Help for the Road Home: Forwardness

Preached on Sunday, August 22

Scripture Readings:
Exodus 13:21-15:3; 1 Corinthians 10:1-22

One of my favorite parts of the Book of Exodus is chapter fourteen verse fifteen: Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.” For me, a shorter way to say this would be like this: “Stop talking; just go!”

I like this partly because it’s funny. It is as if God expected Moses to know, without being told, that he was supposed to lead his people through the sea. It is as if God expected Moses to know he was supposed to think of the unthinkable and to know how to do the impossible.

This sounds funny to me, but it has its serious side. I can’t help thinking that we are supposed to be able to think of the unthinkable. We are supposed to be able to know how to do the impossible.



Although the word faith is not used here, faith is the key. In fact, if we understand the story of the exodus it will help us to understand what faith is all about. The story of the exodus will correct some of our wrong notions about what faith is.

Moses had a good idea of what faith was. He knew enough about faith so that, when he looked at his people, he could see (and hear) that they didn’t have much of it. Moses said, “Be still.” “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Exodus 14:14)

In Eugene Peterson’s “The Message”, Peterson takes the phrase “be still” and makes it say “Shut up!” The minds and mouths of the people of God were running a hundred miles an hour.

They were desperate. They were under attack. They were going to be captured, punished, maimed, raped, and made slaves again. It was questionable whether those who lived would be the lucky ones. Their slavery would be much worse than it had ever been before they had ever dared to hope to be free.

So they were “crying out”. It sounded like blame. It sounded like complaining. But it was much more than that. They were crying, “Help!” And they needed it.

But Moses said “be still”; or “shut up”! Faith is the gift of being quiet. When we are worried, or afraid, or angry, or full of regret there are too many voices jabbering on and on inside us; so many voices that we cannot hear God. We cannot receive the peace of God. We cannot receive the direction of God.

We listen to too many voices, and so we are commanded to silence. We are commanded to “be still” and to “shut up.”

The people of God were in survival mode, but they were not survivalists. A survivalist at least knows how to be quiet and still, and how to keep on going forward.

The people of God would have run off screaming, if there had been anywhere to run off to. There was no place to run.

There was the Egyptian army on one side, and the sea on the other. God’s people couldn’t see anything but unbeatable enemies and impossible obstacles. So the people stood where they were, and yelled, and complained, and blamed others, and they could not hear God speak to them. If they couldn’t be quiet there was nothing else for them to do.

Of course we don’t scream and shout because we are quiet people. It would be impolite. And we would never complain, because we were raised not to do that either; or blame others, or make excuses. Our parents would never let us get away with that.



And yet it is surprising how easy it is for us to live, practically speaking, in a different way than we were raised to do. As grown ups we often feel we have earned the right to do many things our parents would never let us get away with as children. So we do complain, and place blame, and make excuses. But however much right we have to do such things, it is no way to hear the voice of God. It is no way to be able to go forward in the peace of God, and to think of the unthinkable, and to know how to do the impossible.

This is why Paul said that so few of God’s people made it home after passing under the cloud and through the sea. He warned his Christian friends to watch out, because this failure was not as unusual as they thought. It was the common experience. It could happen to them. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

Part of faith is the will to be quiet and still, so that God can tell you what you haven’t been able to think of, and to see what you haven’t been able to see, and to do what you think is impossible.

In this life there are possibly times and places where it is the smart thing to scream and shout, or run with all your might. But not on God’s road; not on the road that leads home. Home, and the road home, means connection with God and with other people; being part of what God is doing, building a kingdom, moving toward a new world, a new heaven and earth; and bringing other people along with us to join us and God on the road.

There are ways we need to grow to be people of faith, and hope, and love. There are ways we need to grow to find the life that God has created us for. Part of how we do this is through the art of being still and being quiet.

When we take time to be still and quiet, God can show us the way. There is that verse from Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) This is an essential part of faith.




But, when the Lord says to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me?” he is talking to Moses who is counseling stillness and quietness. Was Moses being just as noisy on the inside as his people were on the outside? Did Moses only appear to be faithful, when he was actually boiling and trembling on the inside? We do that, don’t we?

Was Moses busy making speeches about being still, and was he in the wrong because he was so busy talking? Churches take such a long time to get around to many things because they talk, and talk, and talk. I do this. And I let my churches do it too. I try to make sure that everyone has their say, and I think this is part of my job.

And it is so much easier to talk than to actually do something. But it is part of faith to know when to stop talking and when to do something.

But there is more to that in God’s message to Moses. “Tell the Israelites to move on.” “Tell them to go forward.” (NIV and RSV) Sometimes we have to go beyond being still and quiet. And we have to do more than just do something. Something is not enough. We have to move on. We have to go forward.

Forwardness is indispensable to faith and to the road home. If home is the family of God, then families are blessed by the ability to go forward, and forwardness is a kind of faith that families nurture in their children and their grandchildren.

God’s people had turned their back to the sea and their faces toward the Egyptians. Moses told them, very wisely, that faith meant facing the Egyptians and seeing what God would do. Faith is facing our fears and seeing what God will do.

But sometimes there must be a forwardness about our faith. Looking at what we fear may not be the same as facing it.

The people of God had a choice of what to face: their enemies and fears, or their impossibilities and obstacles. Moses was very wisely counseling one kind of faith, when God required a very different kind of faith. God had to tell Moses to shut up and just go forward.

I should understand this better than I do, because it is an important part of the story of my life. You know that, by nature, I am impossibly shy, and slow, and awkward, and backward. By nature I can’t do anything in front of other people. I know there must be a lot of other things wrong with me too, but let’s not go into those right now.

I was twelve years old when God first started pressuring me into the ministry. I didn’t give in until I was nineteen, when I realized that the only way I could be happy was to move forward in what I knew God wanted me to do.

I started doing what I needed to do in order to go forward. The problem was that, in so many ways, I was a hopeless case, even as a human being.

Nobody who knew anything about the ministry and anything about me gave me any encouragement at all. They all encouraged me to do something else with my life.
Some people thought that I had a subconscious need for acceptance by others, and that was the real reason for wanting to go into the ministry. But those people neglected to see that my church experience was basically in a church full of conflict, where half the people were in conflict with the other half, and where ministers were usually only accepted by half of the people in the church. For me, church was the very place where I would be asking for trouble and not be happy at all.

Some of the most discerning people recommended that I go and get a life first, and only then should I think about the ministry. I tried that for just a little while (about a year and a half after college) and it was a big relief, believe me. And yet I knew what I had to do. I had to go forward; not the forward that other people recommended, in all their wisdom, but the forward that God kept showing me, in all its impossibility and foolishness (like thinking you could walk through the sea as if on dry land).

Did it work? I don’t know. I have no proof. I still have an awful lot wrong with me. I can’t say that I have changed a bit.

But I would humbly submit that I have grown. I may not have the life that others think I should have, but I am very engaged in life; in my own life, and in the lives of others. I do this because of God; who gave himself to me and for me in Christ.

God has a forward for you and for all his people. God has a forward for the church. When the Lord said that he would gain glory through Pharaoh, and the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart, the Lord meant that the people of God would see God’s glory, and know him better, by letting themselves be pushed forward according to the will of God.

We will never really know God or his purpose for us, unless we are willing to think the unthinkable, and do the impossible, and go forward.

The truth is that you may very well not become a different person as a result of this, but you will become your real self. You will become the person you were meant to be all along. And you will not know a different God, but you will know the God who was there, all along, calling and pushing you forward. And this church may never become a different church, but it will truly become the church as it was meant to be; the church as God sees it.

Paul says that Israel went through a kind of baptism under the pillar of cloud and fire that led them through the wilderness, and through the impassible sea. And Paul says that Christ was with them in the food and drink they had in the desert. (1 Corinthians 10:1-3)

The baptism was about Christ as well. Baptism, for us, is a symbol of a spiritual reality, because the new life we have through Jesus comes through his dying for us on the cross and his rising from the dead to give us a new life and life everlasting.

When we come to Christ it is a move forward. And when we keep on living in Christ it means continuing to move forward. In Christ and his cross we die to our self centered life. In Christ and his cross we die to our enslavement to ourselves, and to our sins, and to our past. We die to the barriers we raise between us and God, the barriers between ourselves and others, and the barriers between ourselves and the people God wants us to be.

We die and we rise to that new life because, in Christ, God moves us forward. This is a process that never stops working.

The same thing happened to God’s people at the Red Sea. To think the unthinkable, and do the impossible, they had to die to themselves, and rise, and go forward. It was a baptism.

There is always the chance that we can forget all about the faith involved in going forward, and stop the process. The people of Israel did this many times. It was a lesson they had to learn over and over, and many of them never learned it.

Going forward is a kind of baptism. It is the heart of faith. Forwardness is what faith requires because it is at the heart of being a child of God. It is at the heart of really coming home.

Forwardness is at the heart of God himself, and his plan for us, and his love for us. When we accept and receive his forwardness we have what we need for the road home; the road to life and life everlasting.

Help for the Road Home: Preparation

Preached Sunday, August 22

Scripture Readings: Exodus 4:18-23; Romans 8:1-17

When my mom was a kid she and a friend of hers did an odd thing. She has told the story of it a number of times, and my impression is that she was a young teenager at the time; about fourteen or fifteen years old.

The odd thing about this story is that it seems more like the sort of thing that a boy would do. She and one of her best friends found a way to get into the city drains.


They lived in Venice, which is a district of the city of Los Angeles that was built along the beach. In winter, the city periodically has tropical rainstorms, and there is no place for all that water to go. So (many, many years ago) a system of drains was built, under the streets, to capture the water and carry it to the ocean.

These were not sewers. The sewers were completely separate. These were just purely drains. The main drains are big; more than big enough for an adult to walk through without stooping over.

Well, my mom and her friend climbed down into this system of drains and followed it. They didn’t know where they were going, but my mom feels that they must have gone for hours and for miles, until they came out into a large marshy area along the ocean.

Many years passed before she told her parents about this. I remember, as a child, having heard the story before, and then finding myself listening as my mom told her mom the story for the first time. I remember my grandma, my Baci, saying “NO!”

Now, there wasn’t anything immoral about what my mom did. It was just extremely foolish and potentially dangerous; and parents are supposed to protect their children (even their teenaged children) from doing such things. Children know this.

All kinds of bad things might have happened to my mom because she didn’t let her parents protect her. But, looking back, this adventure in the city drains is one of my mom’s cherished childhood memories. It is a story of the freedom of childhood; the story of children who have a home.

The Exodus is the story of God’s people going home to freedom. The odd thing about the story in Exodus is that the home in question (the place that would become known as the land of Israel) was a place where God’s people had never truly lived before. They had lived and wandered all around it, for generations, but they had never truly lived in it. They had always been outsiders looking in.

And after all this wandering on the outside God’s people had gone to live as slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. In a sense, slavery in Egypt was the only home they had ever known. But slaves are perpetual outsiders.

The fact that God had allowed them to spend generations wandering outside their true home; and then (on top of that) the fact that God had led them away from their true home, into Egypt (and then warned them in advance that they would spend centuries there in slavery (Genesis 15:13) is very odd.

Their true home was waiting for them. God really liked the home he intended for them. God described it to Moses as “a good and spacious land; a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:8) But, for a long time, it wasn’t the time to go home.

There are a number of reasons why God didn’t let them live in their true home at once. For one thing, if they had all gone straight home, in the time of Abraham, there would have been no drama; and so there would have been no story. And maybe life is better when it has a story with drama.



For another thing, Abraham and his family, the first generation of God’s people, would have been completely swallowed up by their neighbors and disappeared. Again there would have been no drama and no story to tell.

So the story of the exodus and the road home is the essential story. It is the story of the move from aimlessness to home. It is the story of the move from slavery to home, and freedom, and identity, and character. The exodus is a salvation story. It helps us understand the meaning of what we call salvation.

In the end, the escape from Egypt was part of an escape from death. Slavery is a kind of living death. You can’t be yourself or know yourself when you are a slave.
And death was going on in the struggle between Egypt and God’s people. There were deadly plagues sweeping through Egypt, and the Hebrew people were spared from the greatest of these plagues because of a death.

It was the death of a lamb. In each Hebrew home there was a lamb that each family of the Hebrews sacrificed in order to provide the meal that would be their last meal in slavery; their first meal in freedom. A lamb died, and its blood was used to mark each of their homes, to ward off the plague of death that passed over all the homes in Egypt.

Jesus is the Lamb of God. The cross is the sacrifice of God, himself, who came down from heaven to be a human being in Jesus. He became the lamb who takes away the sins of the world and brings us to home and to freedom.

Home is our Father’s house. Home is where God is. It is heaven. Home is also life lived, here and now, with the freedom that comes from the selfless giving of God.

This is the truth hidden in the message that Moses was sent to give to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. In this message God calls his people his son. The message runs as follows. ‘This is what the Lord says: Israel is my first born son…. ”Let my son go, that he may worship me.”’ (Exodus 4:22-23)

Real worship is a relationship with God. Worship exists when we are in a living relationship with God in which we are truly free and truly at home. Without God we know nothing of ourselves, or of life, or of home.

The process of finding these things out is like the drama of a great story. Unless we know ourselves as aimless wanderers like Abraham and his family, or as slaves like the Hebrews in Egypt, we cannot understand the freedom that we have been created for.



The Apostle Paul talks about this freedom in his letters. In Romans chapter eight he writes about the slavery we live in when we live our lives separated from God, and the freedom we have been given through Jesus. “Through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8:2)

In a way, my mom’s adventure (no matter how extremely foolish and potentially dangerous) was a story about home and freedom. There was courage, and mystery in it. There was faith, and hope, and love in it. And this is what it is like to live with God. In some way this is our proper home, and this is also the road home.

At the place where we find Moses, in this part of the Scriptures, he was preparing to lead his people home. And, to do this, he had to return to the place he had left long ago: the place of slavery, the place so far from freedom, the place where his people had lost themselves.

It was a place where he had failed before. It was a place where he and his family would be in danger. It was a place where things could go horribly wrong and many people could be harmed because of him.

We see Moses prepare for this.

The first thing he did was to go to Jethro, his father-in-law, and get his permission to leave, and take his wife and children with him to Egypt. “Let me go back to my own people in Egypt, to see if any of them are still alive.” (4:18)
Now this was only a partial truth. It was a truth that deliberately concealed the truth. Moses wasn’t going to Egypt to see if his family there was still alive.

He would find that out, of course. But he was going, at God’s command, to face the king, and tell the king to let his people go. That was the main truth: the true truth.

The fact that Moses held back the truth is not an example to us. But one good thing was accomplished. Jethro could not talk Moses out of taking God’s road home.

It is possible that other people will try to keep us from finding our true home; the true life that God designed us for. The book of Exodus tells us that, at times, Moses was afraid. (Exodus 2:14) The Letter to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, tells us that, because of his faith, Moses was not afraid. (Hebrews 11:27) The point to this is that, when you look at Moses’ life as a whole, you see that Moses faced the king who had the power to kill him and his family and his people. Moses faced his fears. That is the real definition of courage. That is the courage that comes by faith.

When you are young you have to do this all the time. If you don’t face the things you fear, you will never grow up.

You can’t be afraid to take hard and unknown paths. You can’t be afraid to stand up for what is right. You can’t be afraid of what other people think. You can’t be afraid of peer pressure. You can’t be afraid of taking the road less traveled by. If you are afraid, you will lose the most precious thing you possess; which is your own unique personhood which God has given you in his creation and in his death and resurrection for you.

The same is true for all of us as we get older. We have new fears to face, and we must face them, or shrivel up in the face of them.

Moses prepared for the road home by designing his life so that he wouldn’t get talked out of it by others. We must all prepare for the road home by not letting anyone tell us we can’t do it.

Another way Moses prepared for the road home was by taking his family with him. The road leads to that “good and spacious land, flowing with milk and honey:” It leads to God’s freedom in Christ. If we don’t share the road with others, if we don’t help the ones we love to walk this road with us, then we are being afraid again and we are not free at all.

My cousin Don (who is a much better Christian than I am) is a teacher. He has taught remedial classes. Currently he teaches an elementary class. His goal, if I can put this right, is to teach more than facts. He tries to teach kids how to learn, how to solve problems, how to see things through, how to build their sense of positive identity, how to be truly free in God’s sense of freedom.



Paul, in Romans, has more to say about this. “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.” (Romans 8:18) Sharing the road home with others shows how ready we are for home ourselves.
Another way that Moses prepared for the road home was by taking his staff with him. Only it wasn’t his staff any more. It was the staff of God. (Exodus 4:20)

The staff was Moses’ shepherd’s staff. He used it to control the sheep. At the fair this month we will see kids using something (a judging stick?) like the staff of Moses to control their animals in the livestock judging.

As a prince of Egypt, Moses may well have had a different staff in his hand; a fancy staff that was more like a royal scepter, and was a mark of his office and his authority. But Moses had lost that staff. That staff was the symbol for a whole way of life that was lost for Moses.

His shepherd’s staff represented Moses’ failure. It represented the story of Moses running for his life and making a new life as a foreigner in a strange land. Moses’ staff represented the story of his life.

After his meeting with God at the burning bush, it was no longer his staff any more. It was the staff of God. In the same way, his own life wasn’t his own life anymore, it was God’s life.

The staff represented the authority of Moses in his new life with God. It represented the same kind of authority that we have as God’s people. Moses had the authority of being a weak, foolish, vain, fallible human being, who was called to a better purpose by the grace of God.

Through Christ, and the dying and resurrection love of God in Christ, we all have this authority to live and to take others with us on the road home. We all have the story of the love of God that empowers us in spite of our weaknesses, and raises us up above our sins and failures.

The staff of God was no magic wand, but Moses would appear to use it as one: to turn it into a snake; to make all kinds of things happen; to part the Red Sea and make a path for God’s people, through the waves, on their way home.

All of us have a story to tell, and a life that has been changed because the Lord has made himself a part of it. This changed life, and this story of a new life, are like a wand in our hand that helps us pass through the waves and the barriers between us and home. We hold that story close to us for its help along the way.

We have a story. We have seen what God has done. We can hold onto it and live by faith.


There is more, but that’s enough for now. There is this preparation. Let us prepare by not letting people talk us out of our journey and our growth on the road. Let us prepare by having the courage of God’s freedom to help others become free. Let us prepare by keeping the story of the grace of God in our lives close to us, as evidence to help us live by faith. Then we will have God’s help for the road to home and to freedom.

Help for the Road Home: Sufficiency

Preached Sunday, August 15

Scripture Readings:
Exodus 3:1-12; 4:1-13
2 Corinthians 12:7-10

The people of God were about to set foot on the road home; but they didn’t know it yet. And they didn’t really know anything about home. Home was nothing but a story. Home was an old, old promise that had never come true.

For centuries they had been slaves in Egypt. They couldn’t have been at home there! And yet, perhaps, they had grown all too much at home in Egypt.



They had allowed themselves to grow comfortable in a place where they did not belong. They had allowed themselves to grow comfortable in a place, and in a way of life, where they could never hope to be the people they were created to be and called to be by God.

God’s people knew nothing about home. But they were about to set foot on the road that would take them there.

The key to understanding the meaning of home and the road home are the promise of God. Home is wrapped up in the promise God gave to Moses, “I will be with you.” (Exodus 3:12) Our home is the presence of the God who created us and knows the purpose of our creation; the God who knows us through and through; the God who saves us and sets us free; the God who calls us by name.

The truth is that God is our home. That is why heaven will be our home. That is why the new heaven and the new earth will be our home. And that is why we can know what it is to be at home right now.

Life for us, here in this world, is the road home, and home is where God is. But God is here with us on the road: so even the road is our home.



The reason for this is that home is a relationship. Home is a whole network of relationships, but there is a center to it all. The center makes it possible for that whole network to hold together. The center is God, because we are children of God.

Perhaps because I have never been married I see the central relationship of home as parental. I am told that parents never stop being parents to their children, and children never grow out of being their parents’ children. And from my end of it I believe that this is true.

I think about times long ago; of being at home on the road. When I was a little kid, before we moved away from Southern California, my family would go camping for a week or two up north every summer.

My parents would put us kids to bed dressed in tomorrow’s clothes, and wake us up in the dark, and carry us or lead us, bleary eyed, out to the car we had packed the day before. Once in a while I would open my eyes and see the lights on the freeway as we drove north, or the darkness of what they called “The Grapevine”; the winding highway that would take us up into the Central Valley.

It was getting light before we got to Bakersfield, and there, out in the middle of nowhere, is where we stopped for breakfast along the road. There was no freeway there, in those days, and no rest stops.

We used the bushes to go potty. And my mom would open two thermoses and a package of doughnuts. One thermos had coffee for my mom and dad. The other had hot chocolate for me and my sisters.

Somewhere along the way we turned east and started up the hills, and the hills changed from grass to oak trees, and the oaks changed into pines, and we went higher and higher, and the roads got scary because they were only two-lanes and they had no shoulders. You could look straight down for hundreds of feet down the steep sides of those mountain canyons.

Then the road started passing between giant sequoia trees. We were almost there, and then we were.

We chose our spot, and there were sleeping bags to carry, and ice chests to carry, and lanterns to carry, and the box with the tent to carry and set up, and water to fetch and to carry. There was a lot of carrying; a lot of work. We kids worked, and whined, and our work probably wasn’t worth very much; and we were more work than help, for our parents.

Long, long childhood days passed, and it came time for the road again; the real road home. But camp had become our home and we didn’t want to go to our real home.

What a surprise it was when we finally got home and found that we were glad. There were our rooms, and our toys, and our friends. But home was work too.

That old summer road was always home, from the beginning to the end. It was all about freedom from oppression. It was all about my family living at our very, very best together. In spite of us children whining, we were at our most alive on that road. We were in the place where we were at our best creating good memories.

So what do we say about home? It fits the way the Lord described it to Moses. “So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:8)

The land of the sequoias, and the King’s Canyon, and Cedar Grove where we camped, was that good and spacious land for us. It was the end of slavery, but not the end of hard work, and being of help, and caring for others. It was hard beds, and roasted marshmallows, and campfires, and singing. It was the wonders of God’s creations around us. It was the amazing easiness of waking up and getting up, so eager and ready to go, so much earlier in the morning than we ever did at home.

God talked to Moses about home. It was talk about room and freedom, the end of slavery and oppression. Home would flow with milk and honey: not silver and gold, not time-saving and labor-saving conveniences, not games and entertainment, not thrills or pillows. The goats would give lots of milk, but those goats would have to be milked. There were lots of flowering things to feed the bees and give those bees something make their honey with; but the honey would have to be found, and the bees would have to be dealt with.



With Jesus our road home is also about freedom. The love of Jesus gives us the freedom to cross over into the life that we have been created for. Grace makes our lives into a spacious land where we can put our slavery behind us; our dysfunction; our hardened, and broken, and worn-down hearts. But this is work for us, too; to will it and to carry it through.

My old summer road would often make me forget the work that went along with it. Most of all, it took a lot of work on my parents’ part. Being at home on the road was their grace at work for us: it no lark for them.

The road home for the people of Israel was a big challenge: scary and a lot of work. It was about escaping from one of the strongest powers of their day. It was about crossing the desert, where there was no food or water, with thousands and thousands of men, women, children, babies, and livestock. It was about an invasion of the people who were living on the land that was supposed to be their home.

Paul was a servant like Moses; sent to call God’s people and lead them home. It was no lark. Many of God’s people in Paul’s time were slaves too. It was a world that worshiped such strange things: strange things like success, and wealth, and wine, and sex, and entertainment. It was a world that laughed at you and made things tough for you if you didn’t play along. It was a world like ours.

The home and the road that takes you there is a wonderful road, but it is not a lark. A week or two in the mountains takes a lot of work. But a life where there is real freedom for you to live in that network of relationships, at your best, and for others to live with you at their best is not easy.

And to really help others to find their way into that life of freedom is not easy either. We can live a holiday life for a holiday, but not for much longer.

And this brings us to the matter of sufficiency. Moses wondered who he was that he should be able to lead his people home to God’s freedom. (Exodus 3:11) There were so many reasons for him to fail. After all, he had failed at the start, when he was a young prince of Egypt and had tried to come to his people’s rescue.

When I perform a wedding, I wonder whether the couple who are standing before me are sufficient for leading each other into God’s freedom. Can they succeed in their mission to help each other to grow as free, and happy, and thankful children of God? Are they sufficient for rejecting all the temptations of self-righteousness, selfishness, unfairness, spite, the competition for dominance? Are we sufficient for this in our families? Are we sufficient for this with our neighbors and community?
And what about the church! Are we sufficient to lead our brothers and sisters in Christ into greater and greater freedom in the grace and love of God that is found in Christ? Are we sufficient as a church to reach out beyond ourselves? Are we sufficient to bring the good news of the road home to those who seem to have such different lives and such different purposes in living?

In this matter, the scriptures tell us “no”, we are not sufficient. If we were sufficient for these things, our message would be about ourselves and about our program for becoming the outstanding and wonderful and amazing people that we are. But we’re not.

The key is in the simple words of the Lord to Moses: “I will be with you.” There is no greater wisdom and no greater joy than to accept our insufficiency and to really understand God’s sufficiency for us.

Our lives are meant to be a living story of the grace of God. This is what the life of Jesus was for. This is what his sacrifice on the cross was for. This is what his resurrection was for.

It is all for us. It is all for grace. It is all for planting the life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus in each one of us. The story is all about God whose sufficiency makes it possible for each one of us, and for all of us working together, to be the living proof of the power of the grace of God, in Christ.

Unbeknownst to himself, the Christian named Paul wanted to tell a story about how spiritual, and how holy he was. Then, instead of being a witness to Jesus, he would have become a witness to himself. Jesus took away Paul’s sense of sufficiency and, then (when this loss brought Paul to the edge of desperation), Jesus told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:8)



We don’t know for sure what Paul’s source of weakness and insuffiency was.

It may have been people problems. Everything would be going well in Paul’s work. He was guiding people into the new life of the road home. People were learning the new freedom and the transformation that come from Jesus. People were growing in their faith, and in their sense of calling, and their growing together in love. And so many times it would blow up in his face.

There would be people problems; fights, and rivalries, and desertions. People problems would come up and seem to spoil everything. It was enough to make him want to quit. These people problems were a thorn in his flesh.

Paul’s thorn in the flesh that made him feel so weak and insufficient may have been a matter of health. In his first letter to the Corinthian Christians Paul reminded them of the state he was in when he first came to them. “I came to you in weakness, and in fear and in much trembling.” (1 Corinthians 3:3) Writing to the Galatians Paul wrote about the state he was in when he was with them. “You know that it was because of a physical infirmity that I first announced the gospel to you; though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me…” (Galatians 4:13ff)
We all know people who have had something happen to them that makes them completely dependent on others. The longer we live the more we understand how very hard that is; how humiliating (at least at the start) and how frustrating.

There are thorns in the flesh that take all a person’s illusions away. And we are full of illusions about ourselves and our abilities. We are full of illusions even about the gifts of God. We are full of illusions about our sufficiency to take the road home and to bring others along with us, in the freedom of the children of God that comes through Christ.

The bush in the desert was a common shrub, like thousands of others, adapted with thorns and thin and leathery leaves to a life in a in a hard thirsty land. It is hard to see beauty in that desert shrub.

The presence of God in the bush changed nothing about the bush except to make it the center of God’s holy ground. This bush became a place for meeting the grace of God that was reaching out to a defeated man, a failed prince, and his enslaved people.

Our insufficiency is the place where God’s power can be seen. It is the place where the proof can be seen of how we can grow in the freedom of God’s children.
We can grow on our way home, and we can help others on the road with us. We can help them because we are really just like them: insufficient.

God is sufficient, and we can be the living and contagious proof that, just as we are, the presence of God can burn in us, and not consume us. The sufficiency of God can make us and our lives into holy ground.

Help for the Road Home: U-Turns

Preached Sunday, August 8, 2010

Scripture readings: Exodus 2:11-3:6; Acts 9:1-25

The story of the exodus, that takes us through several books of the Old Testament, is a travel story: a story of the road. So is the Book of Acts.

They are stories about a road home.



Moses and others with him take their people, God’s people, from slavery in Egypt to the home they never knew. They go home to the Promised Land.

In the Book of Acts the disciples of Jesus learn, and grow, and become the church (which is a kind of home). But the church is a home that is made out of people, not a building.

The church in Acts is very much on the road. And the road leads them out into the whole world. Their road home spreads them out like a rising tide; a pretty small tide in their own generation, but one that is still rising and growing in ours.

The story of God’s people, modeled for us in the Scriptures, is the story of a journey home. If we want to be part of that journey it is important to notice that their road home does not run in a straight line. If we want to be part of that story of what God began so long ago, and what God is still doing today, we need to know that it would never be the story that it is without many corrections and many u-turns.

In fact the whole Bible is the account of one giant u-turn. We and the whole world ran away from home (ran away from God) in the Garden of Eden, in the Book of Genesis. We don’t return home until the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, which is also a book of the road home.



The gospel, the good news of God, in Jesus, is the news of an amazing plan on the part of God to engineer the correction of a tremendous mistake; a disastrous and deliberate wrong turn. The first humans, in the form of Adam and Eve, were part of a plan by God to make us children of God by means of intimacy and partnership with him. Adam and Eve took this plan and ran with it in the opposite direction. They decided to bypass the children of God part by engineering their own god-status by means of breaking their ties with God (Genesis 3:4-8); by breaking faith, and trust, and love toward God; by taking their lives in their own hands, and making their lives into a story about themselves. This created a human race, and a whole world, that have not worked well ever since.

God came down from heaven, in Jesus, and shouldered our human life, and pain, and sin, and injustice. God, in Christ, took all the dysfunction that works at the heart of the world; all the dysfunction that makes it (and us) work in vain. God, in Christ took all of this upon himself, on the cross.

In Christ, by faith, we die to that old life and we turn homeward from the depths of our being. We round that long u-turn in the new life that comes from the power of Jesus’ cross and resurrection.

We are people headed for home, which is intimacy and partnership with God. Home is harmony with others. Home is harmony with the whole world no matter how the world seems to work against us. And home is harmony with our true selves, as God created us to be.

But it all begins with a willingness to die with Christ. It begins with a willingness to come to the end of ourselves and to let the one and only God be the one and only God.

This is not as simple or as easy as it may sound.
Moses, in the Old Testament, and Saul (or Paul as he came to be known), in the New Testament, have a lot to teach us about the importance of u-turns in the story of our own lives as people of faith. Moses and Saul were both people of faith.

Chapter eleven (11:24-27) of the Letter to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, tells us that Moses had faith in God long before he met God in the burning bush. This faith enabled Moses to leave his life as an adopted prince of the royal family in order to identify with his real people.

Saul, who became Paul, lived in that odd time of change, that odd first generation of believers. It was the time when the faithful people of Israel were being sorted out by whether they would believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel, the center God’s plan of salvation and transformation for them and for the whole world.

Saul loved the God who had made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God who had made a covenant with Israel on Mount Sinai. Saul loved the Lord of the covenant enough to fight with all his might against those who endangered the faith of his people. And God had Saul in his sights. Saul was a person who was going to know Jesus.

You never know just who those people might be. But you should know that, whoever they are, God loves them. If we treated everyone in the world as if they were people who were going to know and love Jesus better, then we Christians would be a lot more effective as God’s people. We would truly be people of the good news.

God’s idea of both Moses and Saul was that they needed to know and understand him better; and that they needed to stop, and learn, and listen, and love. What God did with each one of them was to make them stop, and learn, and listen, and love. This is the source of the great u-turn in each of their lives.

Their halt and about face were not their own idea. It wasn’t something they were working on. It wasn’t something simmering on the back burner. It was something that God made possible.



God forced their surrender. God brought them to the end of themselves. Both Moses and Saul had to die to themselves and rise from the ashes into the new life that God would give them.

Both Moses and Saul teach us that God’s own people need to make u-turns. There are times when we have a false confidence. There are times when we are far too proud for our own good, or anyone else’s. There are times when we think we are right; but we have not listened to God except to hear what we wanted to hear, and we have not listened to the people around us who are really wise.

There are times when we go far too far in the wrong direction. We find out the hard way that we have been wrong, and we need to turn around. God meets us on our long detour, and shows us this, and points the way home.

Both Moses and Saul were smart. A speech by Stephen in the Book of Acts (7:22) tells us that “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” There was a time, after Saul became Paul, when he was on trial and speaking in his own defense, and one of the officers of the court had this warning for him: “You are out of your mind Paul. Your great learning is driving you insane.” (26:24)

Moses and Saul were both smart. At one or more points in their lives they were too smart for their own good, and God had to stop them in their tracks.
There are times when we really are too smart, too clever, for our own good, and our smartness makes us stupid. If we were really smart we would learn and listen even when what we hear seems like nonsense, or like something that may apply to others but not to us.

It may be that we do know something worth following, but what we know is half-baked; half wise and half fatally-flawed. If we don’t listen then God will bring us down until we learn to listen.

Both Moses and Saul were strong people who could get things done.
Moses was raised as a prince in a civilization that had really mastered the art of organization. The Egyptians knew how to do things, and Moses knew how to make things happen.



Moses was a ruler, and having the power of life and death over others was nothing to him. It was his right. It may be that he considered making himself ruler and judge over the Israelites and using them to overthrow Pharaoh. After all, he was a prince.

Paul tells us in one of his letters (Galatians 1:14) that at an early age he had advanced beyond many other people of his own age in the power-structure of the Temple and the Jewish Senate. As a Pharisee, he represented a different party in the Jewish faith that was at odds with the priests of the Temple, but (in spite of this) he had gotten their approval to carry out his plan for persecuting the Christians and killing the most dangerous of them.

Paul was strong. He didn’t hesitate to seek the power of life and death over others. And he had the knack for getting a thing done when he put his mind to it.
Sometimes we are too strong for our own good. We know too well how to get what we want, even at the expense of others, even to the point of using others. This is a turn in the wrong direction. If we don’t stop and turn away from this God will stop us; life will stop us, and show us the horror of what we are. And then God will turn us and point us home.

Both Moses and Saul were people with a good cause. Moses cared about justice. He cared about it passionately and selflessly.

It’s true he cared about the injustices that the Egyptians had committed against his own people. But he cared about justice even when it had nothing to do with him.

When he escaped from Egypt, and was wandering in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, he came across a scene where a group of sisters were trying to water their flock, and a group of men were trying to cut in line. The impression we get from this story is that this was a daily ritual of injustice.

It was strange for the sisters to come home so soon, the day someone finally stepped in to do justice. Moses stopped the men and helped the sisters do their work, even though he had lost the world that was so familiar to him in Egypt.

He cared passionately about justice wherever it was needed, and so he was the follower of a good cause. But God had a better plan for showing his justice to the world.

Saul cared passionately for righteousness. In Philippians (3:5-6) he described himself as: “A Hebrew, born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless.” This righteousness was the status of being right in your relationship to God; and right in your duties to your neighbors, and to your family, and to the world around you.

According to the letter of the law, Paul was exactly what he was supposed to be, but the law alone is not enough (not even God’s law). Jesus said that our righteousness must surpass that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. (Matthew 5:20)
By this he meant the law of love that no law can enforce. Only the grace of God can empower love.

Paul persecuted the Christians because he was afraid that they would put Israel’s obedience to God at jeopardy. Paul was afraid that, through the Christians, Israel was in danger of losing the covenant life for which God had shaped them throughout their history. He was afraid they would stop being a nation that was humble and faithful before God; a nation that stood for a righteous society.

Paul was the follower of a good cause. But God had a better kind of righteousness in mind.

We might be people of a good cause, and yet we may be so passionate that we cannot hear God’s plan for that cause. G. K. Chesterton said something on the order of, “Reformers are always right about what’s wrong, but they are also generally wrong about what’s right.” For instance there may be ways of helping victims of injustice that take away their God-given freedom. There may be ways of preserving the value of righteousness that take away the virtues of mercy and compassion. You may teach someone to be good by making them a hypocrite. You may teach someone a form of faith that takes away their ability to think and use their brains.

The passion for a good cause may be a wrong turn when the good cause becomes a god in itself. C.S. Lewis wrote about the dangers of adulterating Christianity with other priorities. He called this the temptation of “Christianity-and” or maybe we could call it “Christianity-Plus”. There are things like “Christianity plus Prosperity”, “Christianity plus Positive Thinking”, “Christianity plus My Politics Whatever It Is”, or “Christianity plus the Perfect Church”, or “Christianity plus being Modern or Post-modern”. These other priorities are like false gods.

When a lesser god is mated with the gospel we lose the ability to stop, and learn, and listen with the true and only God. We have made a wrong turn, and we need God to stop us and make it into a u-turn.

The Lord’s Supper is the story of the great U-Turn in a nutshell. The broken bread and the poured out wine tell us of a broken and bloody world, and a life that has taken the wrong turn.

Most of all, they also tell us of the God who came down from heaven in Jesus Christ, to be broken and bloodied on the cross for the hope of the world, to give us the new life that only comes from God. When God comes into our lives through Jesus; and when we stop, and learn, and listen, and love; our lives turn with the power of God who leads us through the great u-turn.

"Help for the Road Home: Unquenchable Light"

Preached Sunday, July 25

Scripture Readings: Exodus 1:1-2:10; Ephesians 4:17-5:2, 5:8-17

God’s people in Egypt were going home, at last, but they didn’t know it. They had never been home before. They had never known what it was like to be at home. They knew nothing about home.

God had promised them a home, long ago, but (for generations) they were not allowed to do any more than wander around and look in the windows of the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, like a bunch of peeping Toms.

The people of Israel were God’s own people. They had been promised a home, but they had wandered for generations around the desert fringes of that home where other people lived. They tried to imagine that this is what home was, but they were wrong. They were wrong because they knew nothing about home.



Then, during years of drought and famine, the Lord led them into Egypt. At first they were welcome there. They tried to pretend that Egypt was their home. But they were wrong because they knew nothing about home.

Then they became unwelcome, and the Egyptians had made them their slaves for four hundred years. They had begun to settle into the notion that, maybe, this was what home was. But they knew nothing about home.

It was almost time for God’s people to go home, but they didn’t know it. Egypt adopted a policy of genocide for their Hebrew slaves. Even the Hebrews knew that this didn’t look like home.

It looked like the end. The Egyptian government made it their policy to exterminate all male Hebrew babies. In a generation there would be no one left to find the home that God had promised them.

The genocide law was doomed to fail. God’s people would not be destroyed. The law would be abolished; but a Hebrew baby who should have been killed under that law lived instead, and grew up as a prince of Egypt named Moses. Moses would take God’s people home.

It would be nothing short of a miracle, but it would be a painfully slow miracle. The miracle would take years, would take decades; would take until the end of Moses’ long, long, long life. And Moses, himself, would never make it home. He would live to see it from a distance, but never walk over the threshold of it.



The story of God’s people is always the story of the road home. It’s a long, long, long road, so the story always seems to be about the road, and not much about the arrival.

Sometimes the story of the road tells us that God’s people often make the road seem longer by traveling the wrong way, by going backward. The story is often about God’s people traveling from place to place on the way home, but the real home is not a place. Home is a relationship.

The real point about the road is that God is there on the road as well. God is at home on the road. Years before the slavery in Egypt, God had told Jacob and his family (the core of the Hebrew people) when the famine was threatening their lives, “I am God, the God of your father. Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again.” (Genesis 46:3-4)

The key to knowing what home is… is to notice that God says, “I will go down with you, and I will surely bring you back again.” The key is, “I go with you.” From beginning to end, the nature of home is the place where God is, and God’s place is always with you, when God calls you by name.

Home is God being with you, even when you never seem to be anywhere but on the road. The road home is God’s road, where God also lives.

When God calls us by name, it is a call home. It is a call that puts us on the same road that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob walked. It is the road where Moses and his people walked. It is the road the disciples took when Jesus called them and said, “Follow me.”



There has never been anyone else on this road but followers and disciples. There is a home at the end of the road (heaven, and then a new heaven and earth); but (until then) our lives will be traveling lives, and most of this life will be on the road.
So, then, to be people of God means to be people of the road, and it is important to know that there sort of “ways of the road”, rules of the road.

I follow certain rules on the road, especially on long trips. I always have coolant, oil, jumper cables and a few other things in my trunk (not enough things). In the winter, I always have a heavy sleeping bag for warmth. In the summer, I travel with a couple gallons of water. There have been times when these have been very helpful to me; or to others I met on the road.

Those are just a few of my rules of the road. Another is that when someone is driving fast behind me I pull into the slow lane, or I pull over onto the side of the road as soon as I can find a good place to do it.

We can see some rules of the road working in the Hebrew slaves in Egypt; and in Paul’s good advice to his friends, in the church in the Greek city of Ephesus. I want to see that God’s rules for the road home are actually God’s help for the road home.

The point is help for home. It is God’s road and so it is also the road of grace. No one is called to the road except by God’s free and gracious love. No one continues on the road without the same grace. But God is love, God is the faithful God, and we should expect to not be able to travel the road without his help.

The home before us is God’s home. The road is God’s road. Life, as God created it to be, is all about relationship and intimacy with God. God wandered with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God went down into Egypt and slavery with their family. God would bring them back out of slavery into freedom. It is all about relationship, and intimacy, and the faithfulness of God; and also our faithfulness to God. That is the help for the road.

The New Testament takes this all farther and deeper. Paul says, “Be imitators of God, therefore as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 5:1) This is strong language. “Be imitators of God.” “Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us.” Do you realize that if this was a matter of rules, and nothing more, that it would all be hopeless?

But this is not a matter of rules. This is a matter of grace; a matter of help. This is what the Lord gives us in Christ, and “in Christ” is another key. We are in Christ and Christ is in us, with all the fullness of his Father and the Holy Spirit; because of Jesus offering himself for us in love on the cross.

Paul says, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:8) To be on the road is to be “in the Lord”. To be on the road is to be actually in the life of God. Paul says that people commonly harden their hearts to God, and so they “are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God.” (Eph. 5:18) But that is not how it is supposed to be.



I believe this tells us that there is a kind of light operating in the hearts and minds of those who do not harden their hearts; and this keeps a steady light shining in their lives, because, then, they are not separated from the life of God. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul says, “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3) There is a great, small book from the seventeenth century called “The Life of God in the Soul of Man” (by Henry Scougal). This is what life on the road home is about: the life of God in human souls.

There is a light that shines in the lives of those who have been called by God, by name; and that light is not lost or given in vain. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul describes the working of this light in many ways: being truthful, controlling anger so that it does not take over, not giving up to bitterness, being kind and compassionate, not misusing yourself or others, as if your bodies and your lives were just things to play with.

Paul says to “make the most of every opportunity” or “redeem the time”, which is a way of daring to live daringly with every day, no matter how dark that day looks. It means not being beaten down or warn down. It means not to live by cringing, but by knowing that the road belongs to God. This is living as “light in the Lord”.

In Exodus, we see this light working in many ways. The head midwives, who must have reported to the king on their obedience to the genocide law, protected the lives of the boy babies at the risk of their own lives. Moses’ real family hatched a plan to get the royal family to protect the life of their son.

What the midwives did works on a number of levels. Their standing up to the king and standing up to the law were an act of faith. After centuries of slavery in the spiritual darkness of Egypt there were those among God’s people who stood up for innocent lives, who stood up for justice against brutal, hateful, and godless laws.

The author G. K. Chesterton wrote, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” (“Everlasting Man”) They were spiritually alive. In their light they exposed and revealed the darkness that seemed stronger than they were. Their resistance showed that the power that threatened them was a dead power, and the power that motivated them was a living power.

Moses’ real family hatched a plan that put their son under the protection of the royal family. The king’s authority that was designed to kill Moses made him a prince instead. God’s help for the road home was there, working through them. Four centuries of slavery should have deadened their imagination and their ability to dare great things, but it didn’t.

The word “oppression” that is used to describe the policies of Egypt means “to bring them low” or “to beat them down”. The Hebrews, as the story unfolds, will often seem to be slave-minded and beaten-down people; but they were the people of God and so they would sometimes rise above it in surprising, daring ways. There was something in them that was not beaten down, and did not give up hope.



There was a light from the life of the faithful God who had not abandoned them. There was a light that enabled them to dare daring things for themselves, and for others, and for God. (See Joshua, Caleb, and others.)

People who can do that are “light in the Lord”. There is an unquenchable light from God: the life of God in the souls of those who are called by name and set upon God’s road. It is a light that exposes the darkness and shows it for what it is. It is a light that keeps faith, hope, and love alive. It is a light from the life of the faithful God who gave himself for us in Christ. The light is God’s help for the road home.

People of Truth in an Adverse World

Preached Sunday, June 6, 2010

Scripture readings: 1 Kings 19:1-18; Acts 5:27-42

Instead of killing the apostles on the spot, the High Council let them off with a second warning; even though this was the second time they had stood on trial before the court. But, along with the warning, the High Council ordered a beating (a flogging or whipping) as punishment and, since that ancient world was not a gentle one, the whipping was probably the classic “forty lashes minus one”.

The forty lashes minus one was more than enough to do permanent damage. The apostles would bear the scars from that beating for the rest of their lives. They knew this. And so we read their mood as they left the council chamber. They left, “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name (that is, for Jesus).”

They were badly hurt and yet they were glad. As Eugene Peterson says, in his paraphrase of this story, “They had been given the honor of being dishonored on account” of Christ.

The apostles went home happy. Most of the members of the High Council went home very unhappy. But maybe the members of the Council were the ones who went home feeling whipped. The apostles were whipped, but they went home convinced that they couldn’t be whipped.

The gladness of the apostles and the early church is a challenge to us. It is not that they were happy all the time. They were not on drugs. They were not hypnotized or in a trance. They were real people and they felt reality. In Romans chapter 12 (12:15) Paul says: “Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.” By this he means: be real with other people. (Which is part of what it should mean to be a Christian: to be real.)

The whipped apostles were glad because they were being real. They knew what was really at stake. They knew what was really going on. They knew that no matter how badly they were hurt, they couldn’t be whipped.

Still, the happiness of the early Christians is a challenge to us. They seem to have a gift or an art of happiness that is a bigger and finer thing than ours.

I believe that the strength of their happiness grew out of their relationship with the truth: the truth of what they believed. The unhappiness of the Council members also grew out of their relationship with the truth: the truth that they knew was true and yet (knowing this) they could not listen to it, or obey it, or be changed by it.



Think about the relationship of the Council members to the truth when they complain that the apostles are trying to make them appear to be guilty of Jesus’ death. The reality is that they were guilty. Most of the members of that Council had been at that meeting, in the middle of the night, when they had condemned Jesus to death and took him away to the Roman Governor for sentencing and execution. Most of them had shouted for Jesus’ crucifixion.

They knew this was the truth, but they didn’t like the truth. They were mad at the apostles because the apostles kept on keeping reality real. They insisted on making the Council members look at themselves. The Council had killed Jesus for doing much the same thing.

Before they had ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth, the members of the Council and the apostles had generally believed the same core of faith: the predictions of the scriptures would be fulfilled; the messiah would appear and bring the justice and the mercy of the kingdom of God.



In a completely unexpected way Jesus had done just that. Even his birth fulfilled the predictions the prophets had made centuries beforehand. Over and over, Jesus had pronounced God’s justice upon the Pharisees and Sadducees, and brought God’s mercy to sinners and the outcast. Whole patterns in the scriptures came clear when Jesus died and rose from the dead.

For all of them (the council and the apostles) the truth of what they had always believed became reality in Jesus; but not necessarily in a form of reality that they liked.

Even the disciples had been uncomfortable about the reality that Jesus had brought home to them. They thought they were people of faith. They liked to think this was so; but, day after day, Jesus showed them how little they believed, and how little they understood.

They didn’t like this, but they stuck with it. Only Judas betrayed Jesus for this. The rest of them didn’t like it, but they loved Jesus, and they knew Jesus loved them, and so they followed him.

Jesus had made the truth real for them; and, now that Jesus had made the whole truth real, now that Jesus had risen from the dead, they received the gift of gladness that couldn’t be taken away. This is what happens when you find that the good news is the truth. This is what happens when you find that the good news of Jesus is the truth and you give that truth your love.



My faith, as a child, was an odd mixture of things: a sense of the real presence of God, an ongoing experience that Jesus loved me and helped me, an experience of Jesus as someone who died for my sins. But I tried to mix other things with it.

When I was a teenager I sort of developed my own version of Christianity that I thought was better than the kind of Christianity that was handed down over the centuries, better than the Christianity of the Bible. I created a version of Christianity where I could sort of set the terms and make it something I could manage.

But, when I was eighteen, my friend Danny Robertson had an experience of conversion to Christ that gave him great joy and happiness. The strangest thing for me was that his happiness made me unhappy. Danny was experiencing some things about the Lord that he had never experienced before. He was experiencing some of the things that I had experienced before, long ago, and had not followed.

That experience of the reality of the good news of Jesus had not disappeared from my life, but I was holding it off at arms length. And that is something you cannot do and succeed. If you love God but don’t want to do what he wants, you will never be happy.

And that is what was wrong with me. I had created a Christianity (or a Christian spirituality) that allowed me to avoid what God wanted from me.

The Council members had been raised with a faith that Jesus could have made real; but allowing Jesus to make himself real to them would have required them to let go of their being in charge. They would have had to put Jesus in charge; and then they would have known how real all the things were that they believed.

Because of Jesus, the apostles were no longer in charge of their lives; and they were definitely not in charge of the risks and dangers and frustrations that came from following Jesus. When told to stop, they said, “We must obey God.”

Talk to kids about obedience, and they say, “Do I have to?” But the apostles were glad to obey a God who had become a reality as never before. This is what Jesus had done for them. He had made the truth too real to refuse.

We need to remember that the truth they were teaching (the truth that the High Council was trying to ignore) was about Jesus’ dying on the cross, and rising from the dead to give forgiveness and new life to those who believed. The cross and the resurrection are literally death and life. It means the death of our old life and the beginning of a new life; given to us by Jesus who has died and risen from the dead.

Teaching in the name of Jesus, as the apostles did (and as we must do) is more than a matter of words. It is a matter of dying to ourselves and living in Christ. Teaching that cannot be just a matter of words. It is a matter of coming to Jesus, and receiving that life, and living that life. Jesus makes us into living lessons. We are either living lessons, or we are nothing.

So there the apostles stood, on trial for the second time. At the first trial they had gotten off with just a warning. At the second trial they got a warning plus the forty lashes minus one. They got scars that would last. And what would happen next?
They would certainly come back for more, wouldn’t they, if they had to? Were they crazy? Does God expect us to be crazy?

The poet Wendell Berry has a poem in which he writes, “Every day do something that won’t compute….Practice resurrection.” (Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front) The apostles taught the resurrection of Jesus by practicing it themselves. But they could only practice it because they had received that life from Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is what we are called to do. “Every day do something that won’t compute….Practice resurrection.” Come back, again and again, in the same way as the apostles came before the authorities. But remember you can never do this properly (in the proper spirit) unless you receive this life from Jesus and keep coming back to him for more.

The story, toward the end of the life of the prophet Elijah, tells us about coming back for more, again and again. Elijah is an important example because, even though he was a prophet who was full of the Spirit, he got depressed.

He forgot the power of the God he believed in; the God who had made him part of some pretty amazing things. Elijah was so depressed that he wanted to die, until a still small voice from God sent him back to the world; and back to faith and life again.



I have told you about the annual football game at my seminary, at the start of every school year, between the married and unmarried students. I think the married students thought this up, because they knew that they must be higher up in the gene pool than us single students were. We played it on one of the practice fields at the university. It was a serious game, but without padding or helmets. This annual slaughter had been practiced from time immemorial.

One of my good friends, on the married side, was David Ulum, and he had played college football at one of the many small liberal arts colleges in Iowa. Dave was about six inches taller than me and he was fit. He wasn’t heavy, but he was pumped. My captain, Fred Halde (who also claimed to be my friend), kept putting me in the line opposite David, over and over again. At each play David would hit me, and I would fly through the air in the wrong direction, and land flat on my back.

The single students were a small team. I couldn’t leave the game. Over and over I flew like a bird through the air and landed on my back.

As the game wore on, and the married students got farther and farther ahead, it got to be almost more than David could stand. He begged me, “Dennis, please go somewhere else!” And I said, “I can’t. I have to be here.” My friend David had to do his duty, and so did I.

Things like this have happened to me other times in my life; even outside the world of football. Sometime, somewhere, you will find yourself being hit and flying through the air in the wrong direction, and landing flat on your back.

This is what it means to be a living lesson in the name of Jesus. This is how you teach in the name of Jesus. This is how you teach the truth in an adverse world; in a world that often stands against you. You keep coming back.



You may find yourself coming back for more, again and again; as a faithful Christian, as a human being on whom others depend, as a person who is faithful in your relationships, as a person of integrity. Sometimes you have to obey God and keep coming back for more. You have to practice resurrection.

But remember you can’t do this properly or gladly without Jesus. You also have to keep coming back to Jesus for more. No matter how you feel. Jesus will be with you, and in you, and you will rise again. You will find that the resurrection is (just as Jesus is) within you.

God's Invasion: His Fullness

Preached May 30, 2010, Trinity Sunday

Scripture Readings: Acts 2:22-41; John 16:5-16

There was something going on in the streets of Jerusalem during the Jewish festival of Pentecost. The disciples had been praying together in one of the houses of Jerusalem. The first chapter of Acts tells us who would have been there: the apostles, the women, Mary the mother of Jesus, and the brothers of Jesus, and perhaps others. (Acts 2:1; Acts 1:13-14)



A sound of rushing wind filled the room and there was fire in the air coming to rest upon them. It was as if they were human candles or human torches, and they began speaking in languages that they did not know.

They went out into the crowded holiday street and there were people in the crowd, on that street, who understood them. Some of the people on the street heard them describing what they called, “the wonders of God”. Other people on the street only heard giddy babbling and said, “These people are drunk!”

Have you ever heard of people who don’t like it when other people are happy? They criticize it, or try to put a wet blanket on it. The fact that other people knew something about the wonders of God, that they didn’t, put them on the spot. They had nothing to compete with it. This made them intensely unhappy, and they could only be happy again by finding fault with the joy of others.

Still there were these wonders of God. What were they? Peter explained what these wonders were. They had to do with Jesus. They were what Jesus had poured out. They would have been the things that had lately happened with him.

Some of the things seemed absolutely horrible, and others seemed impossible; unless God could do such things. Could God do such things?

Jesus had been hated by the authorities, and their hatred had grown until they couldn’t stop themselves from arresting him. He had been put on trial in a mockery of the law. He had been presented to a manipulated crowd during the Passover festival, and denounced by them. He had been falsely condemned, beaten, and whipped, and killed on a cross. Jesus’ bloody body had been laid to rest in the cool darkness of a tomb, and Jesus had risen from death to life on the third day.



Then Jesus spent those wonderful weeks with his disciples. Then he had taken them out of the city walls, to a quiet place, where he went up into the sky and disappeared in the clouds. Angels told them that Jesus would come back the same way they had seen him leave. These were the wonders of God.

Peter said that all these things were the doing of God; the work of God. “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.” (Acts 2:32-33)

Then Peter did a strange thing. He accused his audience of being guilty of crucifying Jesus. This was probably not true, but they believed it anyway. They knew where they had been and had not been. They knew what they had done and had not done. Jerusalem had many holy festivals and the calendar made Jerusalem a revolving door of religious crowds; people on pilgrimage. One crowd would stay the week of Passover and go back to their homes, only to be replaced by a new crowd who decided to come to Jerusalem for Pentecost, fifty days later.

Some of the Passover crowd had helped crucify Jesus. The Pentecost crowd came after the fact, but they somehow knew that the events of the cross and the resurrection included them, even so. In the same way those events include us and everyone in the world.



Jesus had said this would happen. Jesus had said that, even when he seemed to be gone from their sight, the Holy Spirit would “convict the world of guilt.” (John 16:8) The Holy Spirit would take the work of Jesus and make a powerful statement of it all in the consciences and hearts of those who would hear the message.

The injustice and the sin that were laid on Jesus on the cross would become the injustice and sin felt in the heart of those who heard the message. The wrongness of not believing in a God who would take upon himself the sins of the world would come home to the conscience and heart of those who heard. The righteousness of the one who had identified himself with us on the cross, and rose from the dead to give life to the world, going up to heaven to command the world (the truth that this was good and right) would sink into the conscience and heart of those who heard. The clear failure of the devil, the so-called prince of this world, in his effort to defeat God by capturing the human race in sin; and the power and beauty of God’s way of dealing with this sin, and setting us free, and giving us new life would be brought home to the conscience and hearts of those who heard. The Holy Spirit would have the power to convict and convince the conscience and the heart of those who heard the message.

In Jesus, sin, and death, and the devil got their proper judgment. The Holy Spirit would shine his light on the hearts and minds of those who heard, so that they could see the truth and be changed by it.

When Peter told the crowd that what they were seeing and hearing had been poured out by Jesus, he meant that our knowing our need for Jesus, and our knowing how Jesus has met our need, was being poured out that day. The crowd at Pentecost had not crucified Jesus, but their part in the injustice and sin of the world had crucified Jesus. It was not true that they had shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” and yet they had. We all have. And we all find grace, and life, and freedom through Jesus standing for us, dying for us, rising for us.

And this all goes together with the strange way Jesus describes his presence. He says he is going away and neither this world we live in nor we ourselves will see him, and yet we will see him, and the Holy Spirit will bring Jesus and his Father to us. “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” “The Spirit will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:16 and 16:14-15)

All this tells us essential things about our selves and the world we live in. Although we live in a world of many conflicting and confusing messages, we also live in a world where God is speaking; where Jesus is speaking, through the Holy Spirit, and the Father is speaking too.

We live in a world where we can see Jesus. Seeing by faith is not sightless seeing. Through Jesus we live in a vast mystery every day, living in the presence of the fullness of God. The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are always there to make themselves known to us.

This means that we do not live for Jesus, or live for God. We live in Jesus. We live in God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We don’t only speak for God. We speak in a chorus of voices; the voices of our brothers and sisters in the Lord, and also in chorus with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.



We are never alone as individuals. And the church is never alone. This also means we must stop thinking and acting as if we were on our own, and as if we have to hold on for dear life to what we have got. We can be free. We can let go. We can take up a cross and follow Jesus because we are not walking somewhere behind him at all. And we are far more than with him. We are in him, and he is in us. Through Christ we are “filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:19)



We can know this and live this, because Jesus has poured it out upon us and upon our world.