Great Ends of the Church: The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind

Preached on Sunday, July 6, 2014

Scripture readings: Colossians 1:15-23; Luke 24:36-49

Pontoon Boat Trip on the Columbia River, July 2014

There is a cartoon of a minister standing in front of the congregation, and this is what he says: “Now, before I begin the sermon, I have something important to say.

The church is a living, breathing sermon. It is the living message of something important. But the church often talks and acts as if something else were more important that the message. Our purpose and the message is this:

“The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind”

That is a mouthful. But that is a part of our job. It is the job description of the church.

This job description comes from a statement made, more than a hundred years ago, on the purposes of the church. This statement was made by Presbyterians at their 1910 General Assembly, but we shouldn’t think any less of it because of where it comes from. The ideas behind it go back to the Bible.

In the New Testament, Paul says that there is a message, there is a gospel. Gospel means good news. Paul says that this news was spreading, even in their day; and that he, and the congregation to which he was writing, were all a part of the spreading of that good news, and we are a part of it, too.

It was an essential part of their job description. It is essential to our job, as well.

Paul says that he is a messenger of that good news. He lives to be at the service of spreading that good news. And he says that Christ is what the good news is all about.

And he says that the church (the people who belong to Jesus; and who are gathered together by Jesus) forms his body. We embody Jesus.

We are an extension of him in this world. We are his voice. We are his hands and feet. And are we wounded too?

Paul says that the good news is about Jesus because Jesus is God showing his face to the world; doing great things; doing wonderful things (things good for us, good for our neighbors, good for the whole world. We are the body, the extension into the world, of the God who has done (and is doing) great things, wonderful things for the whole universe.

The God, who cannot be seen, became visible, in Jesus, to reconcile the world to himself; to reconcile the whole universe (things on earth and things in the heavens).

Reconciliation means making peace between people in conflict, and bringing them together in friendship. The good news of the gospel is that our God is a reconciling God.

God did what was necessary to reconcile us to himself. God making peace with us was necessary because something had gone wrong, something centered on the earth, something centered in the human race (centered in us). We humans, from the very start, centered ourselves and our world outside of God. But there is no real life outside of God.

Without the help of the love of God to interrupt us, we serve ourselves. And there is no real life in that. We justify ourselves at the expense of others. We blame others. We fight for the biggest piece of the pie, or for the first pancake off the griddle.

So some families have a rule that, if they let one of their kids cut the pie, the other brothers and sisters get the first pick of the pieces. That way, the cutter of the pie will not cut it to his, or her, own advantage. Bringing justice to human nature requires rules like that, even in families, or especially in families.

There is the story of the two boys whose mother was making pancakes, and the older boy asked for the first ones. And the mother told him, “You know that Jesus would let his brother have the first pancakes.” And so the boy turned to his younger brother and said, “OK, Donny, you be Jesus.”

Of course it’s funny: but all the greatest miseries and evils of hatred, and injustice, and cruelty have their roots in the nature of the human race that wants to turn its back on God to serve itself. We are all born with something within ourselves that is not a friend of God.

The Jews in the time of Christ believed that God would appoint a descendent of the ancient King David to be a new kind of king. With God’s help, this king would conquer the world’s evils with armies and laws.

The surprise was that God did not appoint anyone. God came himself. God, himself, became the descendant of David, and fought the world’s evils, not with armies or laws, but with his own body, by taking evil upon his own shoulders, on the cross. God came in Christ to conquer sin and death by letting them fall upon him, and pierce him, and shed his blood.

It was our sin and death (the sin and death of each one of us; the sin and death of the whole world) that Jesus bears on the cross. This is what forgiveness is about. This is the real cost of it. This is what turns you around and gives you a whole new way of thinking, and seeing, and feeling (which is the meaning of repentance).

Repentance means reversing direction. It means having a new mind and heart.

The veterans who have served in time of war (and the families who have lost a member in time of war) often live in a different direction than others. They see our country with a different mind and heart than others see it.

They see our nation as having the sacred value of a precious thing that someone important has died for. The people of Jesus look at the whole world and they look at every person in it as having the value of a precious thing that someone has died for. That person is Jesus.

Jesus is the love of the invisible God made visible: made real, made to be more than words, because love is what love does. God is real love. Love is what God does.

This is what God offers to us, and to the whole world. This love has the power to reconcile us to God. It has the power to make us God’s friends. This makes an essential change around us. It is how God’s good news comes into the world through what he did in Jesus.

There is no other offer in the whole world like the offer that God makes in Christ. God stretches out his arms to the world on a cross. There is no other message like that.

On the cross God offers to disarm us of everything that is a weapon of pride, or fear, or anger, or lust, or greed. God stretches out his arms to the world from a cross and God offers to re-arm us with something beside weapons. He disarms us with forgiveness, and peace, and love, and then these become the arms we bear in this world.

This is also repentance. Repentance is a complete turn-around. It is life in a new direction. There is really no other offer like this in the whole world. It is good news for the salvation of humankind. It has power to change the world.

God’s promise is that whoever who lays down their arms and receives this good news will become a part of a new heaven and new earth, with which God plans to replace this fallen creation. In fact God promises to give his people the power to make a glimpse of this new creation possible in what we say and do in our present lives.

It is the church’s job to proclaim this, to give this glimpse of a new creation. This is not just the job of individual Christians. It is not the job of the preacher (although “proclamation” sounds like a preaching word). Proclamation isn’t a skill for the gifted; it is a state of mind that is meant for everyone. It is the state of mind that comes from seeing great and wonderful things.

You see it and you want to say, “Look!” You see how much others need to see it and you want to say, “Look!”

Proclamation sounds like a shouting word. But it doesn’t have to be so. There are people whose lives shout. They live noisy lives and everybody has got to notice, whether they want to or not. But there are other people whose lives shout quietly, because they are different. It is like a teacher in a noisy classroom quieting the class by talking in a whisper.

The cross is like a whisper in a noisy world, and it can be quietly proclaimed by a body of people, a gathering of people, a church, better than just by individuals. The cross is about forgiveness, and love, and a new mind and life. And these are things that you can see best in a family of people. And these are things that you can see in the way a whole family reaches out to the world around them.

The cross that brings forgiveness, and love, and a new mind and life is the gospel, the good news of God in Jesus Christ. It comes from God to you, but it probably came from God through someone else. Maybe it came from God through a strange network of people working in some strange pattern in your life. In what they said, in what they did, and in how they shared the love of Jesus, the gospel was proclaimed to you.

For the good news to truly change you in its fullness, it requires this strange network, the body of people who may seem unconnected, but they aren’t. And you see them best when they are together. You see the good news best when you see them as a family, and when you find yourself in the middle of that family. Maybe your own family and friends were a part of this family of Jesus. Or maybe it first came to you from outside your family and circle of friends.

“How do these Christians live together? How do they greet me together? And how on earth do they put up with each other?”

One person alone can show a lot of love and forgiveness, and new life. But if that one person can take a stranger to meet a family of people gathered by Jesus, he or she can show a lot more. The proclamation of the gospel is really everyone’s work.

Of course, how we live together can also destroy the proclamation of the gospel by disgracing it; by living in contradiction to it. But that is another story.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:48) It is the job of witnesses to tell the truth, but they also must tell the truth of what they have seen and not just what someone has told them second hand. When we are told that it is our job to proclaim the gospel, it means that it is our job to know the gospel by experience.

The message is Jesus, and we have to know Jesus in order to be his witnesses. We have to know for ourselves the good things and the great things that Jesus has done, and continues to do. We cannot proclaim unless we can see.

One time in my life I was a witness in a civil case concerning a contested will. I went to the stand very sure of what I knew. I knew the woman whose will was being contested, and she had told me what she had changed in her will. She told me why she had done it.

But the process of being a witness was very confusing and full of anxiety. The lawyer who cross-examined me did a good job. He made me sound like a shaky witness, even though I knew the truth first hand.

This world we live in cross-examines us all the time, as Christians and as a church. This world looks to see if we make decisions and live like people who really know Jesus and trust him.

The part of the world that has not become God’s friend is complicated. It’s laid out like an obstacle course, to make us stumble and contradict what we believe.

Jesus said that we need “the power from on high” in order to be his witnesses. (Luke 24:49) We need the Holy Spirit to give us strength and help us to remember what we know clearly, and to be able to proclaim it consistently in how we conduct our lives and in how we speak. To say that the proclamation of the gospel is our job is to say that we need a power from beyond ourselves.

We need the gift of the Holy Spirit to live and speak as the friends of God. How can anyone be silly enough to think of being a friend of God without God? How can you be anybody’s friend without them? The Holy Spirit is the presence and power of Jesus who is your friend.

But the Holy Spirit also makes the presence of Jesus real between us, and among us, as a church. And the Holy Spirit also makes the presence of Jesus real through us, and through the church, to those who do not know him.

I remember a communication chart in a college textbook of mine. It showed two heads facing each other across the page. There was a little arrow inside the first head, pointing from the brain to the mouth. Then there was a longer arrow pointing across the page from the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the hearer. Then there was another short arrow pointing from the ear of the hearer to the brain of the hearer.

The proclamation of the gospel is a prayer for the Holy Spirit to fill that space between you, as the speaker, and the person who is listening to you. Or it is a prayer for the Holy Spirit to fill the space between your life, your actions, and the eyes of the person who is watching you and trying to read the message of your life. It is also a prayer for the Spirit to fill the space inside your head and the space inside of the head of the other person!

The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is a call to prayer. It is a prayer that the Lord would send his Spirit to somehow stand between us and the world, to enter the eyes and ears of others who see and hear us. Otherwise how can they see and hear Christ through us? We need “the power from on high.”

And so the Lord gives what he commands. He gives us, in Christ, what he calls us to give to the world. He gives us brothers and sisters, whom he calls the church, to help us.

His Spirit is the soil and the water and the sun that makes the good news grow in us. His Spirit is the wind of Pentecost that breathes in our words. His Spirit is the fire of Pentecost that warms hearts. And so we do our job: the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.

“The Birth of a Nation and the Faithfulness of God”

Preached on June 29, 2014

Scripture readings: Psalm 33; James 5:7-11

A little boy named Jimmy sat on a hilltop in a place where you could see the countryside for miles and miles. The weather was fair, and the wind blew, and the sky was blue and full of clouds. A feeling of wonder gave him goose bumps. He felt the presence of God.

Photos of the journey toward Desert Aire Washington:
June 2014

Jimmy said, “God I feel like you are so much bigger than I am. I love you God. Help me know how great you are.” And God said, “Well, Jimmy, to me a million dollars is like just a penny, and a million years is like just a minute.”

Jimmy said, “Gee, God, could I have one of your pennies?” And God said, “Sure Jimmy, wait just a minute.”

The Book of the Psalms is basically the prayer book, or the worship book, of the people of Israel. It is our prayer book too.

There are words and thoughts in the book of Psalms for anything in the human condition: anything you might feel that makes you confused, or afraid, or ashamed, or happy, or angry. The Psalms are God’s inspired invitation to tell him anything you are feeling.

This Book of Psalms, this book of prayer and worship, gives us a surprising freedom in how we pray. It allows us to be bold. It allows us to be scary. Think of the words that begin another Psalm; words of worship at the start of Psalm twenty-two: “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” These are God’s words.

These are God’s permission for you to say the very same words in your own prayer and worship. In some way the Psalms give you permission to say to God anything you want, just as long as you understand that God has the right to say anything he wants to you.

So, the Book of Psalms runs the spectrum of pretty much everything that you could ever need in order to live as an authentic worshiper of God, in this world. To be a true worshiper of God, with our roots deep in the prayers of the Psalms, is to be very bold and daring people indeed.

Have you ever thought how bold and daring a thing it is to say words like these words that we read in the Psalm this morning: “The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love?” (Psalm 33:5) These are bold and daring words. These are scary words.

My first thought was that this way of seeing things came from a special kind of faith; a high level of faith, an especially mature faith. But it doesn’t come from a special faith at all. It comes from basic, simple faith. The ability to say that the earth is full of the unfailing love of the Lord is simply what faith is.

My copy of the Jewish Study Bible tells me that Psalm 33 is a part of the opening prayers of worship in Jewish synagogues, in their regular Sabbath morning service. So these words define what worship is. They tell us what it means for us to live, in this world, as worshipers of God. We say: “The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of this unfailing love.”

These are the thoughts of a simple faith. But they are not necessarily the words of a simplistic faith. They are not the point of view of someone who hasn’t lived or paid attention to the way the world really is.

When did the people of Israel ever live through a time when they could possibly think that the world was not a complicated and dangerous place? No, it was always, for them, a bold and daring thing to say: “The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love.”

When they lived in their own land, and lived by their own laws, in the days when these words were written, they were bold and daring words, because, often enough, God’s own people ignored the righteousness of the Lord. Their land was not full of justice. God’s own people were the worst possible examples of God’s unfailing love.

There is so much to think about here, but one point is that this bold and daring faith is one of the sources of the courage behind the American Revolution and the American Experiment. You would think that those who believed that the earth was already full of the Lord’s unfailing love would never have the drive or the gumption to do anything bold and daring. But enough of the citizens of the first colonies had this faith, that it led them to defend themselves against the taking away of their freedom to govern themselves, or the restriction of the rights they had enjoyed for more than a hundred years since their founding as British colonies. Faith gave them gumption and made them bold, and daring, and active, and scary.

Because the representatives of the colonies, at the Second Continental Congress, in July of 1776, believed that the Lord loves righteousness and justice, they approved the Declaration of Independence where it said that they were: “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions.” They could make that appeal to God because they believed that God loves righteousness and justice.  And their declaration said that they were supporting their independence: “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

They relied on God’s protection because they believed that the earth was full of his unfailing love. And I have to say that they did much more than rely on God. They lived, and they worked, and they fought for what they believed in.

Their agenda was to practice, as a nation, what it was that God loved. It was their recipe for life, as individuals and as the nation that they hoped to become.

They didn’t know what would happen to them on account of their boldness and daring. They didn’t know if they would live to see their mission succeed.

They did believe that they loved righteousness and justice, and that they could do what they believed was right and just in a world that was full of the unfailing love of the Lord (even when that world seemed set against them). They would do what was right and just, even though they might die for it in a world full of the unfailing love of the Lord.

 Another bold and daring thing to believe, as worshiping people in this world, is the faith that says: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” (Psalm 33:12)

One of the major forms of entertainment in the colonies up to the time of the Revolution, and afterward, was the Sunday Sermon. Preachers of that time often compared their community, or their colony, to the stories about people of Israel in the Old Testament.

Preachers would compare the issues and temptations of their day with the wandering of Israel in the wilderness; or the temptation of Israel to worship false gods, or the temptation to ignore the needs of their neighbors or the vulnerable people in their land (namely poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien). In the Old Testament Book of Zechariah it says, “Thus says the Lord of the angel armies, Carry out true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.” (Zechariah 7:9-10) The people of the revolution were used to hearing these words directed straight at them.

The people of the thirteen colonies often thought of themselves as Israel. They often thought of their successes and failures as the results faithfulness or unfaithfulness to a covenant with the Lord.

A covenant is like an alliance or a partnership. It is like a contract, but much, much more than a contract.

A covenant is more like a promise. There are some promises that are so crucial, and so central, to your identity (the core of who you are and what God created you to be), that, even when you do break that promise, the relationship based on that promise does not come to an end.

Probably the best way to think of a covenant with God is the covenant of adoption. It’s like a promise that is meant to be permanent.

It is possible, in a court of law, for any of the parties involved, including the child, to annul an adoption; although it can’t be done without a proven cause. And yet the fact that such a promise has been made runs so deep that it surely cannot be forgotten. In God’s court of law, God’s adoption of us runs deeper than the love of a mother for her child.

It says this in Isaiah. There God says, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are ever before me.” (Isaiah 49:15-16) God’s adoption has its share of successes and failures, joys and sufferings; but it never ends. God never forgets his people.

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” is a covenant like that. Abraham and his descendants were adopted by a God who never let them go. They could un-choose their faithfulness to God, but they could not un-choose God’s faithfulness to them.

The Americans of the revolution knew that they could choose to be happy with God. They knew that they could choose to be unhappy with God. They knew that there were those who chose to live without God: but most Americans, in the beginning, knew that you couldn’t escape from the consequences of living in a world created by God, a world in which God loves righteousness and justice, and a world that is full of his unfailing love.

Was this a good thing for them? Yes it was very good: difficult but good!

The colonists disagreed on some important matters of faith; but most of them and their forbearers came to America to be free in following and living their faith. They came, and they lived, with an ambition to be the People of God in their own way. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

They believed that this would be good for them. They also believed that it could be difficult. They might make many mistakes and failures. And they might suffer for these. But that would be good, too, in the end, because: “the earth is full of his unfailing love.” Where, after all, in the Bible, is it ever smooth sailing when your God is the Lord? Ask Moses. Ask David. Ask Peter. Ask Paul. Ask God himself, who came in Jesus to give his life for the world.

We Christians, in America, seem to forget what it was like for the people of Israel and for the early Church to be the people whose God is the Lord. We forget the long story of the ups and downs of living in covenant with God.

When we forget this, we get impatient, and anxious, and fearful, and angry; and we go a little weird and wacko. That is why James counsels patience.

He uses farmers as an example. You seed and you harvest. You seed and you harvest. You seed and you harvest. You keep on trusting that the earth is full of the Lord’s unfailing love. And the special, successful discipline that comes from this is usually an antidote for weirdness and wackiness.

The faith expressed in the Psalms, and the patience in James, are the same discipline. As such, they are a cure for the weirdness and wackiness that get a hold of us when we get upset at the ups and downs of living with God by faith.

We live in a world and a culture of crisis, and fear, and anger, and pride, and hatred. And yet we believe bold and daring things like the earth being “full of the unfailing love of the Lord.” Do you believe that the world, as you see it is full of the unfailing love of the Lord? Can others see it?

There is a deep sanity and health in this. We forget that the American Revolution was a long, and bleak, destructive, and (often) almost hopeless war. There were far more defeats than there were victories. The state of war lasted from 1775 until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. In those long years our nation was held together most of all by those who held onto faith and patience.

The best thing that could happen in our country today would be for more people to become worshiping people who know the health and the sanity of living by faith and patience. But how can they, until they meet the God who became one of us in Jesus Christ, who lived, himself, by faith and patience? How can they live with the sanity and health of people who can live by faith and patience until they meet the God who showed his unfailing love for this world by dying for all of the sins and evils of this world on the cross? 

What does America hear Christians and our churches saying today? What do they see us doing? Does America hear the infinitely patient voice of the unfailing love of God? Can they see that we love righteousness and justice as God does? Can they see that we are daring and bold about it? Can they see any unfailing love in this?

Can they see the real reason for what we do? Can they see that our very reason for loving righteousness and justice is that we want to love this world and all the people in it as God loves it? Can others see the evidence that we want to be daring and bold about loving our world, and our neighbors, with God’s unfailing love?

Until Christians themselves show this God and speak with the voice of this God, until they show what it means to fill this world with the same unfailing love that God has for it; how can anyone else know what it means? Only then, perhaps, then, we can truly be the nation whose God is the Lord?

In God's Joy and Service

Preached on June 22, 2014. My first official sermon preached as pastor of the Riverside Presbyterian Church of Desert Aire, Washington.

Scripture readings: Zephaniah 3:9-17; Luke 10:1-3, 17-24.

I remember the summer when I was nineteen. I had just finished my studies at the local community college, and I was gearing up for going away to a state college.

My faith garden; May/June 2014

I was nervous all summer long, knowing that school would be different. I knew it might be a lot harder. And I would be put together with a lot of new people. And I knew that I needed money (a lot more money) than I had in the past. I was worried about money.

My Baci (“babcia”), my Polish grandmother, was spending that summer with us. One morning, she was in the kitchen cooking, as usual. And I went out to get the mail, and brought it in, and was sorting through it on the kitchen table, and there was an official looking letter for me.

I opened it. It was the announcement of a scholarship that had been awarded to me. All of a sudden Baci was on top of me. She had me in her arms, and she was hugging me and kissing me, and she was spinning me around the kitchen, and saying, “Oh Denny! That’s so wonderful!”

My Baci was very good at joy; much better than I have ever been, or probably ever will be.

The joy of my Baci is a good picture of the joy of the Lord. As I studied the scriptures for these verses, I was reminded that there are several Hebrew words for joy.

Where Zephaniah tells us that the Lord will rejoice over his people with singing, the word rejoice describes what my Baci did that summer day when there was something to celebrate.

That particular word for joy and rejoicing is “gil” or “yagil”. It means to circle, or to make a circle: like Baci when she was making circles with me around our kitchen. Sometimes “gil” is a dancing word.

More of faith garden

Or it’s what a football player does in the end zone when he makes a touchdown, if he’s still on his feet. It’s what a winning team does on the field or the court, at the end of the game.

It’s what young kids do when they’re happy. They start running in circles and jumping up and down. It is like Snoopy’s happy dance.

Zephaniah tells us that this is the joy that the Lord wants with his people. It’s what the Lord wants to do with us. Deep in the heart of God is a fountain of joy that sweeps around, and around, and around.

Jesus is God in the flesh and he shows the same kind of joy. When the seventy-two disciples came back from their mission journey, they shared their joy with Jesus and he shared it right back at them. Then, in verse twenty-one, Luke tells us that Jesus was “full of joy in the Holy Spirit”. The Greeks also had several words for joy. And this one (agalliaomai) is the Greek match for the Hebrew-dancing-joy.

So picture Jesus among that crowd of seventy-two, doing an ancient Hebrew dance around them, or grabbing them at random and swinging them in circles. It isn’t a far reach to say that.

The ancient Bible joy is a physical joy. It’s completely un-cool. Jesus has a dancing joy. In Jesus, God has real feet like our own feet for dancing out that dancing joy.

Now I will tell you why this is important to me. Sometimes the secret of joy is not a feeling or an emotion you have within yourself. The secret of joy comes from knowing that you are the light of someone else’s joy. You know that there is someone, someone who wants to hold you and swing you around in circles.

This is the secret of a happy church. God doesn’t only want to swing us around individually. Well, he may want to do that as well. But his joy is for us as a whole; as a body, as a family, as a community, as a congregation.

More of said garden

I was embarrassed by being the focus of someone else’s joy. And my moping around and worrying about money, and about my future, looked stupid and foolish in the light of the loving joy of a person who was much better than me.

A church or a congregation must learn not to mope. A church must learn not to carry a burden of responsibility too heavily; not to worry, not to be embarrassed, and maybe not to apologize for what it doesn’t have or what it hasn’t done.

At the same time, learning to accept the joyful love of God does not put an end to ambition. If you are convinced that you are joyfully loved, you have more hope and ambition than ever.

The proof of being the people of God and people of faith is to live a life that is changed because you know that you are joyfully loved. But the proof is in knowing that your bragging rights are not found in your own power and your own accomplishments. Your bragging rights are found in the grace and the mercy that claim you.

That is real grace. God wants to bring you joy, and he does it in many ways: through many reminders of his beauty, his love, and his strength.

The strongest way God has of sharing his joy with you is by reaching out to you from his cross.

In the letter to the Hebrews (12:2) we are told that Jesus, “for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame” that is treating the shame and pain of it as if it were nothing, nothing at all, compared with the joy that was set before him.

A view from the cucumbers

And what was the joy that Jesus saw before him, that made it all worth while? It was the people he was going to claim through the cross. It was you. You were the strange unspeakable joy in Jesus’ eyes when he died on the cross.

Now in all the Greek words for joy, the joy of the cross was not a dancing joy. It was graceful joy. There is a word for joy that is related to grace. The word for that joy is “chara”. The word for that grace is “charis”: “chara” and “charis”.  It is the joy of the Lord to give you his grace. It is the grace of the Lord to open your heart to his joy.

What more can we see about the secret of joy? When the seventy-two returned with joy, they said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.” (Luke 10:17)

Do you know what those devils like to do to people like you and me? They like to fill us with the fear that paralyzes us: to give us the fear that curdles our stomach; to give us the fear that makes us run in such a panic that we lose our way. More secretly those devils like to fill us with the fear that saddens us, depresses us, and beats down our ability to live thankfully and hopefully.

The disciples, in their mission for Jesus, found that speaking and working in their master’s name had the power to make the most frightening powers of darkness run and despair. Jesus is stronger than any devil, and you can take Jesus with you, into your greatest fears, into your greatest paralysis, and into your greatest sadness.

You can rely upon Jesus. You can call upon Jesus, and he will deliver you. He will be at home with you and make you at home with him.

Jesus will overcome. He will share his strength with you. Your circumstances may not change but what will change is your not being alone without someone who gets joy from loving you.

The joy comes afterwards, when you have lived to tell the tale, as we all will. It becomes part of the good news that you can tell others about.

I would say that this belongs in the garden

What else can we see about the great secret of joy? When the disciple shared their joy at the amazing things they were a part of, Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.” (Luke 10:18) That’s what Jesus saw.

But what did most other people see? Most people only saw a bunch of untalented and untrained amateurs, spreading out along dirt roads through little villages, who didn’t know what to expect, or what to say or do, and most of the people who saw them were really surprised.

The disciples were surprised too. They were so joyful, because they were so amazed. They could represent Jesus. They could work and speak in Jesus’ name.

The name of Jesus, here, could mean his authority; but what is that? What is authority? When I was a kid, we would play cops and robbers, and the cops could say, “Stop, in the name of the law.”

But those were the days of TV westerns, and we knew that we could say that because we were the law. We were “Lawman”. Doing something in Jesus’ name doesn’t work except to the degree that we are committed to being Jesus, and trusting that he will always be with us and in us. We must be Jesus-men, and Jesus-woman, and Jesus-kids, with Jesus in us. Together, we must be the Jesus-church. We are his and he is ours. What more can we want?

This is what those disciples had. They were surprised, but they were learning.

They were still normal people, just like us. And Jesus would have more than enough opportunities, in the future, to ask them, “Where is your faith?”

“Where is your faith?” But something great was going on here, something that truly defeated and frustrated the Devil.

Standing in a better garden than my own

It was not the power, or the ability, or the competence, or the skill of the disciples. It was the gracious power of Jesus in ordinary people.

You don’t know what to expect. You don’t know what to say or do. But you are on a mission. You are someone who has been sent here to do a job: to do lots, and lots, and lots of jobs.

And there is the power of Jesus.

There is a saying that life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. I am certain that if I have ever done any good at all in my life, it has had nothing to do with my plans.

In a strange way, whatever good I have done doesn’t even have anything to do with my job: because there are jobs and jobs. There are jobs you get paid for. There are jobs that are roles in life that you think you have, in terms of your gifts, and your abilities, and your understanding of life.

But there are other jobs that belong to you (to each one of us), and you and I know very little about these secret, God-given jobs. If we are lucky, people will tell us later what we really did, once upon a time, without our knowing it.

This is what I know. I have a job in life that I don’t know anything about. I don’t know what I will do or say, or what it will look like when I get to it, tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Whatever it is, I will do it as a human being who belongs to Jesus, and who loves Jesus, but who also needs a lot of help following Jesus. Our help comes from others and it comes from Jesus himself.

Jesus will come through, and one way or another, that will defeat the Devil. And that is where our joy will come from.

Jesus says, “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:20)

Now here Jesus does not say, “Wipe that smile off your face.” He is saying, “Yes! You have a lot of things to be joyful for. Now, let me tell you the greatest thing to give you joy. You belong to the family that has its home place in heaven. You belong to me and my Father.”

Heaven is about so much more than living forever. It means belonging forever, and being rejoiced over for ever.

It's my neighbor's garden, to which I was a contributor

Remember that Jesus is celebrating along with his disciples. They are right to be joyful, and so are we. Jesus wants to celebrate with us. He wants us to be joyful.

So Jesus points to a deeper joy. The disciples of Jesus were celebrating success and power. Jesus told them to celebrate something much better and much more important. He said, “Celebrate that you are written in heaven, in my book.”

Jesus’ book in heaven is about love, and mercy, and belonging, and everlasting life. Christians who celebrate the power of God without celebrating the mercy of God are in danger of forgetting the secret of that power.

The power is all about mercy. Otherwise we would never know anything about it. The people who remember the mercy will be better at giving mercy to others: which is what the good news is about.

The people in the villages may not have known who Jesus was before he came to them. They still would not have known who Jesus was if the disciples had only come through and talked about him by name. The people in the villages knew all about Jesus because they disciples did what Jesus did among them.

The healing and the deliverance that the disciples brought were not only acts of power. They were acts of grace, mercy and love. The disciples of Jesus were grace-people, mercy-people, and love-people.

Neighbor Ottis, my farming partner, and his sunflowers

When Jesus followed his disciples into the villages where they had gone, and met the people who had met his people, he was no stranger to them. They were not afraid of Jesus unless they were set against him. When they saw Jesus, they received him as the master of grace, mercy, and love.

The kingdom of God is not just about power. The kingdom of God is about grace, and mercy, and love. If we remember that, then we will have a joy that is gentle, and humble, and healing, for others.

There is a great ambition in reaching out for this. The end of moping is not the end of a great ambition. Now that they knew the joy of Jesus, the disciples wanted to do more than ever.

It will be like the joy of my Baci, who didn’t have one proud bone in her body. Her authority in my life had nothing to do with power. It was only love.

Her dancing me around the kitchen floor embarrassed me in all my teenage pride and it showed me what I was missing. Let’s remember the joy of being rejoiced over by somebody else who happens to be named Jesus, who is (in his very being) all the fullness of God. Then people will see the simple dancing joy of God reaching out to them through us.

The Cross Beams

“The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) -

The beams of the world are made from wood.

They’re fastened with nails and stained with blood.

Embraced by the outstretched arms of God,

They bind all things for good.

The beams of the world shore up our heart

For God’s renovation, every part:

The clean up of Satan’s poison dart;

Then our true life shall start.

The beams of the world are battle torn.

They rise against evil, fear, and scorn.

Protecting the weary, weak, and worn,

They guard the coming morn.

The beams of the world an outline trace,

Through order and chaos, pain and grace.

They shape what they bear, through time and space,

Revealing God’s true face.

The beams of the world are scales that weigh

The worth of a life, a choice, a day,

By weight of a God who works in clay,

And dies to have his say.

The beams of the world are lines and bars

That carry the music of the stars;

The ballad of long and hopeful wars,

Where God has won his scars.

The beams of the world hang low with fruit,

While sliver and thorn send forth their shoot

Where God hung his head, forlorn and mute,

And bowed to plant their root.

The beams of the world, unseen, untold,

Are stronger than steel, more royal than gold.

All heaven and earth they gently hold:

The hands of God enfold.

The beams of the world enthrone a King,

Like girders that tower, and vault, and spring

The crossing he died and rose to bring:

The life the angels sing.

Written by Dennis Evans, October 2004

The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA, 2010

The Contest

Sharp was the blow

The hammer let go.

Deep were the wounds, and red.

Soft was the sigh,

The Savior’s reply,

“All was for love,” he said.

Black was the day

They did him away.

Light hid her face for shame.

Bright were the trails

That flowed from the nails.

Gladly Love bore the blame.

Cruel the tongues

That mocked as he hung;

Laughing to bruise his soul.

Mercy the word

His enemies heard.

Love prayed to make them whole.

Dead was the King;

A castaway thing,

Broken within the grave.

Strong he arose,

Unbeat by his foes.

Love won the power to save.

Written by Dennis Evans, 1997