He was a boy in a carpenter’s shop. He got calluses, and big honking splinters, and gashes in his boyish hands, learning how to make important things with wood: to build a roof, or a ladder, or a table, or a plow; to make something that would make the lives of simple peasant people better.

He became a teacher, and a healer, and he raised the dead to life. The wind and the waves obeyed him, but he had no roof over his head because he would not live to serve nothings.

He said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) And he was arrested and killed, in a viciously painful and dehumanizing way, by those who had seen and heard more than enough of him. Although the truth is that he died to redeem us, to purchase and buy us, from our slavery to the nothings of this world.

Then he rose from the dead. Then he returned to heaven to rule and lead his people with the promise and the hope of his next grand appearance.

He purified us from our nothings. Paul’s talk of the change from godlessness to godliness tells us about this. In this particular place the Greek words give us an ancient way of thinking about the quality of our life.

Our language and our way of thinking lack the words for it. We could say that the appearance of the Lord changes us from impiety to piety, but what is that?  We think of pious people as being, somehow self-righteous or hypocritical. The Old Testament concept of this is called “the fear of the Lord”, but what is that? We think that the fear of God would make us sad and cringing.

In our Psalm Ninety Six we read that the Lord “is to be feared above all the gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols…” Eugene Petersons paraphrases it this way: “His terrible beauty makes the gods look cheap; pagan gods are mere tatters and rags.”

In the ancient world a pious person lived every day and every moment of their life in an attitude of reverence because they knew that they were living in the presence of a terrible beauty: an unspeakable beauty. They were living lives of enormous consequence and worth because they had the attention of a beautiful God.

When we worship nothings, then nothing is holy, sacred; but when the Lord makes his appearance then everything and every moment is sacred. Every step we take is a journey we make on holy ground.

This sounds deadly serious but this doesn’t mean we lose the gift of laughter. Even laughter, even the humblest and the silliest thing, is holy. I almost think that whatever doesn’t kill us should make us laugh.

My little town of Live Oak was too small for the great Bing Crosby, but a manger was not too small for our God and Savior Jesus Christ. This purifies our hearts from the worship of nothings.

Sometimes our nothings seem so big and important that they blind us the terrible beauty of God. They outweigh the gifts of God that take the form of our own family and our neighbors. We make ourselves too big for God, when God did not make himself too big for us. Death on a cross, to take away our sins and give us a new life, was not too small for him.

So we have been changed by the appearance of God in Christ, and we wait for his coming appearance that will bring real righteousness and truth to our world. We have been so changed that we no longer worship the nothings. Instead we have a passion for the most important things of all: rightness and truth, even when they seem smelly and difficult (like mere mangers and crosses) to the world around us. We have a passion and eagerness rightness and truth, even when they look like mere mangers and crosses to us.

These will be the things that count. These are the true wealth. Our hope to see rightness and truth rule is not wishful thinking. It is because of our faith in the God who appeared in Jesus. This is why we live with hope. The passion of God, appearing in Jesus Christ, gives us a passion for the little things of rightness and truth that make us truly wealthy.

The passion of God in Christ makes us faithful in little things, because we see that even they are holy, and we are not afraid of this passion because we are people of hope: the hope of his appearing; when God’s good will be seen to be good, and when God’s rightness will be judged to be right, and God’s truth will be proven true.