God's Power: Hands Together

Preached on Sunday November 13
Scripture readings: Psalm 18:16-19, 43-50; Matthew 18:21-35; Romans 15:1-13

Sometimes I can still remember what it was like to be young and in love, and to walk down the street holding hands with the girl I loved. It felt really good; such a seemingly little thing as holding hands. It felt very good!

The goal of the universe is the goal of a feel-good moment like that. But it will not last only for a moment. It will last forever. The whole creation, all heaven and earth will hold hands. That will be the day when the whole creation enjoys the reality it was created for. The universe has grown old in the absence of the joy it was created for. It will become a new heaven and earth.

This is the point of Jesus’ coming: to bring all cultures, all nations, all individuals together as the people of God. The point is so important and exciting for Paul that he awards it four quotations from the scriptures. It is his way of saying that this future of holding hands in the presence of God is the message of the scriptures, and the great quest of God himself.

My hand-holding days did not turn out to be very productive. The hand-holding days that Paul hopes for are sure to come, and he knows it; but there is a problem in the present. He looks forward to the hand-holding of the estranged, of the alienated, of the enemies, of the opposites. And God has created the church to be the foundation of this; the first evidence of this.

You can see that this presents us with a difficulty. There may be a hand you do no want to hold.

It is the whole point of the Gospel. The word gospel means good news. It is the good news of Jesus. It is the good news that God has come to an estranged and alienated world; and God has done something in the life of Jesus, in the suffering and death on the cross, and in the defeat of sin and death in the resurrection. Something in that miracle (God’s staggering offer of himself) bridges an unbridgeable gap, pays an unpayable debt, reconciles irreconcilable differences.

Paul uses some shorthand to describe the gap. The classic shorthand of the Bible for this is the difference between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews are Israel; the people of God. “Gentiles” just means “peoples” or “nations”.

Some Indian tribes originated names for their tribes that just mean “the people”. In their concept of identity, you are either one of the people or you aren’t.

That is how it was with the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews were “The People of God” The Gentiles (or “the nations”) were just everyone else. You might as well say that the Jews versus the Gentiles were the ultimate insiders versus the outsiders, or the ultimate old-timers versus the newcomers.

Anyone who has lived in a place where people are either old-timers or newcomers knows that there can be a nearly unbridgeable gap between them. You can live in a place and be a part of it for thirty years and never be an old-timer. Individuals on either side my hold hands, but the groups (as groups) do not.

Now the church of Paul’s day included Christians of Jewish origin, and Christians of pagan origin; the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jewish Christians were the original Christians, the old-timers of the Church. The Christians of pagan origin were the cutting edge, the growing edge of the Church. They were inclined not to want to hold hands on their way to heaven and the new creation.

The other shorthand was the pairing of the strong and the weak. Basically Paul means what he calls the strong in faith and the weak in faith.

Paul has discussed the issue of the strong versus the weak all through the fourteenth chapter of his letter. The really important thing is that Paul considers himself to be one of the strong. If we happen to be someone who likes to be strong, we will like the thought of being on Paul’s side. But then (wouldn’t you know it) Paul manages to spoil it all by turning strength on its head. He says that the real calling of those who are strong is to adapt them-selves to serving the needs of those who aren’t.

Here was the problem of the strong in faith versus the weak in faith. The strong would say that the good news was about living in the power of the Holy Spirit and with the mindset of Christ, and so don’t worry about all the laws and rules of the tradition that tells you what pleases God. Stop being a scorekeeper. This is what Paul calls living by faith and not by the law.

But Paul gives an awful lot of advice to those who need to follow Jesus better. Aren’t those rules?

The so-called strong in the faith would say that they were living boldly. The so-called weak in faith would say that the so-called strong in faith were living carelessly.

The so-called weak in the faith would say that they were the true conservatives and the original faithful. The so-called strong in faith would say that the so-called weak in the faith were obsessive-compulsive, and just plain silly.

The strong in the faith would probably be like those who text. The weak in the faith would probably be like those who still practice their penmanship and write notes on real stationary.

The so-called weak in the faith would go to worship because the discipline of worship is a healthy habit for the soul; or because it was one of the rules. The so-called strong in the faith would go to worship because they want to practice resurrection. But neither the strong nor the weak would sleep in on a Sunday morning.

The pairs of Jews and Greeks or weak and strong were not friendly pairs. They found each other (at best) annoying, (at worst) dangerous. They were not inclined to hold hands on the way to the new heaven and earth.

But that failure was a sin, as Paul understood the plan of God. How could they expect to hold hands like lovers in the new creation when they didn’t want to hold hands now? Why did they think that Christ had come, if not to join them together?

God’s scheme of things was that he wanted to right the wrong created by human sin. The nature of sin is to break and divide everything that God has made. God came into our world to put us back together.

Human sin had divided the world from God. It had created imbalance in the creation. It had created conflict in the whole realm of human relationships. Human sin even broke our own inner wholeness so that, in so many ways, we seem to be at odds with ourselves. God wants the broken pieces of creation to join hands.

God, the insider, became an outsider in Jesus; ostracized by his own people: killed. God became an outsider in Jesus to make insiders of all people. The new heavens and earth will be a place where all people who want to come in will be welcome.

I sometimes tell kids who are graduating and going out into the world that these small towns of ours are places where they will always belong, as long as they want. At least, to my mind, that is what these places are for.

Paul says “accept one another”. I can accept lots of things without liking them. But the Greek word he uses is a much stronger word than that. It means “receive” and “welcome”. Paul says, “Accept, receive, welcome one another, then, just as Christ accepted, received, welcomed you, in order to bring praise to God.” (Romans 15:7) God is praised and glorified when diverse people, different people, people with different temperaments and personalities, and different ways of living their faith and expressing their faith welcome each other. Paul says it. All we can say against this is, “Yes, but!” And I don’t want to say “yes, but” to God.

Jesus did, by his cross, what the great Old Testament King David could not do by conquest. Jesus could bring people into his kingdom through his love. The cross shows us a different use of strength.

Jesus has died for the sins of all, and risen to give victory to all, so that all people can sing together about the praises of God and his kingdom. “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”

The forgiveness that Jesus’ story (about the king and his servants) talks about is not at all like cancelling a debt; at least not if cancelling a debt means crossing out some numbers on a page or deleting them from a computer chip. Forgiveness is not a legality but real work and real effort. Jesus did, by his cross, what a king could not do by canceling debts from his ledger.

The Greek word for forgiveness carries the thought of putting something away, or sending it off. The Hebrew Scriptures share the same way of thinking. Psalm 103, verse twelve, says, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has the Lord removed our transgressions from us.”

Our sins, and the sins of all other people, have been removed from us and put upon Jesus. “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” (Romans 15:3) All of the sins and evils of our world, and of our lives, are like living insults against the God who created us for good and for love. And they have all fallen upon Jesus on the cross. If we know Christ, as he is on the cross, we should know that our sins have been sent away to that place where Jesus has died for us.

But the same truth holds true for others. If we see something in another person that seems to divide them from us, then we should know that that difference, and that division, has been carried away by Jesus on his cross.

What Paul calls bearing with others, building others up, pleasing others, is not about casting a blind eye to any real wrong or evil. In fact Paul tells us to “hate what is evil”. (Romans 12:9) But we are called to use our understanding of Jesus in order to understand others, and encourage them in the right direction, and build them up.

The small town where I first served as a minister, after I was ordained, had an amazing number of people who had been in jail or in prison. And there were people who went to jail or prison after I had gotten to know them. And they went to jail or to prison for some very good reasons. I needed to give them the dignity of using my understanding of Jesus to know how to listen to them and what to say to them that would bear with them and build them up.

We are called to use our knowledge of other people to guide us to Jesus. We seek Jesus to find his answers and his guidance for what we are to say next and what we are to do next in the world of other people.

There is a story in which a person sought to understand the difference between heaven and hell. This person had a dream in which they were led into a room where there was a huge banquet table with a feast set laid out on it. The diners sat around the table, and they could see and smell the heavenly feast, but they were all starving to death. Their forks and spoons were all four feet long and they were unable to feed themselves. So they were starving to death. That was the picture of hell.

This visitor was guided to another room where the diners were also seated around a feast, just like the one in the room of hell. The utensils were still four feet long, yet everyone was eating to their hearts delight. They feasted because they used their long spoons and forks to feed each other. That was heaven.

That is what the church is for. The church is a table set with the love, the peace, the joy, the hope, the faith that come from God, through his Son Jesus.

It is the grace of God that we really cannot feed ourselves at the church’s table (at the Lord’s Table). If we think we are feeding ourselves, it is only the dying dream of a starving soul. We live by feeding others and by being fed by others.

We must feed each other. In the end, it is not what we do for ourselves that makes us thankful, and satisfied, and full, but what others have given us, what others have shown us and how they have fed us. And our lives are full because we have fed others.

Paul sees that the church is a family where people feed each other, and this is our holy calling in Christ. We are to give to others what Christ has given to us. “For even Christ did not please himself.” (Romans 15:3) How else can we claim that we have anything to do with him?

Christ has fed us with himself. We must be feeders, too, by the very nature of Christ living in us. There is no other way to get to heaven. There is no other way to the new creation but by holding hands.

God's Power: Undaunted Mercy

Preached Sunday, November 6, 2011
Scripture readings: Job 41:1-11; Matthew 23:33-39; Romans 11:25-36

One of the places where I often wish I had brought my camera is a stretch of the road between Ritzville and Washtucna. The place is just a few miles south of Ritzville. There are a couple of spots along that stretch of road. You don’t see them when you are driving north. If you try you will run off the road.

You can only see them when you are driving south. And you have to look at exactly the right spot and time.

There are two views (two elevations) that I have in mind: one looks to the southwest and the other (a bit further on) to the southeast. At certain times, on a clear day, with a particular light, I clearly see vastness.

I don’t see anything in particular, except for the vastness, and I would like to take a picture of it. I am not sure it would be possible to capture it in a picture, because it is simply much too big.

There are a lot of photogenic big things that are easy to catch in a photograph: a mountain, a canyon, a waterfall. Those things have a center that you can use as a target, or a focus. But there are certain places where there is nothing to see but pure, simple, unadulterated vastness.

Some people have a strange and strong dislike for it. Wide, open places make them nervous; make them afraid. But vastness makes me peaceful, and thankful, and even joyful.

There is a vastness that the Apostle Paul talks about in Romans, in chapters nine through eleven. This vastness first made him nervous, and anxious, and afraid. But, in the end, it made him peaceful, and thankful, and joyful. “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

The vastness he has in mind is the plan of God for uniting all things in heaven and earth in Christ. (Ephesians 1:10) The vastness is the plan of God for the ages of restoring harmony to a fallen world; restoring humanity and nature to a relationship with him in such a way as to bring them all into the enjoyment of his love and goodness.

The plan is vast because it covers the whole extent and the whole history of the world (and possibly even the whole universe) as we know it. Paul calls it a mystery, but mystery had a specific meaning in the ancient world. It didn’t mean a thing you couldn’t know. It didn’t mean a puzzle or a predicament that was up to you to work out.

Mystery, in the ancient world, meant a great truth that God had revealed. Seeing the mystery meant seeing the truth that holds everything together and makes sense of everything. And even if it doesn’t make sense of everything at once, you see the mystery clearly enough to know that it will keep it promises.

Paul summarized the mystery in the first few paragraphs of his letter to the Romans. He called it “the gospel”, which means “the good news”. It was the good news of Jesus.

Paul summarized it like this. “I am not ashamed of the good news, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For, in the good news, a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17)

This is the vastness that Paul wanted to share with everyone because God had revealed this good news to him through Jesus. Jesus is the center of the vastness that Paul wanted everyone to see. He found that Jesus is the center that makes sense of everything.

Yes, the center has a name. We can call the center the good news, because that is what Jesus is. We can call it the power of God for salvation, because that is what Jesus is. We can call it the righteousness of God (or right relationships with God and through God) because that is what Jesus is. Jesus gives us all of this. So we can call the center that holds everything together by the name of Jesus.

In chapter eleven Paul also calls the center of God’s plan by the name “mercy”. So we can say that, when the world seems most baffling, and confusing, and scary, and brutal, and when the world seems most unacceptable, the mystery is that, in Jesus, the mercy of God can be trusted to do its work; and do it perfectly. Everything can be explained by the mercy of God, according to Paul.

But this happens in the oddest ways. For instance, it works, “For God has bound all people over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” (Romans 11:32)

Paul grieved at the thought that the mercy of God might fail to do all the work he hoped for. Paul grieved at the thought that the whole of God’s plan, which had been carefully built upon the foundation of Abraham and his people, was in danger of losing its foundation. The people of Israel, who were groomed for centuries to become the people of Jesus’ birth and upbringing, and who became the people among whom Jesus taught and did wonderful and amazing things, seemed to be dropping out of the plan.

Paul was full of grief because his people now seemed to be left out of the picture for not accepting Jesus as their king and Messiah. They did not accept Jesus’ humble and sacrificial way of bringing his blessing to the whole world through the cross. They did not accept Jesus’ pattern of dying and rising as God’s way of life for them.

Paul always tried to reach out to his people with the good news of Jesus, but he had very little success. He had much more resistance and rejection than success.

The people of Israel were more than a nation. They were a family. In losing them Paul felt the loss of his family. It broke his heart every day. He wrote: “I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers and sisters, those of my own race, the people of Israel.” (Romans 9:3)

The people of Israel, including Paul, had enjoyed a special insight into the work and the plan of God over the centuries. They saw that the promises of God go on, and on, and on, in faithfulness, and hope, and mercy. Suddenly, when all their hopes were coming true, they didn’t seize the moment. They shrank back from it. They pushed it away. It was like walking through a wonderful vastness with your friends and suddenly they vanish (as if in a nightmare), or (much worse) they start yelling at you like crazy people, and they run away from you.

“Cut off from Christ” is the phrase Paul uses for the offer he would make to God, if he could win his friends and family. It is a desperate thought!

Then, in chapter eleven, Paul tells a kind of parable or story about a domesticated olive tree which is the tree of God’s people. It is the tree of those who belong to God by faith. He says that there is something strange that God is doing with this tree. God is cutting off the true branches that are of the same variety as the domesticated tree and grafting wild branches onto the tree.

No good farmer, no smart farmer, would do that. Grafting the branches of a wild olive onto a domesticated tree is totally wrong.

Paul says that those who are not part of Israel, but believe the good news, become a part of the tree of God, the tree of Israel. It is faith that makes the wrong branches become a living part of the tree of God.

There is a twisting of faith, a malignancy of faith, a distortion of faith that Paul calls “unbelief”. It happens when faith stops being content to be nothing more than faith, because faith seems to be dependent and needy, and we do not want to be dependent and needy, not even toward God.

Paul gives this distortion of faith the name of arrogance and conceit. Paul says, “They were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid.” (Romans 11:20)

Paul talks about continuing in God’s kindness. (Romans 11:22) Continuing in God’s kindness is a way of walking dependently; walking and living by faith in God.

The good news is about God, in Christ. The mercy is about God, in Christ. Faith is about God, in Christ.

When we become discontented with faith we may still want to be God’s people. But we want to have fellowship with God in a different way; not just by faith, but by our merit, by our work, by our effort, by our commitment, by our own righteousness, instead of by the righteousness of God. We want to stop owing our fellowship and partnership with God to his sheer mercy.

Paul is saying that this discontent and pride is no way to stay in a condition of faith. If you want to stop depending on mercy then you don’t understand faith at all. You don’t understand the righteousness of God because righteousness means right relationships, and those relationships depend on mercy and grace, whether toward God or toward others.

When God came to his people, in Jesus, he told them: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44-45) God’s people didn’t want to love their enemies but to judge them; not to pray for them but to defeat them.

Somehow, they built an identity that was based on their rightful place as God’s people, and not based on their place as the receivers of God’s mercy; mercy for themselves with mercy for others, but not mercy for themselves without mercy for others.

God’s people had made their faith and their holiness into a kind of disobedience that insulated them from pure grace and simple faith, which are the only way to find our true meaning in life. They used the beautiful traditions and laws which came from their history with God as a defense against the life to which they were called by God, in Christ.

God had called their father Abraham to be a blessing to the nations. The Lord had told Abraham: “I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing….and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

God’s people held themselves together and survived by enclosing themselves and insulating themselves inside a shell. It all looked very pretty, in its own way, but it actually protected them from the real meaning of their life.

Bad things had happened to them. Some of those things were their own fault, some were not. But what God found in his people’s unwillingness to listen to him, when he came to them in Jesus, and what Paul found when he spoke to them on behalf of Jesus, was what you find in a person who has responded to their hurts and their hard times the wrong way.

Some people respond by growing in compassion and love. Others respond by always trying to prove themselves, or by going around with a chip on their shoulder, or by not getting involved. We can grow tender or we can grow hard. God’s people grew hard.

It was a kind of disobedience and, as Paul said, they needed to see what they had done to themselves. Even the best of people need to know themselves as people in need of grace and mercy.

There is no other way to live as a true blessing to others. That is why Paul warned his readers (and warns us) against arrogance and conceit, for these are often the greatest sins of good people and they are destructive.

Paul talks about God hardening the hearts of his people. It is basically the same thing we saw God do in the first chapter of Romans, where people did not accept what God was trying to tell them about his power. They did not want to accept what God was showing them about his image that was supposed to shape their lives and change them. Paul says that, because they would not listen and learn, God “gave them up”. (Romans 1:24, 26, 28)

But, as we thought about that terrible fate, we also thought about how it could be a strategy of love. Loving parents always have to let their children go. Sometimes, they must let them go the wrong way, to do what they are driving themselves so hard to do, so that they can, hopefully, learn how to come home from the depths of their heart. Maybe, in a smaller way, it is like a parent ignoring their child’s tantrum, until the child sees that tantrums are no good.

Paul, here, is talking about God’s mercy. There is no mention of judgment here; only mercy. The only judgment taking place is what Paul calls the “the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” (Romans 11:33) How will God, in his wisdom, plot out the hidden way for those who need his mercy most to discover it, even against their will?

According to Paul, God, in Christ, has a plan to bring mercy to those who reject it. Jesus hinted about it in the middle of his anger at those who were rejecting him. “For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” (Matthew 23:39)

Jesus is clear that they will see him again and that they will say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” But he doesn’t say how that change will come, and he doesn’t say when.

Paul only gives a measurement that makes us wonder more than it answers our questions. The people of Israel will come in when “the full number of the Gentiles (the nations) has come in.” (Romans 11:25)

The Bible is pretty clear about this mystifying promise. Peter writes about it in his second letter. “The Lord is not slow about keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) But how can you even measure that? When will the growing human race finally include “everyone”?

Well, God may be patient, but Paul was often impatient. He wished that he could be cut off from Christ for the sake of his own people.

There is this odd thing that we must see in God’s promises. They are about life and death, and life and death are going on around us all the time. Life and death is going on in everyone we know.

At the same time, Paul takes stock of things and warns us against the conceit that comes from thinking we are rightfully inside and those who are against us are rightfully outside. Or we are inside and those who are just not with us are outside.

In this matter of life and death, we think of people we know. And we think about who we are, and where we are, in this matter of life and death. Paul was not thinking in the abstract about imaginary people, but about the people he knew; very often the people he loved most.

But God is telling us, through Paul’s writings, and through the rest of the scriptures, how to think. Paul struggled until he was able to think about the ability of God to accomplish his mercy. That is how we ought to think.

Our freedom, in response to God’s promises and God’s offer of mercy, is a scary freedom. What we need to think about is how we are to live with the knowledge that God is strong enough to accomplish his purpose in the long run and, then, to apply our faith in that future strength to God’s strength in the present.

If God is able to accomplish his plan of mercy in the long run, will he not use his same power for mercy for those who concern us now? Can we confidently entrust those whom we know, now, and everyone in our present generation, to the mercy of God now? Can we live, and speak, and think with confidence in that mercy now?

Paul was able to overcome his fears and anxieties about the faith or the unbelief of others, because he knew “the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” Paul could be faithful to the life and death issues that are involved in our choices and priorities in life. At the same time he could entrust the lives of those he knew and loved to the mercy of God.

Somehow even our disobedience is for the future purpose of our entering the mercy of God. There are warnings and cautions about presuming on this, or taking advantage of this. We don’t want to forget that caution.

In my own life, I can look at times when (maybe) God had given me up to my resistance against him and his purpose for me, and I learned to love the Lord more, and to know him better, as a result of the trouble I had caused myself and others, and all the precious time I had wasted. With God, nothing is wasted; not even the jealousy that Paul talks about; and few things cause more harm than jealousy. But, with God, nothing is wasted.

In war, there is a thing called “collateral damage”. It has come to mean civilian deaths and injuries caused by military action.

In our life as Christians, and as the Body of Christ (the family of Christ) in the world, we sometimes seem to cause collateral damage in our effort to be faithful to God, in our attempt to be holy. We wear people out. We allow our brothers and sisters to be unjust and unkind to others.

We need to grieve for that. We also need to trust that (in the mercy of God) the collateral damage will be healed and overcome.

But there is another fear that, in the plan of God, in the progress of the kingdom of God, all will come right in the end, but only at the expense of unacceptable levels of collateral damage. We fear that, along the way (even in God’s strategy), there will be the collateral damage of those who did not receive the mercy of God, and therefore lost it.

I believe there is another way the Bible gives us. It is true that there are those who receive God’s mercy and do not welcome it. They say “no” to the mercy of God. But in God’s scheme of things, in God’s time, or in God’s eternity beyond time, those people never cease to be offered the mercy of God.

I went to a high school that had a rigid “pecking order” (social order) and I was low down in that order. As low as I was, there were people lower on the scale than I was. Sadly, I would have been embarrassed to have them as my friends. I would have been embarrassed to be seen with them.

The mercy of God is the opposite of that embarrassment. The friendship of God may be unwelcome because it comes in a shape, or in a condition, that seems unacceptable to you, or to someone you know.

But God is like that most un-cool person in your school, who is so not-cool that they are completely blind to what others think of them. They are completely unfazed and undeterred by the clearest forms of rejection. They simply don’t know when to stop being the way they are. It isn’t in their nature to stop.

God doesn’t stop. God’s mercy, in Christ, does not stop. It is just like Jesus, praying for those who were crucifying him. We cannot know God as he truly is, in Jesus, and live as if anyone living or dead has stopped being the object of the mercy of God.

I believe in hell, but I also believe in the mercy of God, in Christ. I believe in not being afraid of anyone’s destination.

Let us believe in living as if everyone we know, and everyone we meet, and everyone in the world, belongs to God. God is doing everything to prepare that person for his mercy and love. It is the mystery revealed in the good news of Jesus that makes us say, “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”

God's Power: A Christ-Shaped World

Preached on Sunday, October 30, 2011

Scripture readings: Isaiah 65:17-25; Matthew 25:31-46; Romans 8:17-30

A man went to the zoo and found a small meadow-like area, surrounded by a high fence, where a wolf and a live lamb were lying down together. The sign on their fence said “Isaiah 65 verse 25: The wolf and the lamb shall feed together”. The man was amazed and spoke to the zoo keeper about it. “This is amazing. How do you do it?” And the zoo keeper said, “Well, we replace the lamb every morning.”

Isaiah is not telling us about a future world where lions and wolves stop being carnivores, but a world where what is wonderful, and beautiful, and innocent in this world will not live in danger of destruction, or blight, or mutilation. Isaiah, Paul, and Jesus too, tell us about a change that is coming, someday; of a world where life, and freedom, and happiness are not endangered.

A fish lives its whole life in the water and never knows it is wet. So I am told.

We are born, and live our whole lives, in a beautiful world that we know is unhinged; unbalanced at best. If the suffering, and the injustice, and the unfulfillment of this world were to us what water is to a fish, we would be different from the fish. We would know that we are all wet. We would know that there was something wrong, and that we were living in a world that was not what it was meant to be. We would know that we were not what we were designed to be.

I heard a news report about the changes in sheep ranching in Idaho, since the reintroduction of wolves. The journalist interviewed ranchers and sheepherders and learned how sheepherders have to stick much closer to the sheep in the wilderness, than they used to do before the wolves returned.

The sheepherders told about the differences they have found between wildcats and wolves as predators. They have found that wildcats kill a sheep and eat it, but wolves seem to enjoy killing a sheep, and then moving on to the next, and on to the next, and on to the next. The sheepherders (who are mostly Latinos) call the wolves “terroristas”: terrorists.

I have always thought that dogs are more like people than cats are. Maybe wolves are more like people than wildcats are, too. Or maybe humans are more like wolves. And some people are like wolves in sheep’s clothing.

I think Isaiah starts out describing sickness, disease, death, sin, and injustice; and then pictures them for us in the form of wild animals. He tells us that God promises a “new heavens and a new earth” where there will be no more wild animals; meaning no more sickness, disease, death, sin, and injustice.

There was a woman who told me about losing a four-year-old grandson. She told me that this grandson was just a normal energetic, exuberant four-year-old, but the boy’s mother did not know how to be a mother to such a child. The mother put bolts on the boy’s door and nailed the windows, to shut him in.

There was a house fire and there was no time to get into the boy’s room from the inside or the outside. The boy burned to death.

Perhaps the mother was possessed by a kind of insanity toward her son, but it made her a wolf to her son. The mother was fatal to her own child.

This is only an extreme case of what sin and injustice are, and what they do. God did not design the world to be this way. Most of us know that we were not designed for such a world. But sin has twisted God’s world into another shape.

It has even infected the world, like a disease, by infecting our hearts and minds. We live in a world that reflects the infection of our own hearts.

This is why Jesus says such extreme things. He says, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother ‘Raca (worthless)’ will be subject to the High Court. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

For a while, when my mom was in the hospital, my sisters and I were required to put on hospital gowns and gloves before entering her room. When you know there really is a danger of infection, you take care. You take extreme care. We are all carriers of a dangerous infection called sin.

But God does a good thing here. God does a wonderful, extravagant, almost heart-breaking thing. He comes in Christ and suffers for the sins of the world.

The cross is the attack of the world’s infection against the life of God in Christ, and the cross is like God’s production of a vaccine for the cure. A vaccine always contains some element which it has in common with the disease it is designed to cure. This is why some people are afraid of vaccines.

Well Jesus does a scary thing in his battle against evil and sin. Jesus takes the infection of sin, and injustice, and death on the cross, and then he injects his crucifixion into our souls. Jesus makes his death into a way for us to die to sin, and injustice, and death.

It is as if the gospel, or the good news of Jesus, was the serum that contains the vaccine and the cure. Then, somehow, he makes us part of his work of injecting that vaccine into the world of which we are a part. The active ingredient of his vaccine is his life, and death, and resurrection. It is a Christ-shaped vaccine.

Paul says that “we are children of God”…”heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” His glory is heaven. His glory is the coming resurrection. His glory is our part in his new heavens and new earth: a new creation.

When Jesus claims us and makes us his own, we have to be his own by living what he makes us. We have to be Christ in this world; his hands, his voice, his feet. The world suffers, so Christ suffers, so we suffer; to make things different, to make things new. The world groans, so we groan, and even the Holy Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9) groans, in order to pray what we don’t even know how to pray.

Our prayers are the voice of the creation crying out to God for a new heavens and a new earth; for ourselves, and for everyone and everything in this beautiful and groaning creation. Our prayers are the voice of creation hoping for the day when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21)

We are carriers of an infection. The world is like a school, or a home with lots of little kids, where the same virus goes around, and around, and around. But the promise of God is that the sufferings of Jesus (which we can share and which we carry for him) are the foundation of his work of a new creation.

We are sharing together the work of Jesus, because Jesus gives us the promise of hope. We are never without hope, because Jesus himself is the first installment of the new heavens and new earth, and he lives in us.

We have Jesus in us. Paul says, in Colossians, that we are God’s people, and that God’s people have been “chosen to make known among the nations the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

But it is even more positive than that. Paul says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22) It sounds strange. We are all going to have a baby together, and that baby is the baby of God, the baby of Jesus. (Romans 8:21) The baby is a new creation, a new world.

The church is called the Bride of Christ. (Ephesians 5:23; Revelations 17:7) I would suggest to you that the baby will resemble the father more than it will resemble the mother. That baby is the liberated creation; the new heavens and the new earth that will be free from the old infections, the old dysfunctions that surround us and fill us. The baby is the kingdom of God; the kingdom of justice, and righteousness, and the peace of God.

What will that new creation be like? We have read some of the clues this morning. Paul says that our groaning comes, in part, because we “have the first fruits of the Spirit.”

What would the Spirit be doing in you that would create a contrast between you and the world as it is and has been for so long? What would the Spirit be giving you, and changing in you?

We have, Paul says, “the first fruits of the Spirit.” What is the fruit of the Spirit? In Galatians, Paul says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) If this is the shape of the world to which we are giving birth, then we can say that it is a Christ-shaped world. It will function like Jesus.

Surely the work of the Spirit has the goal of making us Christ-shaped people for a Christ-shaped world where people live in Christ-shaped ways. Together, that coming world and we will be Christ-shaped. Life will be like that.

This is what we were made for. This is what got twisted out of shape by the infection of sin. This is the shape that the power of Jesus, the power of the good news, and the power of the Holy Spirit is molding in us.

This is why it is true that Paul also says, “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has gone. The new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) The body of a mother changes with the progress of the baby inside her. We change with the nearing of Jesus within us.

It is not true that the reality of Jesus is only a thing of the future. He is here now, in you and me. He is here in the world, through us, and through his Spirit.

He should be visible. We should be able to look at each other (and at ourselves), and other people should be able to look at us, and see what is coming.

Later on in Romans, Paul will say, “Do not be conformed to this world (that is; don’t be shaped by it) but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2) The power of God working through his good news makes you a demonstration, a proof, of what he is doing.

This is what Jesus is talking about in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. This is the truth that separates the sheep from the goats.

The hungry, and the thirsty, and the stranger, and the naked, and the sick, and the imprisoned are all part of the travail; part of the suffering of this world. They do not make a complete list, but they represent neediness within our world, as it has been deformed by sin. They represent the sufferings of this world that brought Jesus to the cross, and that bring us to suffer with him. They represent the needs of the world that we carry to God in the groaning of the Holy Spirit’s prayers.

Jesus calls these people his brothers and sisters.

Some people say that Jesus’ brothers and sisters are his messengers. After all, Jesus called the disciples his brothers. So some people say that Jesus means us to understand that the peoples of the world will be judged as sheep or as goats by the way they have treated Jesus’ messengers. This would make Jesus say that other people will be judged by how they treat you and me; or by how they treat the missionaries that come to their lands. This sounds very nice for us. It’s a good deal.

By all means, if we love Jesus, we should take care of him in the form of our own brothers and sisters in Christ. They all belong to us. Jesus works, and intends to work, in our lives through them. They are Christ to us. But so are all the people of the world.

At the Last Supper, Jesus washed the feet of the disciple Judas, along with the rest of the disciples. Jesus did this even though Judas was the one who was going to betray him.

When Jesus fed the multitudes in the wilderness he didn’t require a test to see if anyone who was hungry might also be spying on him. There were enemies in the crowd. There were Pharisees, and government spies, and hypocrites there.

The Gospel of John tells us that there were certainly unbelievers who were fed along with the rest of the crowd. (John 6:26-27) There was no test for loyalty; no test for a relationship with Jesus. The people Jesus fed did not have to be his messengers or disciples.

When Jesus travelled briefly out of his country to Lebanon (just a few miles north of Galilee) a pagan woman asked him to heal her daughter. Jesus, at first, declined to help her because, as he told her, he was sent to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. But she persisted and Jesus healed her daughter anyway. He said, “Woman, you have great faith.” (Matthew 15:28)

The point is that Jesus came for those who were most likely to be considered lost. Surely the ones who came, in their need, to Jesus are truly his brothers and sisters. Such people always receive the special attention of Jesus.

There is no test for loyalty that we have been given to use on anyone in need. We are to help the brothers and sister of Jesus, of course. And we are to help those who are hungry, and thirsty, and strangers, and naked, and sick, and in prison because they are in need of Christ, even if they do not know their need.

None of us know our need until we know him. Sometimes, even after we know him, we do not know our need.

We are not a part of the new creation of Jesus if the old creation does not make us groan. And that groaning takes a practical shape; a Jesus-shaped shape. We groan for the world in prayer. We groan in the form of stretching to help others, because we know that they have the special attention of Jesus. We know this is especially true when there are others who would put a warning-label on them, and pigeon-hole them as lost, or simply to be ignored and passed by.

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther was led by the story of the judgment of the sheep and the goats to pray like this, “O dear Lord God! How are we so blind that we don’t take such love to heart! Who could have thought it up that God himself throws himself so deep down into our midst and accepts the works of all those who give themselves to the poor as though they were done for him. Thus the world is full, full of God – in every alley, before your door, you find Christ.”

This is a hard thing, and a wonderful thing. The world is groaning with the burden of sin; and it is groaning with the birth pains of God’s love and God’s new creation at the same time.

Our friend Paul assumes that we will be making noise ourselves for the same reason. We will pray with sighs and groans too deep for words. And we will serve and help, because we see Jesus in all the people who have all kinds of needs.

In the parable of the sheep and the goats the amazing truth is that, in the end, we will all find that we have seen Jesus. No one passes through life in this world without meeting Jesus.

The good news is all about the power of God in the form of grace. Grace is about need. It is true that this need is our need. But we cannot say no to the needs of the world around us and the people around us. When we say “no” to them, we say no to our own need for the grace of the gospel of Jesus. This is the proof of the sheep and the goats.

Every day in this world you have grace meeting you at your door. You have grace meeting you in the needs of those you work with. You have the need for grace facing you and talking to you at school. You have grace and the need for grace sitting with you at your table at home. You have the grace of Jesus meeting you every day.

Even now the shape of this world shows you the face of Jesus. And Jesus involves you in his mission; the work of bringing Jesus into a Christ-shaped world because you live a Christ-shaped life.

God's Power: Declaring Us "Not Guilty'

Preached on Sunday October 23, 2011

Scripture readings: Genesis 15:1-6; Luke 18:9-14; Romans 3:19-31

I have friends who are great listeners. There are times when, more than anything else, I need someone to listen. So I try to be a listener too.

Only there are the times I get caught red-handed and ashamed, because someone was talking to me and it was my job to listen. They stopped to hear some sign or some encouragement from me, and I had no idea what they just said. I was too busy thinking of what I wanted to say next to listen to them.

This is one of the ways we know we live in a fallen world; a world that is separated from the love, the harmony, the peace, the goodness, and the faithfulness that comes from God. We belong to a human race that makes far too much noise.

We find it easier to talk than to listen. Even when we are not talking out loud, our minds and hearts are full of jabbering and noise.

It isn’t just the kids who walk around with earphones blasting away with their own play list. Human beings have done this all along. We walk around with our own soundtrack. We listen to the music of our pride, our anger, our complaints, our desire to make an impression on others. We listen to our drive to justify ourselves, or prove ourselves, or defend ourselves.

This is why Paul says such a strange thing about our need to be quiet and listen to God. He says that the most important purpose of God’s laws (which are God’s principles and ways for us to live as his creatures) is to make us quiet and listen. He says: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.” (3:19)

We have the same problem when God wants to speak to us through his creation. We hear, but we are very selective about what we hear.

Paul says that we humans suppress God’s truth and drown it out through the ways we have developed of thinking and living, even when we claim to be filled with wonder by the world around us. He says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20) We have let ourselves be moved by God’s creation but not changed by it.

The world and everyone in it is in a lot of trouble because our hearts, our minds, and our lives are so full of the noise of our selves. In the Book of Job it says, “For God speaks in one way and in two though man does not perceive it.” (Job 33:14) In the Psalms, the Lord says, “Be still (be quiet), and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

We are a rebel race. We try to maintain our authority over our own lives. We try to drown out God, using our inner noise as a weapon, even when we claim to have given our lives to God.

Some people say there is too much harm done in the world by people claiming to listen to God instead of listening to reason. But we have spent our lives learning how to disguise our own desires and make them sound like other voices; whether God, or reason. James, in his letter, recognizes the danger of substituting our own desires for other voices. ‘Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.’ (James 1:13-15) Yes, religious people have done great harm in this world by claiming to follow the voice of God when, all along, they were only acting from their desire to play God.

This is like the temptation in the Garden of Eden. The voice of the serpent (the voice of the Devil) said that eating the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would make us as wise as God. It would give us control over our lives.

We wouldn’t have to only listen to God. We would have a voice of our own, and we wouldn’t have to live by simple faith.

In our present time, more than ever before, everyone is claiming for themselves the right to follow their own inner voices. It is all another round of the same chorus taught to us by Adam and Eve. The voice within them agreed with the voice of the serpent. They followed their own inner voices, and we have had hell to pay for it ever since.

We live in a confusion of voices and our own voice is loudest of all. In the confusion of voices, we don’t know the meaning of anything. We don’t know what anything is, or what it is for. We don’t know what men and women are for, or what family is for. We don’t know what nations or communities are for. We don’t know what laws and governments are for, or what freedom and liberty are for. We don’t even know what religion and faith are for.

And we are afraid to find out. We are afraid of not having our own way.

During the fourteen hundreds, in the wealthy Republic of Florence (which was an independent city-state in northern Italy, in those days), there was a monk and preacher named Savonarola.

Savonarola saw the rule of law being broken down by a clique of families who wanted to use the power of the government for their own personal gain. He tried to re-establish the old republic, but he lost the struggle and got burned at the stake.

The Christian writer G. K. Chesterton wrote this about Savonarola and what he tried to accomplish: “Democracy, of which Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings. Christianity, in Savonarola’s mind, identical with democracy, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying that they are all the sons of God.” (“Savonarola” in “Varied Types” p. 151)

The word “gospel” means “good news”. It is a kind of message; a kind of voice that tells us we are, or can be, sons and daughters of God. It is the good news of God, the good news of Jesus Christ, taking the form of a voice and telling us how we can be changed and filled with “the righteousness of God”.

This righteousness is a kind of rightness in all our relationships. It means a right relationship with God; the peace and love of God restored in us. It spills over into right relationships with others; so that we know how to be a husband, a wife, a single person, a parent, a child, a member of the kingdom of God, a citizen, an agent for God’s purpose in the world. The righteousness of God enables us to live the life we were created for. It enables us to live the life that Jesus came to give us through his own life, and his death on the cross, and his resurrection.

There is a voice in this world that is the voice of God speaking among the many voices that we use to drown out our fears, and the sounds of our own sins, and the sounds of our own cooperation with the ways of this world. Among all our fond and confusing voices, faith appears to sort them out and let us hear God’s voice rising above them all, so that we can listen to God and respond.

Faith enables us to hear the message of how far we have fallen from a lost glory. The glory is that life of right relationships. It was a glory we had in Eden, and the message says that we have all sinned and fallen short of it. We are all just as involved in falling from that glory as the first humans were so long ago in Eden.

The word “sin” (in the Greek language) is an archery word that describes missing the mark. But this kind of missing the mark goes beyond anything that can be corrected by discipline and skill. This kind of missing is a part of us. It would be like shooting a crooked arrow from a warped bow: only you are not just the archer; you are the crooked arrow, and you are the warped bow. They are extensions of your self.

It would be like having dyslexia in your spiritual vision. Here you see what is before you, but it is jumbled, and you don’t know how to put it together because it will always be jumbled in a way you do not expect.

What if our self-centered soul (because of our spiritual rebellion) has made us all severely near-sighted? Teddy Roosevelt was deeply nearsighted; even from early childhood. His family was always into sports and hunting, and he would go hunting for ducks and geese with his cousins. He could never understand how they could simply point their guns in the air and fire, and ducks and geese would come down. He would fire into the air, and nothing came down. He couldn’t understand this until he realized that they could see the ducks and geese, and he couldn’t. Of course he would miss the mark.

John Calvin spoke of the spectacles of faith, the eye glasses of faith. He meant that faith enables us to see what we cannot see otherwise.

I got my first glasses when I was about ten and, when I put them on, I cried, not for the joy of seeing, but for the sorrow of seeing how blind I was. I couldn’t see how blind I was till I got my glasses. Just so we cannot see how fallen short we are until we put on the spectacles of faith.

I never boast about my glasses, just as I never boast about my faith. My glasses are a gift, even though I have bought them my self. Glasses are just a remedy for my level of blindness.

So Paul says that faith never allows us to boast. (3:27-28) Faith is a gift, no matter how experienced we become in living by faith. I am always interested in comparing my spectacles with those of other people, but I would never dream of criticizing other people’s glasses or boasting about my own. We need God’s gifts to see God’s truth, and to see the good news.

There is a very brief statement that Paul made about what Jesus has done for us. It is like a text message; a huge thought spelled out in just a few letters. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as the sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.” (3:23-25)

Paul is usually very wordy, and we complain when he is. Here Paul is very condensed and brief, and I wish he would explain what he says here. Reading these few verses is like sucking on a bullion cube instead of making it into broth.

The phrase “sacrifice of atonement” is sometimes translated by other single words because it is just one word in the Greek (and it would be just one word in Hebrew), too. But this one word is shorthand for the whole process of God working in our life.

It was the name of a piece of furniture in the tabernacle and in the Temple in Jerusalem that King Solomon built. The blood of sacrifices was sprinkled on this piece of furniture, to represent the forgiveness of the worshiper who offered that sacrifice for the forgiveness of his or her sins.

This piece of furniture was the Ark of the Covenant that contained the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. It held the treasures from the exodus, when God led his people out of slavery in Egypt and into the freedom of the Promised Land.

The Ark of the Covenant was built to look like a golden throne. No human was allowed to sit there, because it was God’s throne. God’s invisible presence was thought to hover there in a concentrated way. When a sacrifice was made for forgiveness the blood was brought to the throne of God to represent that sin was costly, and that the cost came home to God.

It represented that sin was deadly. The death of the sacrifice represented the death of the person who had sinned. The sinner offered his death to God, by substitution.

The sacrifice also represented that the sinner needed life from somewhere else, in order to go on living by the love and the freedom of God. But the death given for sin, and the life given for new life, represented something that those who offered the sacrifice could never really give for themselves. The fact that such a sacrifice could be made in the Temple, and brought into the presence of God, meant that God himself had to provide a way to die to sin and live a new life. Only God could devise and provide such a new life for his people.

In the end, when Jesus came, he claimed to be the sacrifice and the ransom for sin. Jesus is God come to earth as a human, in order to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

It turned out that God himself provided the sacrifice. God was and is the sacrifice: God himself is the gift of the righteousness of God.

The word translated as “sacrifice of atonement” refers to the throne of God but really it is the name of the special title of that throne where the blood was sprinkled. The title is “mercy seat”. The mercy seat was the place where the mercy of God was found. Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase translation “The Message” translates it this way: “God put Jesus forth as the place of mercy, though his faithfulness, by means of his blood.” (3:25)

God, in Christ, is the place of mercy. Mercy has not been gotten by our faithfulness to God but by means of God’s faithfulness to us in Christ. We have all been died for, and the blood of God, from the cross, has marked us as the children of God, the people of God. This is an act of God in the fullest and best sense of the word.

Paul said that we have received “redemption”. Redemption means the freeing of a slave. Sin is a kind of self-seeking that is, by its very nature. It deforms every relationship. Sin cuts us off from God who is our very source of life, and without God we are not fully alive.

Without a right relationship with God, which spills over to all our other relations, we no longer know how to live. We have lost our selves in our ambition to rule our selves. We are slaves.

But, through the atoning sacrifice of God in Christ, we are in the place of mercy. We are made one with God and we are set free to live the life we were created for.

Paul said that we are “justified”. We have two words in English where the Greek language has only one. The words “just”, and “justice”, and “right”, and “righteous” are represented by one root word in Greek.

“Justify” is a verb form of the same word. It means the action of making right, or making righteous, or making just. In New Testament Greek the word “justify” also means to give someone the status of being just, or right, or righteous. It is a verb of legal status. It is like the verdict of a judge who declares a defendant innocent.

In this case, however, we have God, our ultimate judge, declaring us (the guilty) to be innocent. This is a miscarriage of justice. In fact, in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, we read that this miscarriage of justice is specifically condemned. The proverb says: “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent – the Lord detests them both.” (Proverbs 17:15)

The truth is that we live in an in-between time. In Christ, God has given us a new life and a new nature. It is our status. It is our new identity. But the substance of our new identity hasn’t, in terms of how we think and live every day, hasn’t come home to us. We don’t see it very clearly as yet.

Something has happened. We can be aware, sometimes, of an enormous change in our lives; and others may see it too. But there are other times when we fail miserably to be what God has made us, and declared us to be, in Christ.

At such times we are like old Abraham who was given God’s promise. He and his wife Sarah would become the parents of a nation with a purpose that would be a blessing to the whole world. (Genesis 12:1-3) But the years passed and nothing seemed to happen. Over and over the Lord renewed his promise and, year after year, nothing happened. It was as if the promises of God were only a joke.

The fact is that, for Abraham, God was real even when the promises seemed unreal. Abraham held onto the promise because he trusted the God who spoke the promise. Abraham chose the voice of God above all the other voices that discouraged him.

That was the faith of Abraham. It is like that with our faith in the good news of God in Christ. It is the news that God, our judge, has acquitted the guilty through the cross of Jesus. God declares us innocent, even though we wear the evidence of our guilt.

The righteousness that comes by faith is nothing to boast of. But the God who declares the guilty innocent is a God worth boasting of. And that is the sort of news that can be shared with anyone.

Dick Cochran was a mentor of mine for a number of years. When I was first ordained, Dick was the senior pastor of a very fine church in a neighboring town. I met with him every week share what was going on in my life and my ministry.

He had a story he often told of a time when he was playing tennis with his teenage son. Dick has always been extremely competitive and taught his kids to be the same.

Well, in this story, Dick hit the ball over the net to his son and it bounced very near the line. His son missed it and said it was out. Dick said it was in. And Dick said, “If I said it was in, it was in. I’m your father and I’m your pastor. If you can’t trust me, whom can you trust?” And his son answered, “That’s what I’m afraid of!”

That was classic Dick Cochran, standing up for him self. But in Jesus, God stands up for you and says, “Innocent! Free! Redeemed! Atoned! You are the receiver of my mercy!”

This is what it means to be justified by grace. It means that a voice has spoken up in your favor and this voice has been designed for faith. It means a message for you to trust by faith. “Innocent! Child of God!”

Many voices will tell you otherwise. Many voices will try to wear you down, or discourage you, or distract you. Those voices will tell you to live as something different than a child of God. Even your own voice will try to do this. You have to choose to hear the voice of the one who loves you more than you love your self. This is faith.

It is true because God says so. If you can’t trust God, whom can you trust? Whom will you, trust? You must listen. Through faith you can go forth and live by the promise of God.

Polar Bear Gnats

Polar bear gnats; that’s what I call them:
Tiny and wearing their white fluffy coats;
Funny harbingers of the wicked cold.
See how my fall garden is full of them.
Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! Winter is coming!

God's Power: A Mercy-Centered Wrath

Preached Sunday October 16, 2011

Scripture readings: Jeremiah 7:3-15; Mark 11:12-25; Romans 1:16-23; 1:28-2:11

Did you know that “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of human beings?” (Romans 1:18) This is what the Bible says, and I believe that it is so. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about the wrath of God, and I think it would take a sermon about as long as the Bible to explain it.

The wrath of God makes us think of a fire-breathing God; a God who smites people. Whatever else the Bible may say, elsewhere, about the wrath of God, Paul says nothing about fire or smiting here.

According to Paul, what is the form that the wrath of God takes when human beings push God, and the reality of God, away? Paul says that God gives them over, or that God gives them up. (1:24, 26, 28) God lets them go. What if, of all the horrifying pictures we have of the wrath of God, this image of God letting the world go, and letting us go, is the most horrifying picture of all?

We hear Paul describe this process. Paul says, “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” (1:22) He says, “Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind.” (1:28) In other words, to those who did not want to see reality in the same terms that God sees reality, God gave them up to the reality that would exist if he did not exist. God let them get a taste of the world and of their own minds as they would be without the boundaries created by God and his love.

Paul says, “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” (1:29-31)

When we speak of God giving up a person, we mean that God is willing to let them go from bad to worse, if they are determined on going that way. You know, sometimes this is the only way.

There are broken people who want to go a way we cannot accept or support. We would like, with all our heart, to fix them. We are always kind to them, but we also have to be firm as well, and not support them or enable them in the harmful journey they have chosen.

We have to let them go. We have to entrust them to God by giving them up, in the hope that they will see the truth and seek God’s help (and our help too) when they are ready; when it is the right time, when it is God’s time, when they “hit bottom” and feel the pain of the way they have chosen.

We know (in the sorrow of our heart) that giving someone up, or giving them over to the life they choose, is not a lack of love. It is an act of love, and faith, and a prayerful, concerned hope. And so, one of the discoveries we make about the wrath of God, through what Paul teaches us, is that the wrath of God is not separated from his love in any way. The wrath of God is not an absence of love.

We know, from human experience, that even the presence of a red-hot anger is not necessarily a sign of hatred: not when we are family or friends. And all people belong to the family of God in virtue of their being his creatures. They are God’s sons and daughters by creation.

We know, from human experience, that our anger can give way to complete indifference, or to bitterness and hatred in the end. But we also know (or we should know) that we are not God, and that God is not measured by our limitations.

Our love seems to come to an end because of our human limitations, but God is love. God has no limitations, nor does his love. If God stopped being love, in any way, he would stop being God. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)

We have a lot of misunderstandings about the wrath of God, and understanding that wrath is a part of the love of God doesn’t make it any easier to understand. Paul says that we can experience God’s coming wrath (or even God’s judgment) as kindness, tolerance, and patience (2:4), and that even his own people (like you and me) might not realize that not feeling the wrath or not feeling the judgment of God for ourselves might be the kindness that is meant, by God, to lead us to repentance. (2:4)

If the wrath of God means that God will sometimes let people go their own way, what does it mean if, so many times, God lets us go our own way? We think what we want, we feel what we want, we deal with other people as we want, and we think that, because nothing apparently goes against us, that everything is OK.

The Bible clearly doesn’t agree with what we might be thinking, and feeling, and doing, but we manage to do it anyway. Sometimes we explain this by saying that the Bible is sort of extreme and it doesn’t always mean what it says? And, after all, we have accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior, and so we are immune to God’s wrath and judgment (so they say); because God is a God of love.

We wouldn’t be the first to think this way. Paul knew such people, and they appear in his letter to the Romans.

But Paul is saying that we are not immune and, if we think that God allows us to be so, then we are doing what Paul says that others have done who wanted to go their own way. We have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” (1:25) And Paul, in this part of his letter, is talking to the Christians in Rome. He is talking to us.

The people of God in the time of the prophet Jeremiah thought they were immune from the wrath and judgment of God. In their case, part of their self-confidence was that they had “the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord.” The Lord had his dwelling with them. (Jeremiah 7:4)

The temple seemed to them like a wedding ring on the finger of the bride of the Lord, and so they thought they were protected. They thought they were immune. Are we not tempted to think the same way, just because we are the bride of the Lord Christ?

They thought he would never let anything happen to them. We think that God will never let anything happen to us to show that we have been caught, and that we have been found to be false.

Jeremiah said that they had made the temple into “a den of robbers”. (Jeremiah 7:11) This means that they had made it into a hiding place where they thought they could escape detection, and where they could not get caught. They had made the temple into a den where they could even hide their own eyes from the truth abut themselves.

They had robbed God by depriving him of their primary allegiance and their first love. They worshipped idols, just as we worship our homes, and our security, and our money; just as we worship our own happiness.

They mistreated and used other people for their own happiness. And, in this way, they robbed those who were supposed to stand before them as the image of God. They robbed them by not giving them the treatment that we owe to those who are made in the image of God. And they robbed them by not being for others the image of God that we are created to be. They robbed them by not being the image of God’s steadfast and faithful love to others.

Jesus acted against the temple as a hiding place. He attacked the very operation of the temple as a place where the mercy of God was acted out through the sacrifices made for the forgiveness of sins.

These sacrifices could not be made because they could not be bought without the temple coinage that the money changers provided. Because of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers, all offerings for sin stopped in the temple that day. The only offering for sin that was present in the temple that day was Jesus, himself.

The attack of Jesus on the temple was a sign that the temple had come to an end as a place for the mercy of God to be found, because of those who used it to hide from their own failure to love God and to love others.

The cursing of the fig tree was another sign of this wrath of God, and of his promise to destroy the temple. Jesus said that every faithful prayer for God’s judgment to come upon the mountain of the house of the Lord would find itself fulfilled. (Mark 11:23) When Jesus says “Have faith in God!” he means for us to trust that he will never let this sort of robbery and hiding stand.

When we read Paul’s writings about the wrath and judgment of God and see how he applied it to his readers, including us, we see that he is very interested in getting us to stop hiding from our involvement in sin. He says, “You who pass judgment do the same things.” (2:1)

We don’t do all of the things on the list. That would be nearly impossible. It would be exhausting.

But look at that list, and I will tell you what disturbs me most about it. There is no order to it. There is no top or bottom of the list. There is no way that we can comfort ourselves because of where our peculiar sins fall on that list.

Envy comes before murder. Is envy worse than murder?

The God-hater comes two steps below the gossip. What does that mean?

It means watch out. It means know yourself as God knows you. It means stop hiding and stop thinking you are immune.

What makes God mad? What gets his wrath going? Paul says, “For the wrath of God is being revealed…against all godlessness and wickedness.” (1:18)

Godlessness and wickedness represent the two most important parts of our lives when we have gone wrong. We show godlessness when we are not living as if our lives belonged to God. We show wickedness when we are not living our lives in love and service to others.

We are made for love; which means we are made for life with God and with others. When we do not live for love we destroy God’s work of creation within us. When we fail in love for God and others it is as if we had cut off our own arms and legs. It is as if we had plucked out our own heart, and given ourselves a lobotomy.

When we do not live in love toward God and toward others, we have robbed God and others of the gift that we were created to be. We have mutilated ourselves and lived destructively.

My dad had two big tattoos on his upper arms: a panther on one, and a snake on the other. He hated them.

He had not gotten them willingly. When he was a kid in the navy, going on shore leave, some of the other guys got him drunk and took him to a tattoo parlor and got him tattooed.

The panther and the snake were a constant reminder to my dad of a time when he was the butt of a joke that had mutilated him against his will, and yet his going out with those guys was a willingness to play into a behavior that got him there. He never quite got over the wrath in that; the wrath toward the guys who did it to him and the wrath toward himself for the foolishness that got him in trouble.

We are, in our own time, the people of God and the people of the covenant, in Christ. But we are not immune to the consequences of where we place our heart. We need to be, spiritually, centered in a state of repentance, which is an intensely practical place to be.

Repentance means a change of mind and heart. It means turning about face. It is the difference between going one way and going the opposite way. Paul asks us to look at where our heart loves to live. What way is our heart going?

The gospel means good news, and it is the good news of “the righteousness of God” and “the power of God.” (1:16-17) The good news of Jesus is that God has done everything that is needed to put an end to the self-seeking self, and to make you new and give you a new heart.

God has come as a human for your sake, to die for your sins so that you can die to yourself. And God, in Christ has risen from the dead so that you may rise with him into a new life that will not end.

In a self-mutilating world God has two options for us. One option is holding onto the mutilated life. In such a life we continue to seek our own way instead of living in love for God and for others.

The other option is the new life rising from the ashes of the old as, through Christ, we die to the old life and rise into the new. In such a life our hearts are set on a relationship of love with God and others that will never fade, or spoil, or end.

Think about the world as it is; this beautiful, magnificent world that is packed so full of outrage, and injustice, and victimization, and brutality. What is more surprising in such a world: the wrath of God or the grace of God?

Would the world be a better place if God was not angry with what we have done to it? Should the absence of the very thought of God’s anger make us happier with the world as it is?

Between wrath and grace, does it seem unjust that we have no third choice? What third choice could there be (between wrath and grace).

There could be a third choice. Between grace and wrath, there could be a choice of God making us cease to exist. It could be a kind of spiritual euthanasia or mercy-killing. In such a mercy killing God could say, “I brought you into existence but, given the chance, you have shown yourself to be unworthy of existence.” Perhaps God could take our undeserved existence painlessly away, but would that be the work of a God of love?

Even the wrath of God can be the love of God. It can be God saying, “In spite of what you have done to waste your life, and in spite of the way you have diminished and damaged my children and my world, your life still has meaning for me. Even now I have not made junk. I have loved your existence enough to give you life and I will not deny it or take it away.”

The love that will claim to mercifully remove a soul from existence is not the love it claims to be. It judges a person to be unworthy of life. It goes beyond saying that you can love a person and yet continue to be angry with them. It goes on to say that you can love a person and destroy them completely.

For those Christians who believe, as I do, in capital punishment and the death penalty, I would explain it like this. In executing the person who is guilty of a heinous crime we are not claiming to eliminate their existence from the universe.

We are sending them to a higher court. We are sending them to face their maker and the one who died for their sins. Capital punishment is wrath. It is violent, but it does not deny the worthiness of a human soul to live.

Wrath and grace are both about love. The message of the wrath tells us that we should understand that we may be hard to love. The message of the grace of God tells us that God finds it to be a very costly thing to love us. God’s grace can be called his power because it comes through his own death, taking our place on the cross. And it comes through his breaking the power of death through his own dying and resurrection.

Above all that, the story of God’s grace tells us that God finds that such a love is not too hard for him. The love of God loves to love us into salvation and transformation even when he must bear such an infinite cost.

This is why God’s plan of grace for the world and for us (if we want it) is good news. And when a world of wrath becomes too much for us we can find our freedom by the surrender of ourselves that comes through faith.