(This is the fifth message in our Lenten series 'Together Again: The Meaning of the Atonement.')
Genesis 1:26-31 and Romans 8:18-23
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
At our house in California we had the only swimming pool in the family, and so summers became a long string of barbecues and swim parties for the kids. It started before Memorial Day in May, and lasted until after school started. In the summer, maybe 3 or 4 times a week our extended family would come over, swim, eat and tell stories together. It was great.
There was always a point in the summer when the bees in our neighborhood would breed and go out looking for food to take back to the hive. Nothing makes a person move more quickly or in a funnier way than the sight of a bee—you know what I’m talking about.
But bees play a crucial role in our lives. It’s not just honey, though I’ll bet you didn’t know that a 16-ounce bottle of honey represents the work of tens of thousands of bees who flew a total of 112,000 miles to gather nectar from 4.5 million flowers. That’s for 16 ounces of honey.
Do you know how bees make honey? The gathering bees take their loads back to receiver bees, who eat it and expel it 200 times, which kills any dangerous microbes it may have. The whole time they do this they fan it with their wings—more than 25,000 times each. When it’s done another wax specialist bee comes along and seals it in the comb.
That’s how every ounce of honey that exists in the world is made.
Even if you don’t like honey, there’s one essential truth about bees that you can’t escape: without bees there would be no flowers of any kind. Now you might be thinking that you might be able to get along just fine without flowers—they’re just there for decoration anyway, right?
Think about this: About a third of the world’s food supply is dependent on the pollinating services of honeybees.
The point of this series as we reflect and prepare for Easter is that Christ’s sacrifice offers us healing for our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
The Bible describes how our relationships are supposed to be with the word Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. One writer define Shalom as ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
Today we’re looking at what Christ’s redeeming work means for our relationship to the earth. You’ve heard a part of the creation story already. Here’s the second text for us today.
18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
That’s one of those typically complicated passages of Paul’s in his letter to the Romans. The point is that Christ’s sacrifice sets into motion a reshaping of the world into what God designed it to be in the first place. ‘Creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay.’
And then there’s the groaning of creation, followed by this statement. ‘We wait eagerly for the redemption of our bodies.’ The word that translates to ‘bodies’ there is Soma, and it can also translate to ‘existence.’ We are eagerly waiting, the text tells us, for the groaning to stop—for the redemption of all existence.
Christ’s sacrifice sets that redemption in motion—not just for our personal forgiveness or salvation—but for the restoration of everything—including the earth—back to the Shalom God created.
James Watt was the Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan back in the early 80s. He was known for saying some fairly uninformed things. He once banned the Beach Boys from playing a concert in Washington DC because they attracted an ‘undesirable element.’ Who? Middle-aged surfers? Those are the happiest, most harmless people I know.
Watt was in favor of opening up just about every acre of public land for drilling, mining and other industrial use. In a lot of ways he was the worst nightmare of the environmentalist movement.
To be fair, though, he never said the one thing that most people will remember about his environmental views. He never said that since Jesus might return tomorrow, we might as well use everything up. When that was pointed out, a handful of prominent journalists—including Bill Moyers—ended up apologizing to him.
What Watt actually said was this: “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”
Now even that might make some of you uncomfortable, but we have to agree that it’s not nearly as crazy sounding as how it was reported. As much as it pains me to say it, that statement is at the moderate core of Christian teaching about the earth and how we should manage it.
James Watt makes a pretty easy target. He represents a certain kind of fundamentalism that didn’t offer much in the way of help in understanding what God wants from us—what Christ on the Cross made possible for us—in our relationship to the earth. Watt’s easy, but he’s not alone.
Lately, on the other side of the issue, there is another fundamentalism that seems to be dominating the discussion about the environment—one that may actually drive more people away from healthy discussion about the environment than James Watt ever did.
You know what I’m talking about. It’s a sort of Green Fundamentalism—The ‘gotcha’ mentality that has people looking over their neighbors’ walls to measure their carbon footprint. It’s an attitude that spends more time trying to catch people doing it wrong than it spends teaching people how to do it better.
The point here—what we’ve seen in our two texts of Scripture this morning—is this: God made the world as an integral part of his Shalom—of the web of relationships we were meant to thrive in and enjoy. Seeing our relationship to the earth as separate from the relationships we have with God, with ourselves and with each other—seeing our link to the earth separately from the rest is a part of the brokenness Christ died to restore.
That brokenness shows up in different ways. On the one side you have people who use and waste resources in a way that disregards the most basic principles of management for the long haul. The Industrial Revolution in Britain and America is a prime example of this—from mowing down old forests to strip mining to the way we use energy sources. As other countries try to develop they all seem to pass through this phase of abusive use and waste.
But on the other side some have come to worship nature to the point of forgetting why it’s here. Dennis Prager, the commentator and author that I’ve mentioned before, used to pose this question to his radio listeners: “If you saw a dog and a person drowning, and you could only rescue one of them, which would you choose?” The question cut closer to home when he asked it this way: “If the dog was your dog, and the person was a stranger, then which would you choose?”
I happen to think there’s only one right answer to these questions, but that might get us sidetracked.
Worshipping creation—putting it in a place that is out-of-kilter with the rest of our relationships—is just as much a sign of brokenness as the abuse of nature. Both miss the point about the Shalom that God created for us.
In the Genesis passage we heard about ruling over ‘the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ God creates this amazing planet, filled with all kinds of plants and creatures, and gives it to his human creation to use and to take care of. That’s what rule means. We’re so trained to think of ‘ruling’ as a bad thing, that we forget that at its heart it represents the responsibility to make Shalom possible for everyone and everything.
In some older translations we see it differently—it talks about having ‘dominion over the earth.’ Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound any better than ruling over everything. But the point is that we were given the earth and all that is in so that we could thrive in it, take care of it, be nourished by it, share it together, and pass it on to our kids and grandkids.
Clearly that’s not the way it’s working out. Climate change, pollution of land and air and water, even the impact of our Western diet on the environment. All of these are in crisis. That’s not to mention the political problems we’ve managed to create through our dependence on oil—the partnerships we never would have entertained if they didn’t help feed our thirst for fossil fuels.
How do we solve this? It’s crucial for us to see the earth in terms of the Shalom we’ve been talking about over the last month. . Biblical Shalom is ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
What does that mean for us to treat the world with Justice? Justice describes a situation where people get what they’re entitled to. You’ve heard me say before that I don’t believe God made a single person without providing what they need to live and thrive on. Our problem isn’t production—it’s distribution. Paying attention to justice is being an agent of Shalom in the world.
What about Fulfillment? The dictionary defines this word as, “to put into effect—to measure up to—to convert into reality.” To take good care of the earth is to convert God’s promise of Shalom into reality—literally to make it real for ourselves and our neighbors.
And that leaves Delight. This might be the easiest one to forget, and the hardest one to define. In our rush to earn and spend and acquire and consume—do we take enough time to delight in God’s creation? Do we take the time to help others to see God’s hand in the world around us. Do we remember, often enough, to enjoy the pleasures of the nature God left for us?
But what can we do? This is where the culture is helping to lead us in the small things. There are all kinds of books and pamphlets describing what we can do to save the earth. If you haven’t already, get one—use it—try some of the things in there.
Don’t feel pressured to do it all, but let me make this part clear: Feel pressured to do something. Feel challenged to take some time this Easter to think about how Christ’s redemptive work adds to what you understand about your relationship to the earth. Do something—that’s plenty.
We’re not supposed to hear this and just go back to nature—that’s not what we were meant to do. There’s a reason the Bible begins in a Garden and ends in a holy city—we were created to participate in the shaping of the culture of this world. As people who manage God’s creation on his behalf, part of our lives as called, loved, forgiven and redeemed people—our lives make the most sense when we pay attention to our relationship to the earth. When we take responsibility for what we make and what we use—what we share and even what we waste.
We don’t need another fundamentalism to force us to count our carbons and drive electric cars and even to separate our trash. Those are all great tactics for accomplishing the strategy of taking better care of the earth. But they’re not the point.
The point is that we were made to have contented, joy-filled lives of wholeness and contentment—in healthy relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other and also with the earth. Connecting with the earth in a healthy way is a part of connecting with God and each other in healthy ways.
The big picture is, well, frankly a lot bigger than we give it credit for sometimes. That groaning we hear is the earth telling us that it’s ready for its share of Christ’s redeeming work. As God’s representatives it’s our job to extend the Shalom God made for the world—to extend that Shalom to the whole world and everything in it.
Understanding how honeybees help sustain our food supplies is a start—taking the time to understand more is how we begin the long process of restoring balance to how God made the world to work.
That’s a part of the gift we receive through Christ’s sacrifice, and sharing it is a part of the Easter miracle.
Amen.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Pink Floyd Got It Wrong
(This is the fourth message in our Lenten series 'Together Again: The Meaning of the Atonement.')
Ephesians 2:14-22
Over the more than two years that we’ve lived here I’ve noticed some milestones along the way—little things that represent our becoming Londoners. How to negotiate bus routes, how to order coffee, the difference between a roll and a bap (usually about £1)—all of those things that seem a little mysterious in the beginning are becoming second nature. I knew London had become my home when I could walk through our house in the dark without hitting anything. I knew all the twists and turns—the place had become familiar enough that I knew where all the walls were.
It’s hard to imagine life without the walls we need. They provide safety, warmth, protection from the elements and from danger. They allow us to build places to live and also to hang pictures of loved ones. They allow for privacy and also for quiet and peace in a noisy world. Walls can be so good to us.
But there are walls that are designed to separate—whether they’re physical or symbolic—there are walls that exist to divide people from each other. We’ve seen some of those walls come down during our lifetimes…but we’ve also seen some go up. In our own lives we have relationships that are broken or wounded for one reason or another—we have walls that keep us from reconnecting with some of the people in our lives.
The point of this series as we reflect and prepare for Easter is that Christ’s sacrifice offers us healing for our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
It’s worth reviewing for a moment what those relationships were supposed to look like. The Bible describes it with the word Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. Shalom appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. Shalom describes a state of perfect completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
Today we look at how Christ offers healing for our relationships with each other.
14For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, 20built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
We’re back in Ephesians. Paul didn’t start this church in what is now Turkey, but he provided them with pastoral care in the form of these letters. The main theme of this letter describes what it means to be united with each other through the ministry of Jesus Christ. This letter says more about the church as a community than any other letter Paul wrote, and it also talks about relationships with each other—what they communicate to the world about the work of God in our lives.
Our text starts boldly—‘For Christ himself is our peace, who has made the two one.’ He has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. He preached peace to people far and near, and because of his great gift we find ourselves in one great big occasionally happy family.
All of this—every bit of it, according to the text, comes as a result of Christ’s great sacrificial act. ‘His purpose’, Paul says, ‘was to create in himself one person out of the two, thus creating peace, and in this one body to reconcile both to God through the Cross.’
There it is. There’s the point of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He came and loved and served and died and rose for this reason: To bring people together with each other and with God. To tear down the walls that separate us from the Shalom we were made to enjoy.
I said before that there are good, necessary walls in our lives. But those aren’t the walls Paul is talking about in our text. ‘The Dividing Wall of Hostility’ sounds like a made up name. It sounds like one of the place names in Monty Python or the Princess Bride: Remember the ‘cliffs of insanity’ or the ‘fire swamp’ or the ‘pit of despair’? The ‘dividing wall of hostility’ sounds like Paul was making a joke, but it was actually a real place.
Jerusalem in the 1st century was occupied by Roman forces. They governed the region, levied taxes and provided public services. But within that structure they allowed Judaism to be practiced and the leaders were permitted to enforce Jewish law as long as it didn’t conflict with Roman law. Mostly it was the purity laws that Jews back then were allowed to enforce, and many of those centered around the holiest place in all of Judaism: The Temple.
This was the place where Jews went to offer prayers and sacrifices. It was where the priests lived and worked. It was the heart of Jewish faith and hopes for a different kind of future. It was also a place with a strict set of rules designed to protect its religious purity.
It’s in the Temple that we find the Dividing Wall. It was the barrier that limited where Gentiles—non-Jews—could go within the Temple. There was an inscription on the Wall—here’s what it said:
“No foreigner may enter within the barricade which surrounds the sanctuary and enclosure. Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.”
Well. It doesn’t get too much more hostile than that. Don’t come near this place, and if you do, it’s your own dumb fault when we kill you.
The dividing wall of hostility has become a symbol for anything that separates people or groups. For us it represents the divisions that still exist among people Christ died to bring together.
It’s been about 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. For those of us who remember living during the Cold War that still sounds amazing. There’s a piece of the wall at the Imperial War Museum that I take visitors to see. I have pictures of at least a dozen friends and family members standing in front of that chunk of the wall.
It’s hard to imagine it now, but in the years right after the Berlin Wall came down, there were moves on both sides to put it back up. People from East and West had gotten so used to being separated from each other—so accustomed to the division between them—that they didn’t want to reunite.
The story of the Berlin Wall teaches us something important about these reconciling revolutions: It’s one thing to tear down a wall, but until we cross over the line where the wall stood, it’s as if it still exists, dividing and separating and disconnecting. Once the wall comes down, we have to cross the rubble and finish the job.
What about divisions among family or friends? What about the places where we’re all in need of reconciliation and forgiveness and healing—in need of a few walls to be torn down?
We’ve heard the saying: ‘Strong fences make good neighbors.’ It’s from a poem by Robert Frost, but using it as a principle for life is actually a corruption of Frost’s point. In the poem, ‘Mending Wall’, Frost helps his neighbor fix the wall that separates them, but he secretly wishes that the wall wasn’t necessary—that they could pass freely in and out of each other’s property and lives.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
What do we wall in or wall out? What about the places where we need to experience reconciliation with another person?
The message of our passage this morning is that Christ’s sacrifice for us extends to the broken relationships in our lives—the ones that need some healing or mending. ‘For he himself is our peace…he has destroyed the barrier—the dividing wall of hostility…we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.’ The message of our passage this morning is that Christ came to rebuild Shalom in our relationships—the kind of Shalom that was meant to be there in the first place. But usually that means we have to cross over the line where the wall used to be.
The Cross of Jesus Christ offers reconciliation for the relationships we have that are broken somehow, but that’s just part of the story. The walls have been destroyed, but we have to cross over where they were, if we’re ever going to experience the full measure of Christ’s gift to us.
This is where Pink Floyd got it wrong. Pink Floyd is a rock band, for those of you who aren’t recognizing the name. Those of us of a certain age will remember a year or so when you couldn’t get away from Pink Floyd’s double-album called ‘The Wall.’ There was a major live show with a huge wall on the band’s tour, and it was even made into a movie with a young Bob Geldof playing the lead. In my quest to introduce Ian to the classics, I played the entire album during dinner one night last week.
In ‘The Wall,’ the central character loses his father to war, has an overbearing mother, is abused by teachers at school, and is abandoned by his wife. He responds to these painful relationships by building a wall around himself—to separate himself from those who hurt or threatened him somehow. Each relationship is ‘just another brick in the wall.’
The good news for us as we reflect on Christ’s ministry and prepare for Easter—the good news for us is that the wall—the dividing wall of hostility—has been destroyed. There is a remedy on offer for the impact of sin on our relationships with each other. That remedy is the Shalom that God created for us—the Shalom we can have now through the work of Christ on the Cross.
The real question for us is this:
Will we accept the offer?
Will we step over the lines where the wall used to be and accept the gift of reconciliation on the other side?
This year, are we willing to go beyond just celebrating Easter? This year, are we brave enough not just to celebrate but also to experience what Easter really offers?
In our first reading today we heard that if we’re one with Christ, then we’re a new creation and we’re given a ministry of reconciliation as Christ’s ambassadors. That’s good news for all of our relationships—it’s not easy, but it’s healing and it’s good.
On the section of the Berlin Wall at the Imperial War Museum, there’s some graffiti on it that says this: ‘Change Your Life.’ I’ve always loved the way that looks—what it means, especially on a piece of that wall.
The invitation this season is to change your life. The call to all of us is to accept this gift of reconciliation—to change our lives in a way that allows us to live in Shalom with each other. There’s still a long way to go, but the Easter miracle is coming, and it changes everything.
Amen.
Ephesians 2:14-22
Over the more than two years that we’ve lived here I’ve noticed some milestones along the way—little things that represent our becoming Londoners. How to negotiate bus routes, how to order coffee, the difference between a roll and a bap (usually about £1)—all of those things that seem a little mysterious in the beginning are becoming second nature. I knew London had become my home when I could walk through our house in the dark without hitting anything. I knew all the twists and turns—the place had become familiar enough that I knew where all the walls were.
It’s hard to imagine life without the walls we need. They provide safety, warmth, protection from the elements and from danger. They allow us to build places to live and also to hang pictures of loved ones. They allow for privacy and also for quiet and peace in a noisy world. Walls can be so good to us.
But there are walls that are designed to separate—whether they’re physical or symbolic—there are walls that exist to divide people from each other. We’ve seen some of those walls come down during our lifetimes…but we’ve also seen some go up. In our own lives we have relationships that are broken or wounded for one reason or another—we have walls that keep us from reconnecting with some of the people in our lives.
The point of this series as we reflect and prepare for Easter is that Christ’s sacrifice offers us healing for our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
It’s worth reviewing for a moment what those relationships were supposed to look like. The Bible describes it with the word Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. Shalom appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. Shalom describes a state of perfect completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
Today we look at how Christ offers healing for our relationships with each other.
14For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, 20built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
We’re back in Ephesians. Paul didn’t start this church in what is now Turkey, but he provided them with pastoral care in the form of these letters. The main theme of this letter describes what it means to be united with each other through the ministry of Jesus Christ. This letter says more about the church as a community than any other letter Paul wrote, and it also talks about relationships with each other—what they communicate to the world about the work of God in our lives.
Our text starts boldly—‘For Christ himself is our peace, who has made the two one.’ He has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. He preached peace to people far and near, and because of his great gift we find ourselves in one great big occasionally happy family.
All of this—every bit of it, according to the text, comes as a result of Christ’s great sacrificial act. ‘His purpose’, Paul says, ‘was to create in himself one person out of the two, thus creating peace, and in this one body to reconcile both to God through the Cross.’
There it is. There’s the point of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He came and loved and served and died and rose for this reason: To bring people together with each other and with God. To tear down the walls that separate us from the Shalom we were made to enjoy.
I said before that there are good, necessary walls in our lives. But those aren’t the walls Paul is talking about in our text. ‘The Dividing Wall of Hostility’ sounds like a made up name. It sounds like one of the place names in Monty Python or the Princess Bride: Remember the ‘cliffs of insanity’ or the ‘fire swamp’ or the ‘pit of despair’? The ‘dividing wall of hostility’ sounds like Paul was making a joke, but it was actually a real place.
Jerusalem in the 1st century was occupied by Roman forces. They governed the region, levied taxes and provided public services. But within that structure they allowed Judaism to be practiced and the leaders were permitted to enforce Jewish law as long as it didn’t conflict with Roman law. Mostly it was the purity laws that Jews back then were allowed to enforce, and many of those centered around the holiest place in all of Judaism: The Temple.
This was the place where Jews went to offer prayers and sacrifices. It was where the priests lived and worked. It was the heart of Jewish faith and hopes for a different kind of future. It was also a place with a strict set of rules designed to protect its religious purity.
It’s in the Temple that we find the Dividing Wall. It was the barrier that limited where Gentiles—non-Jews—could go within the Temple. There was an inscription on the Wall—here’s what it said:
“No foreigner may enter within the barricade which surrounds the sanctuary and enclosure. Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.”
Well. It doesn’t get too much more hostile than that. Don’t come near this place, and if you do, it’s your own dumb fault when we kill you.
The dividing wall of hostility has become a symbol for anything that separates people or groups. For us it represents the divisions that still exist among people Christ died to bring together.
It’s been about 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. For those of us who remember living during the Cold War that still sounds amazing. There’s a piece of the wall at the Imperial War Museum that I take visitors to see. I have pictures of at least a dozen friends and family members standing in front of that chunk of the wall.
It’s hard to imagine it now, but in the years right after the Berlin Wall came down, there were moves on both sides to put it back up. People from East and West had gotten so used to being separated from each other—so accustomed to the division between them—that they didn’t want to reunite.
The story of the Berlin Wall teaches us something important about these reconciling revolutions: It’s one thing to tear down a wall, but until we cross over the line where the wall stood, it’s as if it still exists, dividing and separating and disconnecting. Once the wall comes down, we have to cross the rubble and finish the job.
What about divisions among family or friends? What about the places where we’re all in need of reconciliation and forgiveness and healing—in need of a few walls to be torn down?
We’ve heard the saying: ‘Strong fences make good neighbors.’ It’s from a poem by Robert Frost, but using it as a principle for life is actually a corruption of Frost’s point. In the poem, ‘Mending Wall’, Frost helps his neighbor fix the wall that separates them, but he secretly wishes that the wall wasn’t necessary—that they could pass freely in and out of each other’s property and lives.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
What do we wall in or wall out? What about the places where we need to experience reconciliation with another person?
The message of our passage this morning is that Christ’s sacrifice for us extends to the broken relationships in our lives—the ones that need some healing or mending. ‘For he himself is our peace…he has destroyed the barrier—the dividing wall of hostility…we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.’ The message of our passage this morning is that Christ came to rebuild Shalom in our relationships—the kind of Shalom that was meant to be there in the first place. But usually that means we have to cross over the line where the wall used to be.
The Cross of Jesus Christ offers reconciliation for the relationships we have that are broken somehow, but that’s just part of the story. The walls have been destroyed, but we have to cross over where they were, if we’re ever going to experience the full measure of Christ’s gift to us.
This is where Pink Floyd got it wrong. Pink Floyd is a rock band, for those of you who aren’t recognizing the name. Those of us of a certain age will remember a year or so when you couldn’t get away from Pink Floyd’s double-album called ‘The Wall.’ There was a major live show with a huge wall on the band’s tour, and it was even made into a movie with a young Bob Geldof playing the lead. In my quest to introduce Ian to the classics, I played the entire album during dinner one night last week.
In ‘The Wall,’ the central character loses his father to war, has an overbearing mother, is abused by teachers at school, and is abandoned by his wife. He responds to these painful relationships by building a wall around himself—to separate himself from those who hurt or threatened him somehow. Each relationship is ‘just another brick in the wall.’
The good news for us as we reflect on Christ’s ministry and prepare for Easter—the good news for us is that the wall—the dividing wall of hostility—has been destroyed. There is a remedy on offer for the impact of sin on our relationships with each other. That remedy is the Shalom that God created for us—the Shalom we can have now through the work of Christ on the Cross.
The real question for us is this:
Will we accept the offer?
Will we step over the lines where the wall used to be and accept the gift of reconciliation on the other side?
This year, are we willing to go beyond just celebrating Easter? This year, are we brave enough not just to celebrate but also to experience what Easter really offers?
In our first reading today we heard that if we’re one with Christ, then we’re a new creation and we’re given a ministry of reconciliation as Christ’s ambassadors. That’s good news for all of our relationships—it’s not easy, but it’s healing and it’s good.
On the section of the Berlin Wall at the Imperial War Museum, there’s some graffiti on it that says this: ‘Change Your Life.’ I’ve always loved the way that looks—what it means, especially on a piece of that wall.
The invitation this season is to change your life. The call to all of us is to accept this gift of reconciliation—to change our lives in a way that allows us to live in Shalom with each other. There’s still a long way to go, but the Easter miracle is coming, and it changes everything.
Amen.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Life Unbound
(This is the third message in our Lenten series 'Together Again: The Meaning of the Atonement.')
Ephesians 2:1-10
There was a letter to the Times advice column this week from a young woman who was struggling with a very particular kind of problem. Here’s what she wrote:
‘I’m 18 and in my first year of university but I can’t help thinking that I’m sinning somehow. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, didn’t go to a religious school, or have God-fearing friends. I just seem to have developed this strong belief that I’m not good enough…’
The response from the person answering the letter went like this:
‘Your transition to university has triggered a state of acute anxiety and paranoia that has left you with thoughts that are irrational, but feel real…These thoughts are sometimes called cognitive distortions…Having a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. You should treat this as you would a chest infection or a broken leg…’
I want to say, respectfully, that I think the advice person from the Times got this one wrong. Now it may be the case that this young woman has deeper problems that just her sudden awareness of being somehow affected by sin. But I want to say very clearly, especially as we continue our time of reflecting and preparing to remember Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross—I want to suggest that the young woman in our story just might have been given a gift.
The point of this series as we reflect and prepare for Easter is that Christ’s sacrifice offers us healing for our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
It’s worth reviewing for a moment what those relationships were supposed to look like. The Bible describes it with the word Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. Shalom appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it.
Shalom describes a state of perfect completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from the Book of Numbers, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
Today we look at how Christ heals what might be the most difficult of all our relationships: the one we have with ourselves.
1As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. 4But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
We’ve been in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians before. Ephesus was in modern day Turkey, one of a handful of Christian churches that grew during the first century. It’s not one of the churches that he had helped to start, but now that they were growing he wrote them this letter to support and teach them. Paul wrote this from his prison cell, and it’s a reminder to hold on to faith no matter what might challenge you.
In our passage Paul talks about being dead in sins. It’s important for us to wrestle with what the Bible says about sin. The story of Jesus life and ministry and sacrifice doesn’t make much sense without including the sin that makes it all necessary. I suppose the key here is to think of sin not as a list of wrong things that we do, even though that might be important for us to try sometime. Sin here is anything that gets in the way of having an ongoing, life-giving, Shalom-filled relationship with God.
By the end of our passage Paul makes it clear that Christ has offered every person a way back to the way things were supposed to be all along. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved through faith…’
And why did this happen?
‘For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’
Paul makes it clear that we can’t earn God’s grace by doing good works—that would amount to an impossible payment plan that none of us could ever manage. But on the other hand, once we’ve received that grace we’re freed to do the good works that God had planned for us all along. Not a bad deal.
But all of this begins with our need to recognize that our sense of self has taken a beating—that it’s wounded and broken and distorted from what it was meant to be.
How is our relationship with our selves distorted? I can think of three ways at least.
First, the effect of sin is that it cuts us off from who we were created to be. It breaks that circuit we talked about last week—it disconnects us from the true source of life and power. Because of that we can be blinded to the role sin plays in our lives, and we then fall into a cycle of suffering the consequences of sin without seeing the link between the two. In the end that blind sport makes us unwilling or unable to be forgiven—it keeps us from allowing the atonement to atone.
This year those of us who have been tainted by seminary training are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. Whatever you might have picked up from the caricatures of Calvin and Calvinism, the truth is that he was a brilliant theologian and deeply caring person. At a time when the Christian world could have gone completely mad, Calvin set out a vision for living the Christian faith in a community that still has power today.
Given Calvin’s reputation it’s a surprise to most people that the first line of his massive two-volume theology is this: ‘Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.’
To me that’s always sounded so contemporary. ‘If you want to know God, then get to know yourself.’ It’s sounds so ‘60s.
But on the next page Calvin turns the tables and adds: ‘Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.’ That’s more like it. Seeing ourselves clearly teaches us something important about ourselves, and about God.
I was thinking of Calvin’s statement when I read the letter from the young woman, and the Times’ response to her. What if she’s not crazy or troubled at all? What if she’s not a victim of ‘cognitive distortion’, but instead is seeing her own life honestly for the very first time?
What if her self-awareness is just a preamble to a discovery of what Christ can do and be in her life?
That leaves us with still more important questions:
What part of the Shalom is broken in our relationship to ourselves?
How do we relate to ourselves in a healthy way?
What do we do when we realize that the distance we feel between us and God has more to do with us than him?
For our time during Lent, it’s important to ask this critical question: What happens in the work of Christ that makes things right in our relationships to ourselves?
Some of the answers to that are in our text:
God in his grace makes us alive; He raises us in Christ’s resurrection; He sets us free to do good works.
All of that can be broken down into three statements: In Christ’s atonement for us, he reminds us of our sin and brokenness. But Christ also forgives and restores us—he helps us from feeling annihilated as we look at our own lives honestly. And then, just as he has done with his people from the very beginning, God releases us to be who he made us to be in the first place.
But that’s not easy.
C.S. Lewis describes this restoration in one of the Chronicles of Narnia. I hadn’t read the Voyage of the Dawn Treader for more than 25 years, but a section of it has always stuck in my mind. A boy named Eustace is seduced by greed and is transformed into a dragon. When he wants to change back—when he is aware of his sin and wants to repent—he tries to peel the dragon skin off of himself, but he can’t do it.
Aslan comes to him and says: ‘You will have to let me do that.’
Eustace describes the process like this: ‘The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything.
After he was done he said: And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch, and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain and gone…and then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.’
In this story we see the full outline of what it means to come to faith—what it means to experience healing in our relationship to God and also to ourselves. We see repentance, restoration, and release to life the way it was meant to be. There’s even a baptism.
As we each move through our journeys of faith, it’s important to remember that the relationship we have with ourselves is inseparable from the relationship we have with God. To know one is to grow in knowledge and understanding of the other, and back again. The girl who wrote to the Times wasn't crazy. She was feeling disconnected from who she was supposed to be, and from how she was supposed to be.
Don't we feel the same sometimes?
In our text this morning God promises that he is ‘rich in mercy’, and that the gift of his son comes out of his great love and kindness toward us.
My prayer for all of us is that as we prepare for the amazing events of Holy Week, we’ll allow God to give us the gift of Shalom in our own lives—the gift of being webbed together with God, others, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.
Amen
Ephesians 2:1-10
There was a letter to the Times advice column this week from a young woman who was struggling with a very particular kind of problem. Here’s what she wrote:
‘I’m 18 and in my first year of university but I can’t help thinking that I’m sinning somehow. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, didn’t go to a religious school, or have God-fearing friends. I just seem to have developed this strong belief that I’m not good enough…’
The response from the person answering the letter went like this:
‘Your transition to university has triggered a state of acute anxiety and paranoia that has left you with thoughts that are irrational, but feel real…These thoughts are sometimes called cognitive distortions…Having a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. You should treat this as you would a chest infection or a broken leg…’
I want to say, respectfully, that I think the advice person from the Times got this one wrong. Now it may be the case that this young woman has deeper problems that just her sudden awareness of being somehow affected by sin. But I want to say very clearly, especially as we continue our time of reflecting and preparing to remember Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross—I want to suggest that the young woman in our story just might have been given a gift.
The point of this series as we reflect and prepare for Easter is that Christ’s sacrifice offers us healing for our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
It’s worth reviewing for a moment what those relationships were supposed to look like. The Bible describes it with the word Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. Shalom appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it.
Shalom describes a state of perfect completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from the Book of Numbers, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
Today we look at how Christ heals what might be the most difficult of all our relationships: the one we have with ourselves.
1As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. 4But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
We’ve been in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians before. Ephesus was in modern day Turkey, one of a handful of Christian churches that grew during the first century. It’s not one of the churches that he had helped to start, but now that they were growing he wrote them this letter to support and teach them. Paul wrote this from his prison cell, and it’s a reminder to hold on to faith no matter what might challenge you.
In our passage Paul talks about being dead in sins. It’s important for us to wrestle with what the Bible says about sin. The story of Jesus life and ministry and sacrifice doesn’t make much sense without including the sin that makes it all necessary. I suppose the key here is to think of sin not as a list of wrong things that we do, even though that might be important for us to try sometime. Sin here is anything that gets in the way of having an ongoing, life-giving, Shalom-filled relationship with God.
By the end of our passage Paul makes it clear that Christ has offered every person a way back to the way things were supposed to be all along. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved through faith…’
And why did this happen?
‘For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’
Paul makes it clear that we can’t earn God’s grace by doing good works—that would amount to an impossible payment plan that none of us could ever manage. But on the other hand, once we’ve received that grace we’re freed to do the good works that God had planned for us all along. Not a bad deal.
But all of this begins with our need to recognize that our sense of self has taken a beating—that it’s wounded and broken and distorted from what it was meant to be.
How is our relationship with our selves distorted? I can think of three ways at least.
First, the effect of sin is that it cuts us off from who we were created to be. It breaks that circuit we talked about last week—it disconnects us from the true source of life and power. Because of that we can be blinded to the role sin plays in our lives, and we then fall into a cycle of suffering the consequences of sin without seeing the link between the two. In the end that blind sport makes us unwilling or unable to be forgiven—it keeps us from allowing the atonement to atone.
This year those of us who have been tainted by seminary training are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. Whatever you might have picked up from the caricatures of Calvin and Calvinism, the truth is that he was a brilliant theologian and deeply caring person. At a time when the Christian world could have gone completely mad, Calvin set out a vision for living the Christian faith in a community that still has power today.
Given Calvin’s reputation it’s a surprise to most people that the first line of his massive two-volume theology is this: ‘Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.’
To me that’s always sounded so contemporary. ‘If you want to know God, then get to know yourself.’ It’s sounds so ‘60s.
But on the next page Calvin turns the tables and adds: ‘Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.’ That’s more like it. Seeing ourselves clearly teaches us something important about ourselves, and about God.
I was thinking of Calvin’s statement when I read the letter from the young woman, and the Times’ response to her. What if she’s not crazy or troubled at all? What if she’s not a victim of ‘cognitive distortion’, but instead is seeing her own life honestly for the very first time?
What if her self-awareness is just a preamble to a discovery of what Christ can do and be in her life?
That leaves us with still more important questions:
What part of the Shalom is broken in our relationship to ourselves?
How do we relate to ourselves in a healthy way?
What do we do when we realize that the distance we feel between us and God has more to do with us than him?
For our time during Lent, it’s important to ask this critical question: What happens in the work of Christ that makes things right in our relationships to ourselves?
Some of the answers to that are in our text:
God in his grace makes us alive; He raises us in Christ’s resurrection; He sets us free to do good works.
All of that can be broken down into three statements: In Christ’s atonement for us, he reminds us of our sin and brokenness. But Christ also forgives and restores us—he helps us from feeling annihilated as we look at our own lives honestly. And then, just as he has done with his people from the very beginning, God releases us to be who he made us to be in the first place.
But that’s not easy.
C.S. Lewis describes this restoration in one of the Chronicles of Narnia. I hadn’t read the Voyage of the Dawn Treader for more than 25 years, but a section of it has always stuck in my mind. A boy named Eustace is seduced by greed and is transformed into a dragon. When he wants to change back—when he is aware of his sin and wants to repent—he tries to peel the dragon skin off of himself, but he can’t do it.
Aslan comes to him and says: ‘You will have to let me do that.’
Eustace describes the process like this: ‘The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything.
After he was done he said: And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch, and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain and gone…and then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.’
In this story we see the full outline of what it means to come to faith—what it means to experience healing in our relationship to God and also to ourselves. We see repentance, restoration, and release to life the way it was meant to be. There’s even a baptism.
As we each move through our journeys of faith, it’s important to remember that the relationship we have with ourselves is inseparable from the relationship we have with God. To know one is to grow in knowledge and understanding of the other, and back again. The girl who wrote to the Times wasn't crazy. She was feeling disconnected from who she was supposed to be, and from how she was supposed to be.
Don't we feel the same sometimes?
In our text this morning God promises that he is ‘rich in mercy’, and that the gift of his son comes out of his great love and kindness toward us.
My prayer for all of us is that as we prepare for the amazing events of Holy Week, we’ll allow God to give us the gift of Shalom in our own lives—the gift of being webbed together with God, others, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.
Amen
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
In This Together
(This is the second message in our Lenten series 'Together Again: The Meaning of the Atonement'.)
John 17:20-26
Some of you know that I worked as an electrician when I was younger. That job came about in a strange way: My cousins Joe and Jerry had a company that installed fire alarm systems in old buildings. One day Joe got locked in a dark stairwell and couldn’t get out for the better part of a day. It shook him up a bit, and so he decided that he needed a helper. I came home from work one day (making sandwiches for $1.75 per hour) to find Joe negotiating with my dad for me to come and work with him. I was hired on the spot and went to work for Signal Systems Inc. I made $2 per hour. That was 1978 and I was 15. I worked for them during my summer holidays and other non-school days for the next 11 years—through high school, university and about halfway through my time in seminary.
I learned a lot during that time, and some of it was even about electricity. My cousins were both Navy veterans from the Vietnam era, and I was a fairly sheltered kid from the suburbs. A lot of what I learned from them I have to discipline myself to forget…every single day.
But I learned some basic electrical principles, too. The most important concept to know in electronics is the idea of the circuit. Here are some dictionary definitions.
An electronic circuit is a closed path formed by the interconnection of electronic components through which an electric current can flow.
That means that in order for electricity to flow and power electrical things, it has to move in an unbroken circle—a circuit.
There are two main types of circuits: series and parallel. A string of Christmas lights is a good example of a series circuit: if one goes out, they all do. In a parallel circuit, each bulb is connected to the power source separately, so if one goes out the rest still remain shining.
That means that how a circuit is designed will determine how fragile it is—how it responds to challenges and breakage.
Isn’t that interesting?
The Bible says a lot about how God designed us. It has a word for how we were made to function—how we were made to live: Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. That word appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. We usually translate it as ‘peace’, but as I said last week, that doesn’t do it justice.
Just to review. In the Old Testament Shalom has a broad range of meanings. It can refer to the communal well-being of the nation, or physical health. A sense of contentedness or happiness in relationships. It often describes a state of completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from the Book of Numbers, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
One thing that is always true in the way the Bible describes Shalom: It can only be found in the presence of God.
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
The main point here is that our relationships depend on our ability to be interconnected—on the free flow of Shalom—between us and God, within our own lives, between us and each other, and between us and the earth.
The focus of this series as we move through Lent builds on everything we’ve talked about here since September. The Lord’s Prayer, the season of Advent and the celebration of Christmas, and our look at what it means to be a contagious church. The theme during Lent is an important one. We can sum it up in a single sentence: The work of Christ on the Cross restores our broken circuitry. It offers healing for our relationships at all levels—with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with nature. That’s the outline for what we’ll be doing over these next 4 weeks.
20"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. 25"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them."
Our text today comes at the end of a long section that begins back in chapter 13. Jesus had gathered his disciples together for a Passover meal, a tradition that reminded Jews of the way God had spared them and saved them from slavery in Egypt. But this wasn’t like any Passover any of them had seen before.
Just as the food was coming out, Jesus took off his robe and left himself dressed as a slave would be, and then he washed the disciples’ feet…one at a time. Three years of following him—three years of listening to him explain who he was—three years of coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah God had promised to ransom captive Israel. And now he was washing their feet.
He went on to explain to them what was about to happen, and then he comforted them—this is the part of the Bible where we hear the words: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled—do not be afraid.’ Jesus tells them a parable, promises them the gift of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, and then promises them that everything would be made whole again someday.
It’s hard to imagine what the disciples would have been thinking right then. The Messiah had washed their feet, predicted some fairly amazing events, and promised something called the Holy Spirit—all before the dessert course.
Then Jesus began to pray. He prays first for himself, and then he prays for the disciples. He ends his prayer with the verses we just read—a prayer for all believers in all times—a prayer for complete unity among the faithful, and between the faithful and God himself.
In this prayer Jesus is asking for God’s Shalom to be restored to his people, even though he knew that restoration would require his own sacrifice. Almost immediately after finishing his prayer, Jesus was arrested and put on trial and sentenced to die. During this season we remember that all of this was done to heal our broken Shalom—the connections we were made to enjoy.
I mentioned last week that one of my former pastors described the Trinity in an important way. Rather than try to explain rationally what it meant for God to be three persons in one, he said this: ‘At the center of the universe, there is a relationship.’
If it’s true that God lives in a constant, state of relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and if the Scriptures teach that we’re somehow made in the image of this relational God, then what does that mean? The idea of being made in the image of a relational God means at least one thing: We were made to live as relational people— interconnected people whose relationships mirror the redemptive work of Christ in his life, death and resurrection. The breaking of that interconnected, relational way of living, breaks the circuit that gives us life, and cuts us off from our true source of life and power.
So we come to this week’s reflection on how Christ reconciles us to God. That’s what Jesus is praying for in our text this morning. He was praying that his ministry would bring people closer to each other and closer to God—closer in the Shalom sense of being webbed together with him in justice, fulfillment and delight. He was praying that his ministry and sacrifice would repair the broken circuit that cuts us off from the power that frees us to live as we were made to live.
Maybe it will help again to put this talk about electrical circuits into relational terms. Think of the word ‘estranged.’ Literally it means to be made strange to someone else—to become a stranger to someone who was once known. That’s what happens when sin breaks the perfect Shalom God created for us. We are made strange—even strangers—to God. At that point we cease to function as a healthy, whole circuit.
But we were made to live in that state of Shalom—to have whole and holy, fulfilling, connected relationships with God. When that relationship is broken—when our life-giving power is cut off—it can be as frightening as being locked in a stairway alone…in the dark…separated from the one who lives in a state of eternal relationship, and made us to live that way, too.
In his prayer Jesus says to his Father: ‘I pray also for those will believe in me, that all of them be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’
It’s crucial to understand just exactly we have been restored to do. You’ve heard me say many times that God’s blessings come to us with the understanding that they’re to be shared. Jesus prays passionately for Christians to sense the closeness—the oneness—with God. To experience the intimacy with God that we were meant to know. But in the same breath he reveals that there’s a purpose in that closeness—that relationship. ‘May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’
God’s perfect Shalom—‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’—is something that is made to be shared. The perfect circuit of God’s relationship to his creation is meant to draw all of creation into that relationship.
But that still doesn’t describe what it means to be close to God—to have our relationship to God restored to its original condition. How do we do that? There’s no easy answer, but some have found a way to talk about that relationship in helpful ways.
Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite monk in France for almost 60 years. He spent most of that time washing dishes and repairing the sandals of the other people in the community. He wrote a series of letters toward the end of his life that became a little book called ‘Practicing the Presence of God.’ In it he wrote:
‘When we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us, this hinders our offending Him and doing anything that may displease Him. It also begets in us a holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God, where, when we ask, He supplies the grace we need. Over time, by often repeating these acts, they become habitual, and the presence of God becomes quite natural to us.’
Praying and studying and thinking about God isn’t something we do just because we’re told to. It’s not just a set of habits we develop because they make us look like holy people. They’re certainly not just a set of rules that make us feel guilty when we don’t do them enough.
Christian spiritual disciplines are something we practice so that we can have a glimpse into the mind and heart of God. It’s a way of reconnecting and recharging our experience of the relationship God made us to have in the first place. Practicing God’s presence through prayer and study and meditation is a way of enjoying life more deeply and completely than we could ever imagine.
Brother Lawrence reminds us that this doesn’t have to be complicated.
‘My most usual method is this simple attention: an affectionate regard for God to whom I find myself often attached with greater sweetness and delight than that of an infant at the mother's breast. To choose an expression, I would call this state the bosom of God for the inexpressible sweetness which I taste and experience there. If, at any time, my thoughts wander from this state from necessity or infirmity, I am presently recalled by inward emotions so charming and delicious that I cannot find words to describe them.’
‘...an affectionate regard for God…’ Can you imagine that? Does that sound appealing to you? Does it sound possible?
As we move through this season of Lent—this time of reflection and preparation for the celebration of Resurrection Day—focusing on our relationship with God should move to the center stage. Jesus prayed for us on the night he was betrayed—he prayed that his ministry and sacrifice would put an end to betrayal and brokenness once and for all.
As we move through this season of Lent, I invite you to set aside the time and energy it takes to practice the gift of God’s presence in your life—to find that inexpressible sweetness Christ makes possible through the healing of God’s Shalom. Amen?
John 17:20-26
Some of you know that I worked as an electrician when I was younger. That job came about in a strange way: My cousins Joe and Jerry had a company that installed fire alarm systems in old buildings. One day Joe got locked in a dark stairwell and couldn’t get out for the better part of a day. It shook him up a bit, and so he decided that he needed a helper. I came home from work one day (making sandwiches for $1.75 per hour) to find Joe negotiating with my dad for me to come and work with him. I was hired on the spot and went to work for Signal Systems Inc. I made $2 per hour. That was 1978 and I was 15. I worked for them during my summer holidays and other non-school days for the next 11 years—through high school, university and about halfway through my time in seminary.
I learned a lot during that time, and some of it was even about electricity. My cousins were both Navy veterans from the Vietnam era, and I was a fairly sheltered kid from the suburbs. A lot of what I learned from them I have to discipline myself to forget…every single day.
But I learned some basic electrical principles, too. The most important concept to know in electronics is the idea of the circuit. Here are some dictionary definitions.
An electronic circuit is a closed path formed by the interconnection of electronic components through which an electric current can flow.
That means that in order for electricity to flow and power electrical things, it has to move in an unbroken circle—a circuit.
There are two main types of circuits: series and parallel. A string of Christmas lights is a good example of a series circuit: if one goes out, they all do. In a parallel circuit, each bulb is connected to the power source separately, so if one goes out the rest still remain shining.
That means that how a circuit is designed will determine how fragile it is—how it responds to challenges and breakage.
Isn’t that interesting?
The Bible says a lot about how God designed us. It has a word for how we were made to function—how we were made to live: Shalom. We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of perfect Shalom. That word appears more than 250 times in the Old Testament—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. We usually translate it as ‘peace’, but as I said last week, that doesn’t do it justice.
Just to review. In the Old Testament Shalom has a broad range of meanings. It can refer to the communal well-being of the nation, or physical health. A sense of contentedness or happiness in relationships. It often describes a state of completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from the Book of Numbers, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
One thing that is always true in the way the Bible describes Shalom: It can only be found in the presence of God.
So let’s keep this part set firmly in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’
The main point here is that our relationships depend on our ability to be interconnected—on the free flow of Shalom—between us and God, within our own lives, between us and each other, and between us and the earth.
The focus of this series as we move through Lent builds on everything we’ve talked about here since September. The Lord’s Prayer, the season of Advent and the celebration of Christmas, and our look at what it means to be a contagious church. The theme during Lent is an important one. We can sum it up in a single sentence: The work of Christ on the Cross restores our broken circuitry. It offers healing for our relationships at all levels—with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with nature. That’s the outline for what we’ll be doing over these next 4 weeks.
20"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. 25"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them."
Our text today comes at the end of a long section that begins back in chapter 13. Jesus had gathered his disciples together for a Passover meal, a tradition that reminded Jews of the way God had spared them and saved them from slavery in Egypt. But this wasn’t like any Passover any of them had seen before.
Just as the food was coming out, Jesus took off his robe and left himself dressed as a slave would be, and then he washed the disciples’ feet…one at a time. Three years of following him—three years of listening to him explain who he was—three years of coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah God had promised to ransom captive Israel. And now he was washing their feet.
He went on to explain to them what was about to happen, and then he comforted them—this is the part of the Bible where we hear the words: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled—do not be afraid.’ Jesus tells them a parable, promises them the gift of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, and then promises them that everything would be made whole again someday.
It’s hard to imagine what the disciples would have been thinking right then. The Messiah had washed their feet, predicted some fairly amazing events, and promised something called the Holy Spirit—all before the dessert course.
Then Jesus began to pray. He prays first for himself, and then he prays for the disciples. He ends his prayer with the verses we just read—a prayer for all believers in all times—a prayer for complete unity among the faithful, and between the faithful and God himself.
In this prayer Jesus is asking for God’s Shalom to be restored to his people, even though he knew that restoration would require his own sacrifice. Almost immediately after finishing his prayer, Jesus was arrested and put on trial and sentenced to die. During this season we remember that all of this was done to heal our broken Shalom—the connections we were made to enjoy.
I mentioned last week that one of my former pastors described the Trinity in an important way. Rather than try to explain rationally what it meant for God to be three persons in one, he said this: ‘At the center of the universe, there is a relationship.’
If it’s true that God lives in a constant, state of relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and if the Scriptures teach that we’re somehow made in the image of this relational God, then what does that mean? The idea of being made in the image of a relational God means at least one thing: We were made to live as relational people— interconnected people whose relationships mirror the redemptive work of Christ in his life, death and resurrection. The breaking of that interconnected, relational way of living, breaks the circuit that gives us life, and cuts us off from our true source of life and power.
So we come to this week’s reflection on how Christ reconciles us to God. That’s what Jesus is praying for in our text this morning. He was praying that his ministry would bring people closer to each other and closer to God—closer in the Shalom sense of being webbed together with him in justice, fulfillment and delight. He was praying that his ministry and sacrifice would repair the broken circuit that cuts us off from the power that frees us to live as we were made to live.
Maybe it will help again to put this talk about electrical circuits into relational terms. Think of the word ‘estranged.’ Literally it means to be made strange to someone else—to become a stranger to someone who was once known. That’s what happens when sin breaks the perfect Shalom God created for us. We are made strange—even strangers—to God. At that point we cease to function as a healthy, whole circuit.
But we were made to live in that state of Shalom—to have whole and holy, fulfilling, connected relationships with God. When that relationship is broken—when our life-giving power is cut off—it can be as frightening as being locked in a stairway alone…in the dark…separated from the one who lives in a state of eternal relationship, and made us to live that way, too.
In his prayer Jesus says to his Father: ‘I pray also for those will believe in me, that all of them be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’
It’s crucial to understand just exactly we have been restored to do. You’ve heard me say many times that God’s blessings come to us with the understanding that they’re to be shared. Jesus prays passionately for Christians to sense the closeness—the oneness—with God. To experience the intimacy with God that we were meant to know. But in the same breath he reveals that there’s a purpose in that closeness—that relationship. ‘May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’
God’s perfect Shalom—‘The webbing together of God, humans, and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’—is something that is made to be shared. The perfect circuit of God’s relationship to his creation is meant to draw all of creation into that relationship.
But that still doesn’t describe what it means to be close to God—to have our relationship to God restored to its original condition. How do we do that? There’s no easy answer, but some have found a way to talk about that relationship in helpful ways.
Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite monk in France for almost 60 years. He spent most of that time washing dishes and repairing the sandals of the other people in the community. He wrote a series of letters toward the end of his life that became a little book called ‘Practicing the Presence of God.’ In it he wrote:
‘When we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us, this hinders our offending Him and doing anything that may displease Him. It also begets in us a holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God, where, when we ask, He supplies the grace we need. Over time, by often repeating these acts, they become habitual, and the presence of God becomes quite natural to us.’
Praying and studying and thinking about God isn’t something we do just because we’re told to. It’s not just a set of habits we develop because they make us look like holy people. They’re certainly not just a set of rules that make us feel guilty when we don’t do them enough.
Christian spiritual disciplines are something we practice so that we can have a glimpse into the mind and heart of God. It’s a way of reconnecting and recharging our experience of the relationship God made us to have in the first place. Practicing God’s presence through prayer and study and meditation is a way of enjoying life more deeply and completely than we could ever imagine.
Brother Lawrence reminds us that this doesn’t have to be complicated.
‘My most usual method is this simple attention: an affectionate regard for God to whom I find myself often attached with greater sweetness and delight than that of an infant at the mother's breast. To choose an expression, I would call this state the bosom of God for the inexpressible sweetness which I taste and experience there. If, at any time, my thoughts wander from this state from necessity or infirmity, I am presently recalled by inward emotions so charming and delicious that I cannot find words to describe them.’
‘...an affectionate regard for God…’ Can you imagine that? Does that sound appealing to you? Does it sound possible?
As we move through this season of Lent—this time of reflection and preparation for the celebration of Resurrection Day—focusing on our relationship with God should move to the center stage. Jesus prayed for us on the night he was betrayed—he prayed that his ministry and sacrifice would put an end to betrayal and brokenness once and for all.
As we move through this season of Lent, I invite you to set aside the time and energy it takes to practice the gift of God’s presence in your life—to find that inexpressible sweetness Christ makes possible through the healing of God’s Shalom. Amen?
Monday, March 02, 2009
Super Glue
(This is the first message in our Lenten series 'Together Again: The Meaning of the Atonement'.)
Colossians 1:15-20
It’s one of the first nursery rhymes we learn. There are drawings and cartoons of it. Kids all over the English-speaking world can recite it at the drop of a hat. Usually he’s portrayed as an egg.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
According to the East Anglia Tourist Board, Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon used in the Siege of Colchester during the English Civil War. It was mounted on top of the ‘St Mary's at the Wall’ Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in the summer of 1648. The church tower was hit by enemy cannon fire and the top of the tower was blown off, sending "Humpty" tumbling to the ground. Naturally all the king's horses and all the king's men (the cavalry and infantry, respectively) tried to fix it, but it didn’t work.
The poem also shows up in popular music from time to time
Billy Joel had it in one of his tunes:
All the king's men and all the king's horses
Can't put you together the way you used to be
Dolly Parton used it in a song about a divorce:
And all the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put mommy and daddy back together again
Genesis used it, too:
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Could never put a smile on that face
These songs remind us that there’s a sad story at the core of this little poem. Whoever or whatever Humpty Dumpty represents, clearly he’s taken a serious fall and is suffering because of it. The sad part is that there seems to be nothing anyone can do to help. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.’
That’s a very sad ending, I think.
We hear a lot these days about how fragmented our culture is. We hear about the distance—the broken relationships between men and women, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural—the list is long. Our text this morning is a reminder that there is someone who holds things together—even if we can’t see him, someone who loves completely and acts decisively to put things back together again.
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
We talked about the background to Paul’s letter to the Colossians a few weeks ago. The city was a small trading center, and was home to a handful of different religions. The problem Paul is addressing with the Colossian church was that it had allowed too much influence from other religions in its practice of the Christian faith. When you added that to the constant danger of persecution from Rome, Paul’s letter was an attempt to get them back on a straight path. There are some great hymns in this letter—songs that explain important theological truths. The central theme of the letter is pretty basic: Christ is the glue that holds the universe together, even in an uncertain world.
It’s important for us to build our faith on a firm foundation of who God reveals himself to be in the pages of Scripture. We can also get a better understanding of who we are and who we’re made to be.
One of my former pastors preached a sermon on the Trinity a few years back. Rather than try to explain rationally what it meant for God to be three persons at the same time, he said this. ‘At the center of the universe, there is a relationship.’
If the Scriptures teach that we’re somehow made in the image of this relational God, then what does that mean? If it’s true that God lives in a constant state of relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then it means that we’re made to live that way, too. We’re made to live in a range of relationships at a handful of different levels.
But we’ve taken a serious fall—our ability to live and love and thrive in relationships has been damaged—and no one seems to know how to put it all back together again. That shouldn’t sound like a radical statement if you read the newspapers—or even if you just step out of your house. If you drive a car in Central London you know that there is something seriously broken about the way we relate to each other.
The focus of this series as we move through Lent builds on everything we’ve talked about here since September. The Lord’s Prayer, the celebration of Christmas, and our look at what it means to be a contagious church. The theme during Lent is an important one. We can sum it up in a single sentence: The work of Christ on the Cross offers healing for our relationships at all levels—with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with nature. That’s the outline for what we’ll be doing over the next 4 weeks.
But what was it supposed to be like before things got broken? The Bible has a word for how we were made to live: Shalom
We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of Shalom. That word appears more than 250 times in the Bible—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. We usually translate it as ‘peace’, but that doesn’t do it justice.
In the Old Testament, Shalom has a broad range of meanings. It can refer to the communal well-being of the nation, or physical health. A sense of contentedness or happiness in relationships. It often describes a state of completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from Numbers 6, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
One thing that is always true in the way the Bible describes Shalom: It can only be found in the presence of God.
So let’s get this part set in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ We can’t really talk about what’s broken in our world—or even in our lives—without understanding this idea of Shalom.
Sin is the breaking—the shattering into pieces—of the shalom God created for all of us It’s what happens to us when we have our great big serious fall. One writer said that if Shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption, then ‘sin is the blamable human vandalism of these great qualities, and therefore an insult to their architect and builder.’
Now sin is an unpopular topic for discussion for a handful of reasons. No one wants to seem judgmental. No one wants to appear intolerant. Mostly none of us wants to define anything we might be doing ourselves as sin—as blamable human vandalism of God’s Shalom.
But here’s the truth. We can’t begin to comprehend the saving, healing, reconciling ministry of Jesus Christ, if we’re not willing to acknowledge the presence and impact of sin in our lives.
Maybe it will help to put it into relational terms. Think of the word ‘estranged.’ Literally it means to be made strange to someone else—to become a stranger to someone that was once known. That’s what happens when sin breaks the perfect Shalom God created for us. We are made strange—even strangers—to God.
But we were made to live in that state of Shalom—to have healthy, fulfilling, connected relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth. Remember that line from the definition: Shalom is ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ Those are the relationships that are broken by sin, and those are the relationships healed by Christ’s work on the Cross.
In our text we learn a couple of important things about who Christ is and what he does. He was before all things—present at the creation of the world—and he holds everything together, like some cosmic Super Glue. We also learn that gave himself as a sacrifice to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth, when it was clear that we couldn’t manage that job ourselves.
So back to Humpty Dumpty. In the nursery rhyme I started with, the bad news in the poem is that no power can heal something once it’s broken. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ keep trying, but that bad news is that they can’t solve the problem.
The good news for us this season, as we take this time during Lent to focus on Christ’s sacrifice for us—the good news is that Christ can put everything back together again. The gift of the Cross—the amazing thing Christ accomplishes in the Atonement—is the rebuilding of the Shalom we threw away in the Garden—the reconciling of the relationships that are somehow broken. The Atonement—the work of Christ on the Cross—offers us the chance to restore our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
During this season of Lent—of reflection on our need for Christ and his sacrifice for us—during Lent our focus will be on the way God made us as relational beings—people who are hard-wired for connection and community. We’ll see the different ways that Shalom has been broken, and what God has done to restore it for his people.
As we come to the Table this morning we celebrate the gift of communion—the gift of connection and relationship with Christians in all times and in all places, and with Jesus Christ himself. It’s the glue that holds us all together in faith. Wherever you are on that journey, if you’re seeking to have a relationship with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, come and join in this holy feast.
Colossians 1:15-20
It’s one of the first nursery rhymes we learn. There are drawings and cartoons of it. Kids all over the English-speaking world can recite it at the drop of a hat. Usually he’s portrayed as an egg.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
According to the East Anglia Tourist Board, Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon used in the Siege of Colchester during the English Civil War. It was mounted on top of the ‘St Mary's at the Wall’ Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in the summer of 1648. The church tower was hit by enemy cannon fire and the top of the tower was blown off, sending "Humpty" tumbling to the ground. Naturally all the king's horses and all the king's men (the cavalry and infantry, respectively) tried to fix it, but it didn’t work.
The poem also shows up in popular music from time to time
Billy Joel had it in one of his tunes:
All the king's men and all the king's horses
Can't put you together the way you used to be
Dolly Parton used it in a song about a divorce:
And all the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put mommy and daddy back together again
Genesis used it, too:
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Could never put a smile on that face
These songs remind us that there’s a sad story at the core of this little poem. Whoever or whatever Humpty Dumpty represents, clearly he’s taken a serious fall and is suffering because of it. The sad part is that there seems to be nothing anyone can do to help. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.’
That’s a very sad ending, I think.
We hear a lot these days about how fragmented our culture is. We hear about the distance—the broken relationships between men and women, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural—the list is long. Our text this morning is a reminder that there is someone who holds things together—even if we can’t see him, someone who loves completely and acts decisively to put things back together again.
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
We talked about the background to Paul’s letter to the Colossians a few weeks ago. The city was a small trading center, and was home to a handful of different religions. The problem Paul is addressing with the Colossian church was that it had allowed too much influence from other religions in its practice of the Christian faith. When you added that to the constant danger of persecution from Rome, Paul’s letter was an attempt to get them back on a straight path. There are some great hymns in this letter—songs that explain important theological truths. The central theme of the letter is pretty basic: Christ is the glue that holds the universe together, even in an uncertain world.
It’s important for us to build our faith on a firm foundation of who God reveals himself to be in the pages of Scripture. We can also get a better understanding of who we are and who we’re made to be.
One of my former pastors preached a sermon on the Trinity a few years back. Rather than try to explain rationally what it meant for God to be three persons at the same time, he said this. ‘At the center of the universe, there is a relationship.’
If the Scriptures teach that we’re somehow made in the image of this relational God, then what does that mean? If it’s true that God lives in a constant state of relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then it means that we’re made to live that way, too. We’re made to live in a range of relationships at a handful of different levels.
But we’ve taken a serious fall—our ability to live and love and thrive in relationships has been damaged—and no one seems to know how to put it all back together again. That shouldn’t sound like a radical statement if you read the newspapers—or even if you just step out of your house. If you drive a car in Central London you know that there is something seriously broken about the way we relate to each other.
The focus of this series as we move through Lent builds on everything we’ve talked about here since September. The Lord’s Prayer, the celebration of Christmas, and our look at what it means to be a contagious church. The theme during Lent is an important one. We can sum it up in a single sentence: The work of Christ on the Cross offers healing for our relationships at all levels—with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with nature. That’s the outline for what we’ll be doing over the next 4 weeks.
But what was it supposed to be like before things got broken? The Bible has a word for how we were made to live: Shalom
We were created to live in a constant, blissful state of Shalom. That word appears more than 250 times in the Bible—it’s clearly important to God that we understand it. We usually translate it as ‘peace’, but that doesn’t do it justice.
In the Old Testament, Shalom has a broad range of meanings. It can refer to the communal well-being of the nation, or physical health. A sense of contentedness or happiness in relationships. It often describes a state of completion and wholeness. One writer called it ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ In the famous blessing from Numbers 6, we hear this: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make is face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you Shalom.’
One thing that is always true in the way the Bible describes Shalom: It can only be found in the presence of God.
So let’s get this part set in our minds: We were designed to live healthy, content, happy lives filled with wholeness and peace, all in the presence of God. ‘The webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ We can’t really talk about what’s broken in our world—or even in our lives—without understanding this idea of Shalom.
Sin is the breaking—the shattering into pieces—of the shalom God created for all of us It’s what happens to us when we have our great big serious fall. One writer said that if Shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption, then ‘sin is the blamable human vandalism of these great qualities, and therefore an insult to their architect and builder.’
Now sin is an unpopular topic for discussion for a handful of reasons. No one wants to seem judgmental. No one wants to appear intolerant. Mostly none of us wants to define anything we might be doing ourselves as sin—as blamable human vandalism of God’s Shalom.
But here’s the truth. We can’t begin to comprehend the saving, healing, reconciling ministry of Jesus Christ, if we’re not willing to acknowledge the presence and impact of sin in our lives.
Maybe it will help to put it into relational terms. Think of the word ‘estranged.’ Literally it means to be made strange to someone else—to become a stranger to someone that was once known. That’s what happens when sin breaks the perfect Shalom God created for us. We are made strange—even strangers—to God.
But we were made to live in that state of Shalom—to have healthy, fulfilling, connected relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth. Remember that line from the definition: Shalom is ‘the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.’ Those are the relationships that are broken by sin, and those are the relationships healed by Christ’s work on the Cross.
In our text we learn a couple of important things about who Christ is and what he does. He was before all things—present at the creation of the world—and he holds everything together, like some cosmic Super Glue. We also learn that gave himself as a sacrifice to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth, when it was clear that we couldn’t manage that job ourselves.
So back to Humpty Dumpty. In the nursery rhyme I started with, the bad news in the poem is that no power can heal something once it’s broken. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ keep trying, but that bad news is that they can’t solve the problem.
The good news for us this season, as we take this time during Lent to focus on Christ’s sacrifice for us—the good news is that Christ can put everything back together again. The gift of the Cross—the amazing thing Christ accomplishes in the Atonement—is the rebuilding of the Shalom we threw away in the Garden—the reconciling of the relationships that are somehow broken. The Atonement—the work of Christ on the Cross—offers us the chance to restore our relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with the earth.
During this season of Lent—of reflection on our need for Christ and his sacrifice for us—during Lent our focus will be on the way God made us as relational beings—people who are hard-wired for connection and community. We’ll see the different ways that Shalom has been broken, and what God has done to restore it for his people.
As we come to the Table this morning we celebrate the gift of communion—the gift of connection and relationship with Christians in all times and in all places, and with Jesus Christ himself. It’s the glue that holds us all together in faith. Wherever you are on that journey, if you’re seeking to have a relationship with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, come and join in this holy feast.
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