An American Minister in London

Christmas Eve 2011

2012-01-04T03:33:00.000-08:00

In Small Packages

I saw an ad for a laptop the other day—it was a picture from the side to show how thin and light it was. Seriously—this thing was less than an inch thick, and yet it was more powerful than any computer I’ve ever had.

It seems like we’re always trying to make things smaller. Everyone gets a laugh out of seeing Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, walking on the beach and chatting on a cell phone that looks about the size of a shoebox. I think they even called that model “The Brick” because of its size and weight. Now my Blackberry can create the illusion that I’m always in my office, and it fits in my shirt pocket.

For those of us who grew up with stereo systems that filled pieces of living room furniture, the iPod is still a little amazing.

If you’re old enough to remember Apollo 11 and the mission to get a couple of guys walking on the moon, it may surprise you to know that you have far more computing power in your laptop than they did at Mission Control, and that computer took up an entire wing of the building. And that’s not all. You have about 100x more memory in your smartphone than they did on the spaceship itself.

Cameras, computers, mobile phones and even cars—so many things are smaller and more efficient than they were in their original form.

Even Twitter is getting into the smaller-is-better game. Each message, or tweet, on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. Everything from messages about what people are having for dinner, to the real-time report of the raid on Osama bin Laden—all of that happens on Twitter at the tiny rate of 140 characters per message.

The main parts of the Christmas story that we’ve heard tonight can be told through Twitter messages:

“Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child & give birth to a son, & you are to give him the name Jesus.” That comes in at a perfect 140 characters.

And how does Mary respond?

“My soul magnifies the lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant” Room to spare at 128 characters.

Meanwhile, the angels are surprising some shepherds in the fields. “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people. Today in the town of David a savior has been born to you.” Just under the wire at 139.

The promise to Mary is pretty economical: “This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a mange” Just 89.

And the kicker, the praise-filled song the angels sing as the heavens are opened above some terrified shepherds: “Glory to god in the highest, and on earth peace to all people on whom his favor rests.” That heavenly message only takes 86 characters.

There are a couple of newborns in our circle of friends these days. Our own son is 11 now, and one of the things you forget after a while is just how small a newborn baby really is.

In the Christmas story we talk about the angels and Mary and Joseph and shepherds. We even talk about barn animals that aren’t actually in the story. But we don’t often think about just how small Jesus was on that first night. He was probably 7 pounds or so—about 3 kilos—just half a stone.

But that little baby was sent—he was born and raised and shaped and called—he was sent to be the Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people, the one who would reconcile God and all of his creation, once and for all. Such a huge gift in such a small package.

More than 500 feet underground, at the border between Switzerland and France, there is a massive circular tunnel—17 miles around—that is used to conduct scientific experiments.

Now I’m going to try to explain this without sounding like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.”

The Large Hadron Collider is a laboratory where particle beams of protons and other materials are smashed together to try and recreate the conditions that brought about the beginnings of the universe. They’re looking for a tiny particle, smaller than an atom, called a Higgs boson. Physicists believe that the Higgs boson particle is the thing that transforms energy into mass. In other words, it will help explain how solid things first appeared—and keep appearing—in the universe.

That tiny thing is often called The God Particle, because it has the potential to explain how everything got here—how this all got started—and maybe even where we’re going. All of these scientists and engineers—10,000 of them from more than 100 countries—all of these people looking for the meaning of the universe in something so small.

That’s why we’re here tonight. The Word of God, the meaning of the universe, the Messiah and savior of everyone and everything, came in the form of a small child, a newborn baby, and nothing was ever the same again.

Christmas Eve is as good a time as any to remember who this Christ-child was and is. In one of our confessions we say this:

In life and death we belong to God.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
The love of God,
And the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel,
whom alone we worship and serve.

We trust in Jesus Christ,
Fully human, fully God.
Jesus proclaimed the reign of God:
preaching good news to the poor
and release to the captives,
teaching by word and deed
and blessing the children,
healing the sick
and binding up the brokenhearted,
eating with outcasts,
forgiving sinners,
and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.
Unjustly condemned for blasphemy and sedition,
Jesus was crucified,
suffering the depths of human pain
and giving his life for the sins of the world.
God raised Jesus from the dead,
vindicating his sinless life,
breaking the power of sin and evil,
delivering us from death to life eternal.

All of that began with the birth of this one baby: Jesus the Messiah.

If you’re searching or wondering about this Jesus we’ve been going on about, don’t let another Christmas go by without looking for the answers to your questions—without praying and asking to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

That gift is always there for you—always waiting to be opened, even when we come with more questions than answers. If you’re curious, and you don’t have a Bible to read, let me know and I’ll get you one that you can keep. Don’t let another Christmas go by without finding out for yourself who this Jesus is.

For tonight, though, as we prepare to have meals and give gifts and wear bad sweaters and all the other things that go into this day. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas, never forget what God did—and what he promises to do—in the birth of that one baby boy, on that one holy night. Amen.

Second Sunday of Advent

2011-12-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:46-55

At the end of the Cold War someone found a book from the 18th century buried in some papers in East Berlin. The book was about 100 pages long, and it was filled with symbols and words that no one could translate. The book was in a code so unbreakable that it had lasted for almost 300 years without being cracked. That is, until a few months ago.

The book is known as the Copiale Cipher, and it was finally translated by three scientists—one from the States and two from Sweden. As it turns out it was the manual for a secret society in Germany. It described their rituals and practices, and also their fascination with ophthalmology and eye surgery. Strange club.

The story of how they broke the code is interesting, and it reminds us of how hard it can be sometimes to understand what God is trying to teach us in the Scriptures. That’s not the issue in today’s text.

And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”

I’ve said before here that Mary is one of my favorite people in the Bible. She’s a young single pregnant teenager in a culture that wasn’t all that forgiving. But she’s been told by an angel that she’s carrying God’s child, and she responds with such faith and courage that it’s hard not to admire her.

Let’s remember just how courageous Mary is being at this point.

God calls all kinds of people to do his work, and most of them respond with excuses or try to get out of it. Abraham says he’s too old, and so does Sarah. Moses suggests to God that he made a mistake, and recommends that God try his brother. Jonah flat out runs away. God calls him to a task and he turns around and does a 100-yard dash…that is, until a fish gets him to come back.

Jesus—even Jesus, when he is in the garden of Gethsemane—even Jesus asks if God can come up with some kind of a Plan B.

Mary, though, somehow gets it and is willing to hear God’s call no matter what. Remember what she says to the angel just a few verses before our text:

“I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

Mary’s full response comes in the form of an outburst of praise. “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” she says. What we have after that is a song where Mary shows how deeply and completely she has absorbed God’s plan, even if she might have been terrified.

Mary didn’t misunderstand.
Mary didn’t try to haggle with God.
Mary didn’t have to decode God’s call in order to know what to do.
Mary understood God’s call on her life, and she responded by singing his praises.

We learn some things about God in Mary’s song:

First, God calls people to come to him in faith: “His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.”

Second, we see God’s sovereignty: “He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”

Third, God nourishes us for the calling he has given us: “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” That’s not just a slam on the rich. God is calling out anyone who thinks they don’t need him—that they can take care of themselves apart from God. Mary describes a great feast that is open to anyone who admits their need for God.

And finally, in Mary’s song we see the fulfillment of God’s promises and the foundation for the promises to come: “He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.” If God could be trusted then, then we can trust him now.

I like that there is an image of a meal here, which shouldn’t really be a surprise if you know me. I like the picture of a feast for anyone willing to trust God more than they trust their own power or money. This meal is where we’re filled with “good things,” with God’s mercy and forgiveness, with his salvation and Holy Spirit.

When the group of scholars cracked that 18th-century cipher, they were quick to say that it was their ingenuity and not fancy technology that got the job done. “This is something humans did, not something computers did,” they said.

What we celebrate during this season isn’t anything humans did. We celebrate God reaching down to all of us with the gift of his son—the gift of a way back to living the lives we were meant to live all along.

When we come to the Table we remember something crucial and life-changing that we were not able to do on our own. The sacrifice of Jesus is what we’re called to remember as we take the bread and the cup. It’s a sacrifice we can’t make for ourselves.

Mary helps us understand that. As we come to the Table this morning I invite you to say a prayer of thanks that a teen-aged girl in the first century was wise enough and brave enough to hear God’s call and say: “May it be to me as you have said.”

My prayer is that we can all show that kind of faith this Advent season. Let’s pray.

Thanksgiving Message 2011

2011-11-25T05:49:00.000-08:00

(This message was given in St Paul's Cathedral on Thanksgiving Day 2011.)

Ephesians 2:14-22

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Good morning, and Happy Thanksgiving. It is truly an amazing thing to be able to worship together in this beautiful cathedral. We’re honored to be here.

According to the website About.com, these are the Top 5 Family Thanksgiving Traditions. This is really the only day when I get to use material like this, so bear with me.

First, there is the turkey dinner, though there are regional variations on how that’s prepared. There’s the traditional roasting; in New England you can have a salt-encrusted turkey; in Hawaii apparently they rub coffee on the bird before roasting—that may be a way to try to prevent falling asleep immediately after the meal. And somewhere in the south, God bless ‘em, they’re deep-frying turkeys today.

Second, of course, is football. Now for our English friends—or really anyone not from the States—we’re not talking about soccer here. We’re talking about heavily padded, fully helmeted, oversized American football. It’s a part of the holiday to sit and watch football before and after the big turkey dinner. I have three NFL games recorded at my house, just so we can have them on in the background today.

Third are the parades, though that really means the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And fourth is fighting over the wishbone from the Thanksgiving turkey. Apparently the tradition of breaking the wishbone and making a wish dates back to the ancient Etruscans in the 4th century BC. Aren’t you glad you came today?

Finally, Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without somehow pausing to give thanks for the blessings in our lives. Even in hard times, it’s important to be thankful for the gifts of life and family and friends, even if we’re separated by distance or time. We’re here today to join together and give thanks, and it’s a blessing to be here.

Unlike a lot of other American holidays, Thanksgiving is celebrated at home. In the States people get away from home whenever a long weekend comes along. Martin Luther King Jr weekend in January means a ski trip, and if the snow holds out so does Presidents’ weekend in February. Memorial Day is the start of summer, so we go to the beach or the lake. The 4th of July is for picnics in the park. For Labor Day weekend we’ll try to squeeze in one more outdoorsy vacation, and on it goes.

But Thanksgiving is about being home, or at least in someone’s home, and about sharing our homes with those who are far away from theirs. It’s about opening our doors and welcoming family and friends and even strangers to a time of food and football and fellowship.

I remember the first time I celebrated Thanksgiving with my wife’s family. We’d been married for just a few weeks, and even though I knew the people around the table, I was still a little nervous. More than any other holiday, Thanksgiving is steeped in very specific traditions. How you prepare the turkey, what kind of pies to serve, what do you do with the sweet potatoes, and then there’s the cranberry sauce.

Seriously. Let me just pause here for a moment. I‘ve seen people get in heated arguments about whether or not canned cranberry sauce is acceptable for a Thanksgiving table. Even now I can feel the tension in the room. Personally I love a good slice of canned cranberry sauce, complete with those little dents and ridges from the inside of the can.

But what made that first Thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family so special, was how they included me and welcomed me to their table, and how they tried very hard to add a few of my own traditions into that first celebration together. It was wonderful to be included that way. I didn’t feel like a stranger or visitor at all—I felt like part of the family from the very first moment.

That’s what I love about the passage we heard from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians a few minutes ago. It’s a beautiful statement of the unity we’re meant to have as people of faith. Christ “came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we all have access to the Father by one Spirit.”

And then Paul gets to the point. “So then,” he says, “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…”

“You are no longer strangers and aliens…[but] members of the household of God.” You’re part of the family now.

Rena Garcia was my friend in elementary school. This past summer we caught up at our 30-year high school reunion, and it wasn’t more than a few minutes before we shared a very special Thanksgiving memory from our childhood days. We grew up in Southern California, a part of the state that was filled with people from somewhere else. It was good preparation for living in London—we were surrounded by people and languages from all over the world. Half of Rena’s family was from Spain, and the other half from Mexico.

I remember that on the day before Thanksgiving each year, Rena came to school dressed like a Pilgrim—a carefully made black and white dress that looked exactly like the pictures of pilgrims we were reading about in our lessons at school. The teachers loved it so much that they passed Rena around like an artifact—she went from room to room where the teachers would show her off or use her as a visual aid for their explanation of that first Thanksgiving. I can still picture her—her brown skin and beautiful smile all dressed up like a 17th-century English dissenter, the people we grew up calling Pilgrims.

I think I may have felt sorry for Rena. I found out later that her mother had made the dress, and then sent her daughter off to the dangerous jungle we knew as primary school. I felt sorry for her, but one of the great things I learned later was that she wasn’t nearly as embarrassed about wearing the costume as we thought.

Because in Rena’s family there was a point to wearing that costume to school. Rena’s mother dressed her that way to make it clear to everyone that she was an American —that she belonged—that she was part of the family now. For her it was a gentle way of asking to be accepted—of wanting to fit into her country. At our reunion a handful of us shared our memory of the dress with Rena, and she couldn’t wait to go back and tell her mom that we’d all remembered it.

Thanksgiving is a time of gathering and reconnecting and accepting and remembering—it’s a holiday that’s perfect for looking a loved one in the eye and telling them how thankful you are that they’re a part of your life—how thankful you are that you get to be friends or family together.

Thanksgiving is also a time to welcome new friends. I’ve been hearing stories this past week of families who always set extra places at the table on Thanksgiving, just in case someone didn’t have a place to go. Some people invite students over, and others include a member of the military at their family gatherings. Homeless missions across the US today are serving turkey and all the trimmings to men and women and children who don’t have anywhere else to go.

All of this is a way to say what Paul said to his friends in Ephesus: “You are no longer strangers and aliens.” You’re part of the family now.

Paul’s letter was to a city that needed to hear a message of reconciliation and hope. The people of Ephesus lived under the threat of persecution; there were social and religious conflicts; and even within the fragile early church there was a danger of losing touch with the message that brought them together in the first place.

It’s a relevant message for today, no matter what your own faith tradition might be. For Christians this is a call to unity—unity of belief and unity of purpose made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross. But whatever you believe today, for all of us there is an invitation in this passage to come together and share in a common purpose and mission.

“You are no longer strangers and aliens.” You’re part of the family now.

As we look back on it, Thanksgiving didn’t really get off to a very easy start at all. Not long after the first Thanksgiving feast, devout pilgrims changed everything and celebrated the day of Thanksgiving with fasting and prayer. That doesn’t sound nearly as fun as a big joyful meal together.

Later, when Abraham Lincoln officially established the holiday in October of 1863, America was in the middle of the Civil War. The very first Thanksgiving was celebrated just months after the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in the war.

Thanksgiving—this special day of giving thanks for the blessings in our lives—Thanksgiving has survived some very difficult and painful times.

The Occupy protesters outside today remind us that we’re in hard times again. But they also remind us that we have neighbors, people God calls us to love, who have experiences and fears and concerns that might be very different from ours.

And maybe one of the blessings of a protest here, today, just outside these doors—maybe the blessing for us on this Thanksgiving day is that the people who are most vulnerable and who have been affected most deeply by our wounded economy—those men and women are no longer strangers. They’re with us this morning, here in this place.

One way we can celebrate this day of thanks—along with the food and football and fellowship—one way we can demonstrate our gratitude is to listen to the voices of those who struggle. We listen, even when those voices provoke or irritate us—we listen, because we’re not meant to be strangers anymore.

There are all kinds of things to be thankful for, even in difficult times. Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times this week, told the story of a teen-aged boy who is a gifted pianist. He broke his right arm recently, but instead of giving up he went out and bought a copy of Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand and learned to play a new way.

Maybe that’s good advice for all of us this Thanksgiving. Clearly something is broken. Clearly we can’t go on the same way we’ve been going. But maybe, if we look hard enough, we can find other ways to live and grow and serve and make something new and beautiful together. Maybe, if we can turn the heat down a little and look for the light, we can find a way ahead that is more just, and more fair for everyone.

Maybe that makes all of us pilgrims, in a way. We search for ways to heal our hurts and those of our neighbors—we move around looking for better ways to raise our families and engage the world around us. Maybe we’re all pilgrims now, looking for God’s blessings as we work and study and play.

There are all kinds of things to be thankful for, but today, on this Thanksgiving Day, we pilgrims can be drawn to the promise in Paul’s words. “You are no longer strangers and aliens…[but] members of the household of God.” You’re part of the family now.

Happy Thanksgiving. May God bless you, today and every day. Amen.

Saying Goodbye to a Friend

2011-10-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

John Charles Harmon (1963-2011)

John D'Elia, Shane Sindle, Earl Bryant and John Harmon

I’m back in California this week, seeing family, reconnecting with people, and saying goodbye to a friend I’ve known my whole life. There were four of us boys, among some other great friends who grew up at First Presbyterian Church in Burbank, who stayed connected over the last 40 years or so. The four of us played baseball together, went to church camps and conferences together, and over the years supported, participated in and disrupted a generation of youth ministry at the church where we were raised. Some of the stories you’ve heard, and others aren’t really fit to print here. But through all of it, Shane Sindle, Earl Bryant, John Harmon and I developed friendships that shaped us as kids and which continue to influence us in our adult years. My childhood and adolescence are unrecognizable without John, Shane and Earl in the background (probably laughing about something), and it occurs to me that virtually everything I learned about Jesus as a kid I learned with those guys at my side.

The four of us had and have lots of other friends, but there was something special about our relationship that became even more so over the years. Once we got into our 40s we saw a new value or preciousness to the fact that we’d been together so long. It was clear we would do anything for each other, and even better, we began to go out of our way to make sure the others knew it. In the movie “Stand By Me” the narrator says: “It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.” In my friendships with John, Shane and Earl it was more like friends who entered into each other’s lives and then sat down and stayed for a long meal.

John died last week and the rest of us are trying to made some sort of sense of it. There isn’t any big answer to John’s loss, of course, but it’s important to wrestle with the questions. John was a complicated guy. Funny, gentle, charming, and almost childlike on the one hand, while on the other he struggled with depression and grief, and could never really escape the temptation to numb both of those with an assortment of drugs. Now the rest of us are thinking back to signals missed and clues overlooked, but the answer is, very honestly, that John wasn’t the type to reach out easily for himself. Just once in the 40+ years that I knew him did he call me and ask for help. He’d gotten himself in to a pattern of using that had destroyed his finances, his relationship, and was taking its toll on his body. My wife and I drove up to see him in Santa Barbara 13 years ago or so. We didn’t solve much, but it was a reminder to both John and myself that we’d do anything we could to help the other.

We’re left with this moment to begin to say goodbye. I don’t want to be here. I want to be back at my house in London with my family or in my office, thinking about how the four of us were going to get together next summer. I want there to still be one more chance for the four of us to hang out and talk about our lives. Maybe that’s what is giving my grief such an especially intense pain: I can’t imagine a world that John isn’t in. I can’t imagine a world where we won’t have another chance to tell the same old stories and comment on how those stories made us the guys we became.

The service is tomorrow and we’ll gather in the coming days to talk and cry and make plans for getting together in the future. I hope the sadness goes away and I expect it will, mostly, but for Earl and Shane and myself I think there will always be an enormous space among us, a space where John belongs. I believe in the promise of an afterlife, even if I can’t quite wrap my head around what that means. I believe I’ll see John again, whole and strong and filling his days with worship instead of the drugs that ruined him. But even with that hope it breaks my heart that I won’t see him again here, in this beautiful, broken, joy-filled, painful life.

So we say goodbye to John, in the “sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” as the Christian tradition says, though there will be varying degrees of sureness and certainty, I think. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends this week. I just wish they were all here.

"And the Second is Like It"

2011-09-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

Matthew 22:34-40

It’s been a little nostalgic this past week to think about some old neighbors of mine. We had a Japanese-American family on one side, and their grandfather shared with me about his experiences as an internee in Manzanar during WWII. Down the street there were neighbors we didn’t know very well, but we learned pretty quickly that the wife had a hard time parking her big car in their narrow driveway. She would get home at about 5:30 every day, and honk for her husband to come out and park the car for her. For years whenever we heard a car horn, our family joke was “that lady can’t park.”

On the other side of our house was a family that had a bible study during the 70s that had a big influence on my mom’s life. Across the street there was a Puerto Rican family from New York. The boy who lived there was a little younger than me and tagged along with whatever I was doing at the time. They took me to the beach once when I was about 10, and I remember afterward the dad taking us out on the front lawn where he kneeled down and rinsed the sand from our feet. To this day he’s the only person I can remember ever washing my feet besides myself or my parents.

We had some interesting neighbors, but I never really thought about what it might mean to love those people. I didn’t choose them. I didn’t know them all that well. I never really thought about loving them.

Turns out Jesus did.

And not just the neighbors that live in places near us at any given time. Jesus calls us to love neighbors, and by neighbors he really means pretty much anyone who isn’t you. Sometimes he means people who you can’t even stand. Occasionally he means people who would rather kill you than be loved by you.

In multiple places and in different ways, Jesus Christ calls us to love the people around us—the other people he made and loves and wants to reconcile to himself. Yeah, if you thought a series on loving your neighbors was going to be sweet and easy, better think again.

As we move past the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, this seems like the perfect time to talk about loving our neighbors—maybe even about loving our enemies. Jesus talks about both a lot, especially compared to some of the other issues that churches get wrapped up in. He talks about it a lot, and if we’re honest we’ll admit that we don’t talk about it much at all. So, in memory of those who were lost on September 11th, and also in the 10 years since then, we’re going to take this on and see what we learn.

Talking about loving God and our neighbors is really an extended conversation about what it means to be a mature Christian, to be a follower of Jesus. The church has spent 2000 years mostly trying to define what it means to be a Christian in terms of statements of things we believe. But Jesus had a different perspective. He saw faith as being thoroughly linked with action—not to earn God’s love, but as evidence that we’ve experienced God’s love.

Now I’m not ready to give up the idea that what we believe is crucial to being a Christian. I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying here. Doctrine matters—if only to put the brakes on our temptation to re-create God in our own image. Doctrine matters, but it’s not the point.

Jesus doesn’t define the life of faith by what we believe as much as he defines it by who and how well we love. Jesus doesn’t say “they’ll know you’re my followers by your sound doctrine.” No, Jesus says: “By this the world will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Uh-oh.

34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

It was a regular part of Jewish prayer life to begin and end each day with the prayer known as Shema Yisrael. We know it like this: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

This was the prayer that every faithful Jew said in the morning and again at night. It was the foundation for everything else. In our text someone approaches Jesus to trip him up, to catch him in some willful disobedience to the Jewish tradition. “What’s the most important commandment?” the guys asked.

Jesus took the main point of the Shema prayer and joined it with another line from Leviticus 19:18. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

So Jesus’ response was to take a familiar answer and add to it something that hadn’t been connected to it before. Sure, every faithful Jew knew that they were supposed to love God, but it was easy to minimize that obscure bit about loving your neighbor. Jesus not only joined them together, but he added that “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

So the essence of being a follower of Jesus is to love God with all we’ve got—our heart and soul and mind—and to love and care for our neighbor as much as we love and care for ourselves.

How important is all of this? How central is this idea to what it means to be a Christian person? Let’s let Jesus take that one. He said: “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Everything depends on this. When Jesus says “all the Law and the Prophets” he means the entire foundation of faith in the one, true God. It’s such an enormous claim—such an over-the-top radical statement—it’s so huge that I can’t believe Matthew 22:40 hasn’t ended up on t-shirts and keychains and anywhere else it can be printed. I can’t believe we haven’t seen on a poster in the end zone of an American football game.

Everything depends on this.

Think about that for a moment. Everything the Bible teaches on sexuality or personal morality. Everything the Bible teaches on peacemaking or social justice. Everything we know or will ever know about theology and doctrine.

Everything depends on this.

Everything hangs on the one-two punch of “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

We talk a lot about loving and serving God here. We worship and fellowship together, we try to grown our faith through Bible study and reading. You saw today that we’re trying to move out in faith in this community and around the world to be God’s messengers, and there’s more to that report during our Coffee Hour today.

But loving our neighbor in the way that God defines love—and the way God defines neighbor—doing that part is a little more of a challenge. We’re going to focus on how these go together to form us into the people God wants us to be.

Over the next few months I want to invite you to read along in a very good book called The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, by Mark Labberton. Stephanie and I read it earlier this year, and we think it would be a helpful guide for thinking some of this through in the context of the rest of our lives. We have copies available downstairs if you’re interested.

Loving our neighbors, the author says, is about aligning our hearts to God’s so that we see the world and the people in it with his eyes, his heart. This is directly connected to the issue of justice in the world. Listen to what he writes.

“Our hearts don’t consciously will injustice. Nor do they deliberately withhold compassion. Nor is it that tales of injustice fail to grab us and concern us. Yet our hearts are weak and confused. Our hearts are easily overwhelmed and self-protective. They’re prone to be absorbed mostly with the immediacy of our own lives. Our hearts have the capacity to seek justice, but they’re usually not calibrated to do so—at least not beyond concern for our inner circle. In a world of such hearts, virulent injustice thrives. Systemic injustice, the absence of the rule of law, and the suffering of so many innocents at the hands of oppressors—that injustice relies on the complicity and distraction of our ordinary hearts.”

In order to love our neighbors, even when our neighbors are our enemies, our hearts have to be calibrated—they have to be retuned so that we see the world and the people in it with God’s eyes—with God’s heart. It’s not easy—it seems overwhelming and challenging and impossible. And yet here’s the thing:

Everything depends on it.

Over these next few months we’re going to wrestle with what it means to love our neighbors. We’re going to do it with this Jesus Creed in mind, and starting next week, one way or another, we’ll hear it or say it together every Sunday until Advent.

“Hear O people of London, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
With all your mind and with all your strength.
Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

Amen.

September 11th: "Everyone Has a Story"

2011-09-12T00:50:00.000-07:00

Acts 1:1-11

Everyone has a story.

When I was growing up my parents used to talk about where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed. I remember where I was when the Challenger space shuttle exploded and crashed. It was the way my grandparents remembered Pearl Harbor or VE-Day. All of those tragic, historic moments become markers that stay with us—they become a part of the way we see the world around us. They shape how we think about everything that happens after that moment.

Everyone has a story.

This past week, as we’ve come up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, people have been sharing their stories of where they were and what they were doing—of people they knew who had been lost or who had suffered losses.

One of my closest friends from childhood is a flight attendant for American Airlines. She has a terrifying story to tell.

Some of my colleagues who are pastors in New York or New Jersey or Connecticut remember the tragic funerals that filled their calendars and broke the hearts of their congregations.

For months after the attacks, The New York Times ran a series of biographical sketches called “Portraits of Grief,” telling a little of the stories of almost 2000 of the victims who died that day—from bankers to busboys, from soldiers to security guards, from police officers to transit workers to those 343 firefighters who ran into the Towers and never came back. The stories gave faces and names to the numbers we heard on the news. It was essential reading.

Over the past few weeks the Los Angeles Times has been collecting short articles that highlight the impact of that day on people’s memories now.

I was working for Fuller Seminary in California at the time of the attacks, had been in New York on a fund raising trip about a week and a half before. Most of us on the west coast were sleeping when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center—it was 545am in California. Many of us who woke up to the news at 6 saw the second plane crash a few minutes later. My son was not quite a year and a half old that day. I wondered what kind of world he was going to grow up in.

Everyone has a story.

Acts 1:1-8

1 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Our text from the first chapter of Acts is a story that comes right at the end of Jesus’ ministry and before the birth of the church—for those of you who follow these things, this passage falls just before the Ascension and Pentecost, the giving of the Holy Spirit. The disciples are in the presence of the risen Christ, still trying to figure out what exactly happened over the last month or so. Everything was going so well, then it all went catastrophically wrong, and then Jesus emerged from the tomb and you get the idea that the disciples were just trying to keep up.

Jesus is trying to prepare them for what was coming next, but the disciples didn’t understand what he was talking about. Did you catch that question they asked while Jesus was telling them what to expect? Jesus has lived with them and taught them and demonstrated his love by serving people and healing diseases and casting out demons and dying on the cross—he did all of that to show that the values of his Kingdom are different from those of the world. And after all that they ask him: “So are you going to restore Israel to power now already?”

You have to think that Jesus groans here, wishing they could understand what he was telling them, but he presses on and says: “Once the Holy Spirit comes to empower you, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and all over the world.”

In so many words Jesus told them: You have a new story to tell, and I want you to tell it everywhere.

What was the story?

The first part of that story is that God came in the first place, that he took on human form. At Christmas when we sing about “Emmanuel,” we’re celebrating the mystery of “God with us,” of God coming to reconcile us to himself.

The second part of our story is the message that Jesus came to share. More than anything else he talked about the Kingdom of God. In his sermons and parables and his confrontations with religious and political power, Jesus described a world with values that went against the grain—of generosity and forgiveness, of grace and love for enemies.

But most importantly our story tells of the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross—of his taking on our sin and punishment so that we could come freely into the presence of God.

When Jesus told his disciples to “be my witnesses,” this is the story he wanted them to tell.

Being a witness in Jewish tradition was a very important thing. Only with two witnesses could a case be presented in court. Being an honest witness was so important that it becomes one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against anyone.”

To be a witness was to testify, along with others, to the love and grace and sacrifice and redemption available through Jesus Christ.

The essence of the gospel is this: Through the life and ministry of Jesus we have seen what the world can look like when it operates according to the values of the Kingdom of God. Through the sacrifice of Jesus the Messiah we receive the good news that all people in all places can be reconciled to God.

So God’s already done the heavy-lifting. God has already done the work. The call on each one of our lives needs to be crystal clear: It isn’t to save the world. It’s to tell the story of the one who already has.

If that’s the story we’re meant to tell, then what does that mean for us today, as we gather to remember a horrible day and the impact it’s had on our lives?

First, it means that our lives aren’t trapped or limited by our memories of what happened 10 years ago. The gospel story is there to keep our fear and our anger in check—we have to keep from lashing out in revenge against people Christ came to redeem and to reconcile to himself.

Second, that new story means this: In the upside-down values of the Kingdom of God, our story of the September 11th attacks can become a catalyst for more forgiveness, not less. More work in the area of peacemaking, not less. More acts of gospel-sharing grace that tell the story of Jesus Christ in a meaningful, life-changing way.

But most importantly, to be a witness to the story of Jesus Christ is a daring, world-changing act of hope in a world that doesn’t have much of it right now. It’s an act of hope wrapped in the faith that announces to the world that Christ has come, Christ has risen, and Christ is coming again to make all things new.

How does all of that happen? That’s what we’re meant to discover together as the family of God, the Body of Christ, this local church. That’s why we’re going to spend the next few months here talking about what it means to love our neighbors, even if our neighbors are our enemies. That’s an act of hope.

We tend to think of hope as something elusive—something we can’t really find on our own. Sometimes we think of hope as something that happens to us beyond our control.

But Christian hope is active—it’s rooted in God’s faithfulness to his promises in the past. Christian hope is a discipline—we practice it daily so that we can get better at it—so that it can be more than simply hoping for a good parking place, or hoping you get into the right school.

One great theologian wrote that Christian “Faith hopes in order to know what it believes.”

To be Christ’s witnesses in this world is to be people of hope, people who hope so that we can know God’s story is true. And so we can go out and be his witnesses with that new story here in London, all around this country, and to the ends of the earth.

What Joseph Bazalgette Teaches Us About Grace

2011-05-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

(This message is one in a series titled "20 Questions With Jesus.")

John 21:15-17

We’ve all played some variation of 20 Questions before. One person thinks of a person or a thing and the rest have 20 questions to guess what it is. It’s usually a game we play to kill time on a long journey.

Jesus asked a lot of questions, too. We talk a lot about the sermons of Jesus, or his parables, or the conversations he had with his disciples. This is different from that. Jesus often used questions to help people understand what he was about—or to get people to wrestle with something he taught—or to prompt some kind of action that would show that his followers were learning how to live out what he was teaching.

We’re almost done with this series—just a few more weeks to go. This hasn’t been a game we play just to kill time on a long drive. The goal has been to give us some insight into who Jesus is and what Jesus wants from us…as we are each on our own journey of faith and growth and discovery.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are theological—they get at something we’re supposed to know about him and his purposes.

Sometimes the questions are ethical—they get at what we’re supposed to do or how we’re called to live.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are confrontational—they force us to see something to change or confess or leave behind. That’s the kind of question we have in front of us today.

But before we get to the text…

If you love history, living in London is like a smorgasbord. Everywhere you look you see some monument, some detail about this amazing place, some story that inspires curiosity and study. OK, maybe that’s just me.

The other day I was flipping through a book about London when I came across an event called “The Great Stink of 1858.” Since there is a part of me that is an unreconstructed middle school boy, I had to read what this was about.

Basically, the growth of London during the 19th century led to a massive sewage problem that cause several outbreaks of cholera. Most scientists back then believed that cholera was spread through the air—through the smell they called “miasma.” In an attempt to get rid of the odor the government required all cesspits to be drained and allowed to run into the River Thames. Needless to say, this not only killed anything in the river that wasn’t already dead, but it also created an enormous problem of, well, a great stink.

Worse, the resulting outbreaks of disease killed tens of thousands of Londoners, and threatened to make the city unlivable.

Enter Joseph Bazalgette. He was an engineer who had worked on London’s train system, and he was chosen to solve the problem. His plan, based on the idea that cholera was spread by smell, was to build a sewer system that would carry London’s crud far beyond the city limits so they wouldn’t have to smell it anymore.

When planning the network he took the densest estimated population, gave every person the most generous allowance of sewage production and came up with a diameter of pipe needed. He then said 'Well, we're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen.' and doubled the diameter to be used. As a result, the massive pipes he build in the mid-1800s are still in use today—still big enough to take every bit of London’s waste product and deliver it to where it can be treated.

Now what Bazalgette and his partners didn’t know was that cholera wasn’t spread through odor at all, but through contaminated water supply. But by taking London’s sewage away from the sources of drinking water, he was able to eradicate cholera from the entire region.

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”
“Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”
Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”
The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.

This is such a powerful moment in Jesus’ ministry. Peter, who had denied Jesus three times before the crucifixion, is cornered by his master and forced to re-commit himself to the gospel. John the gospel writer knows exactly what he’s doing here. His readers know about Peter’s denial, but they also would know him later as the leader of the church. It was crucial to include this event in order to show that Peter had been restored to his place as a leader in the early church.

But those are just the details. This is also an enormously emotional story. Peter, in front of his friends and partners, has to confront his sin and answer the resurrected Christ. He answers the first time, but Jesus keeps going. You have to wonder at this point if Peter thought Jesus was going to ask him this question all day. In the end it’s just the three times—one for each denial—and by the third time Peter was feeling uncomfortable and wounded by the questions.

This is really a story about grace, about God’s freedom to forgive anyone for anything—about his power to clean up any mess no matter what kind of smell it gives off.

Maybe that’s what Joseph Bazalgette and the London sewerage system teaches us about the grace of Jesus Christ. The real achievement of Bazalgette’s design is that it was big enough to dispose of whatever crap London could throw at it for more than 150 years…and counting.

God’s grace is like that, too. What Jesus reveals to us in his interrogation of Peter is the depths and lengths and limitless nature of his grace toward us.

This passage helps us understand the capacity of God’s grace to get rid of the junk in our lives—the waste product that keeps us from becoming healthy people—whatever it is that keeps us from functioning sometimes as a healthy church.

Jesus looks Peter in the eye and asks “Do you love me?” over and over again. “Do you love me?”

It sounds so simple, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is one of the easy questions in our series.

Jesus looks Peter in the eye and asks “Do you love me?”, and in one single question he makes Peter decide if he wants to give his life as a disciple or if he wants to remain broken and lukewarm on the outside.

The key to these questions is found in the answers Peter gives.

Yes, Lord, you know that I do.

Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

Lord you know everything—you know that I love you.

It’s Peter’s answers that open the door for Christ’s cleansing, restoring grace. It’s Peter’s confession that he loves Jesus with all his heart that makes his reconciliation and restoration possible.

In the end, Jesus looks at each one of us and asks us if we love him. He asks us again and again, even when it makes us uncomfortable—even if it hurts our feelings.

Jesus asks us if we love him, and if we do then we answer as Peter did: Yes, Lord, you know that we do. Yes, Lord, you know that we love you. Lord you know everything—you know that we love you.

And if that’s true, then Christ’s grace is sufficient to handle anything we need to get rid of in order to move ahead.

And if that’s true, then we enter into a new way of living—a life of answering God’s invitation to serve and love and sacrifice as he calls us to do. That’s what we’re celebrating on this very special Sunday. [Note: On this Sunday we celebrated four baptisms, welcomed a group of new members, and commissioned a short-term mission team for trip to Israel.]

Some have heard the call to be baptized and commit themselves to becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.

Others have taken the next step and come for membership, publicly professing their faith in Christ and their commitment to this church.

In a moment a group of people will stand up here and ask for your prayers as they hear God’s call to serve on a short-term mission project in Israel.

All of these are examples of an answer to the “Do you love me?” question that Jesus asks all of us.

But the power of the question isn’t really just the asking of it. The real power of this question is unleashed when we answer as Peter did: Yes, Lord, you know that we love you. Lord you know everything—you know that we love you.

That simple response of acknowledging that we know who we are and whose we are releases a power that we can barely begin to understand.

The grace that God offers through Jesus Christ is the lifeblood of this church and of every person who wants to live as a disciple. It is through that grace that we are transformed into the people who will accomplish God’s work in this place.

Chris Wright, the worldwide director of John Stott Ministries, said: “I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.”

We become the people God wants for his mission when we decide to live differently because of our love for Jesus Christ.

The question is on the table: Do you love him? All that’s left is to give your answer.

Our hymn of response today is the song of people who have answered Jesus as Peter did. As we prepare to commission our Holy Land team, let’s stand and sing together, “Here I Am, Lord.”

Lent Day 31

2011-04-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

I’m having a hard time with Lent this year.

I want to be reflective and repentant—I want to prepare myself to experience the full joy and power of the Easter miracle—but instead I am anxious and tired and distracted. Some of that is for good reason. There are some challenging and important decisions to make, and some difficult processes to lead right now, and so I’m feeling the weight of my role these days.

But in other areas I’m surrounded by joyful and encouraging events in the ministries at our church. Kids are learning about Jesus in a meaningful way in our Sunday School, our men’s fellowship is growing together as we study and build friendships, three teams from our congregation are going out in service to Israel, Haiti and Romania, and this spring we have as many as 18 men and women coming for membership. I’m surrounded by these affirmations of our work, and yet it’s too easy to forget to pause and be thankful...or even simply to enjoy them.

Without trying to turn it into just another commodity or product, I’m aware that I what I want is to experience the full Lent moment right now. Maybe that’s what feels depleted or absent to me.

Henri Nouwen's reading for today says: "Life in the Spirit of Jesus is therefore a life in which Jesus' coming into the world—his incarnation, his death, and his resurrection—is lived out by those who have entered into the same obedient relationship to the Father which marked Jesus' own life."

Maybe the point is that I could not possibly feel less obedient right now.

I want to listen for God. I want to conform my life to the life of Christ (and not the other way around). I want to live in that “same obedient relationship to the Father which marked Jesus' own life.”

Maybe Lent is supposed to be this hard, and it just took me this long to realize it. What if the reflection and repentance that mark the season of Lent are meant to remind us that this life is not our own, that we are a purchased people, free and enslaved at the same time? What if these feelings are exactly the reminder I need—that we all need—of who we are and whose we are?

Nouwen’s prayer at the end of today’s reading includes these words:

Help me, Lord, to life a truthful life,
A life in which I am guided
Not by popularity, public opinion,
Current fashion, or convenient formulations,
But by a knowledge that comes from knowing you.

I want to live that truthful life. My prayer for myself and for you is that our lives will be guided by the knowledge that comes from being in the presence of God—knowledge that comes from knowing and being known by Jesus himself.

Just 11 days until Easter. God help us.

Radio2 Spot #2

2011-04-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to today's Pause for Thought on The Vanessa Feltz program on BBC Radio2. I'm on at about the 46th minute, happily sandwiched between The Pretenders and Van Halen. The topic, given to me by the BBC, is spiritual health, in recognition of World Health Day this week. Enjoy!

On the Radio...

2011-03-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

I was asked a while back to prepare some brief Christian reflections for the early morning drive-time program on BBC Radio2. They gave me topics, like the one for British Mothers' Day this week, and I recorded them about a month ago. The pieces will broadcast on six consecutive Tuesday mornings at 5:45am (UK time), and the first one went out yesterday.

If you missed it (I did. Please, 6:30 is early enough!), there's a link to the program here. In the time bar just drag the little doohicky to the 45-minute mark. I'm on just after Billy Joel sings "My Life."

Useful Junk

2011-03-29T02:19:00.000-07:00

(This message is one in a series titled “20 Questions With Jesus.”)

Luke 14:34

We were in New York last Sunday and had a great time roaming around the Upper West Side—checking out the shops and enjoying a sunny day. We spent some time in a flea market on Columbus Avenue at 76th Street—it had great shops: everything from furniture to vintage photographs to clothes. My son Ian and I spent some time looking at a collection of artworks made from “found objects.” There were pieces of discarded things in box frames, arranged because they were similar or to tell some story or make a point. They were beautiful. Thimbles, toy soldiers, colored glass.

Now we know that “found objects” is another way of saying “junk,” right? The discarded junk Ian and I were looking at had been picked up and rearranged—the pieces had been redeemed and made into something new. You can’t do that with everything, but when it happens it’s a beautiful thing. That thought will help us wrestle with our text this morning.

We continue our series, 20 Questions with Jesus. We’ve all played some variation of 20 Questions before. One person thinks of a person or a thing and the rest have 20 questions to guess what it is. It’s usually a game we play to kill time on a long journey.

Jesus asked a lot of questions, too. We talk a lot about the sermons of Jesus, or his parables, or the conversations he had with his disciples. This is different from that. Jesus often used questions to help people understand what he was about—or to get people to wrestle with something he taught—or to prompt some kind of action that would show that his followers were learning how to live out what he was teaching.

Between now and Pentecost we’re playing 20 Questions with Jesus. This won’t be a game we play just to kill time on a long drive. The goal is to give us some insight into who Jesus is and what Jesus wants from us…as we are each on our own journey of faith and growth and discovery.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are theological—they get at something we’re supposed to know about him and his purposes.

Sometimes the questions are ethical—they get at what we’re supposed to do or how we’re called to live.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are confrontational—they force us to see something in our lives to change or confess or leave behind. That’s the kind of question we have in front of us today.

“Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

I’ll confess that I don’t like this text very much—this isn’t one of my favorite questions that Jesus asks. It seems snarky and mean—maybe what I don’t like is that it seems so graceless and final.

The context helps a little. In Luke’s gospel this comes right after Jesus told a large crowd of people what it would cost them to be faithful disciples. It’s a hard passage. It talks about carrying the cross and being willing to leave our own families behind to follow Christ. It talks about counting the cost—about making sure we can finish what we start. It has a section that sounds like it comes from Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, about considering the strength of your enemy before entering into battle.

See what I mean? This isn’t the easy stuff here. It’s about the hard choices—the total demands of Christian discipleship. And then it gets to our passage: “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out.”

It looks just slightly different in the way Matthew writes Jesus’ teaching about salt. In the Sermon on the Mount he talks about bad salt being trampled, which isn’t as violent as it sounds. Some salt in ancient times was so unstable as a compound that it would spoil. When it did it was used for paving—people walked on it or trampled it. It was still useful, even if it wasn’t useful as salt anymore.

Our passage starts with: “Salt is good.” We’ve talked before about how useful salt has been though history. It’s been a preservative and an antiseptic. It’s been an aphrodisiac and a rust-remover (there’s a joke there somewhere). In Roman times soldiers were paid in salt, which where we get the word: salary. Mostly, though, we know it as a flavoring. Serving salted vegetables is where we get the word “salad” from.

The rabbis in Jesus’ day talked about Israel as flavorless salt, meaning that it wasn’t fulfilling its end of the covenant God made with Abraham—Israel was meant to be a source of blessing to all the nations. Ancient rabbis, when they wanted to be critical of the way God’s people failed in their calling, described Israel as “insipid salt,” salt which had lost or given up its ability to be salt.

That’s part of the background for our text today. Salt is good, Jesus says, but if it loses its flavor how can you make it salty again? The simple answer is that you don’t –it just gets tossed out. That’s the part that sounds hopeless to me—it sounds like everything is somehow disposable when it fails us or disappoints us. It’s hopeless on its own, if we read it outside what we know about the rest of Jesus’ teaching—outside of the promise Jesus offers to make “all things new.”

Because we all know that things wear out. We buy clothes and shoes and other things, and enjoy them while they’re useful, and then they get replaced. Sometimes we can find new uses for things—we can reshape them or remake them into something different or beautiful—we can make them useful again in some way.

Sometimes that process can be miraculous.

It’s hard to imagine, but there are over 3.5 billion mobile phones in active use today. 290 million in the US and 75 million in the UK—in this country there are more mobile phones in use than there are people. That doesn’t account for the billion and a half unused phones sitting in drawers or tossed in the trash. Those phones have been set aside—they’re essentially high-tech junk.

Hold that thought for a moment.

According to the World Health Organization, each year 300 to 500 million people develop malaria and 1.5 to 3 million–mostly children–die. A simple lab test of blood could diagnose and lead to treatment for many of these patients, but many have no access to health facilities with the right lab equipment. Measuring the shape of blood cells is a key way to diagnose anemia, tuberculosis and malaria—three killers in the developing world. Part of the problem is that there aren’t nearly enough microscopes to handle all the tests.

Aydogan Ozcan is a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. He developed a little tool that can take a blood sample and send its image—in the form of a hologram—to a hospital or a lab…using the camera function in old mobile phones. They take the shapes of the blood cells and reconstruct them for doctors into images they would see in a microscope.

The potential for lifesaving is staggering. Remember that there are a billion or more phones that have been set aside as junk, and that each year 300 to 500 million people develop malaria and 1.5 to 3 million–mostly children–die.

The best part of the story—the miraculous part, really—is that it costs about 10 dollars per phone—about six quid—10 dollars to turn an unused, junked mobile phone into a lifesaving diagnostic tool.

The good news in the hard question Jesus asks us today is that it’s not the end of the story. This passage has to be read alongside God’s redeeming work that begins in the Garden and continues through to today. This text has to be read with the Cross in our sights—Christ’s transforming work for his creation and all people. The good news is that whatever happens—whatever changes come our way—God is working and reshaping and creating, even in the midst of our deepest losses.

Maybe we’re all in the process of becoming useful junk. Maybe we’re all “found objects” like the ones I saw with Ian last week. Maybe the point of the gospel is that all of us can be reclaimed and redeemed and transformed into something useful and beautiful. The key isn’t to focus on what might be lost. The key is to rejoice when we’re found and remade by the one who loves us and calls us to love and serve in his name.

The hope in this hopeless question that Jesus asks is found in the rest of the gospel. I’ve been reading through Henri Nouwen’s devotional during this season of Lent, and in yesterday’s pages he talked about the Prodigal Son, and how happy the father was when he came home. Remember how the dad kissed his son and told him that he loved him over and over again? Nouwen writes:

“This is the voice that Jesus wants us to hear. It is the voice that calls us always to return to the one who has created us in love, and wants to re-create us in his mercy.”

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll listen for God’s voice and his mercy, as he re-creates us into the people and the church he calls us to be. Amen.

Lent: An Invitation to Prayer?

2011-03-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

So the first week of Lent comes to a close. How is it going for you?

We’re on vacation this week, visiting Washington, DC and some friends around this part of the country—more on that in a later post. The season of Lent, with its reflection and repentance and refocus on the life of discipleship—everything that makes up this time of the church year is meant to turn our eyes toward God. How is that going?

Part of how we connect to God is through prayer. Now I know it’s part of my calling to help people in their life of prayer, but it’s one area in my ministry where I feel particularly unskilled and, well, out of my depth. I’ve prayed—I’ve prayed a lot in my time as a Christian. Some of the prayers were regular daily sort of check-ins, and others were those prayers of desperation that we’ve all shouted at one time or another. Most of my prayers loitered somewhere in between those two extremes, and so here we are.

Rodney Clapp draws a distinction in a recent article in Christian Century, between two kinds of prayer, faithful and superstitious. When we link certain kinds or quantities of prayer somehow with God’s ability to act, we’re in the realm of superstition and magic. Faithful prayer differs from that, Clapp writes, saying that it “differs from superstition in that it does not presume control. It petitions God, the power at the center of all that is, while it does not presume on God’s answer or response. Faithful prayer is habitual prayer, prayer that does not only occur in crisis and does not end when a crisis is resolved. Faithful prayer is part and parcel of an ongoing relationship, a lifelong conversation, a prolonged attempt not to control God but to discern God’s presence and activity in all that befalls us.”

In Henri Nouwen’s Show Me the Way, he writes this as a part of today’s meditation: “The crisis of our prayer life is that our mind may be filled with ideas of God while our heart remains far from him.”

Is that helpful to you or just another way of saying we don’t do this very well?

I’m going to choose to be encouraged by this. In the spirit of the Lent season I want to be a part of that ongoing relationship Clapp talks about—that conversation that God is inviting me into. I want my heart to warm with the experience of God, even as I study and learn and reflect on what I try to know.

As we move into a second week of this beautiful, challenging season, let me invite you to start your own conversation with God. Not as a shopping list of needs and wants, and not as an act of superstition—this invitation is to a lifelong relationship, a process of learning to discern God’s presence and activity in everything we do.

One way to get started is to take what we call the Lent Challenge. Say the Lord's Prayer five times each day between now and Easter. If your prayer life is stuck or cold, this is a great way to remember why and how we connect to God. Try it...you won't be sorry.

Amen?

Lent Blues (Already?)

2011-03-10T01:31:00.001-08:00

Here I am at the first day after Ash Wednesday, and already I’m feeling as though I’ve lost any momentum for Lent. There are challenges at work that make me feel less than spiritually switched on, my family is preparing for a vacation even though I can’t imagine being away right now, and then there’s my own heart, which feels a little bruised and resistant to introspection.

How do I slow down and take hold what Lent is offering?

Each year I struggle to read through Henri Nouwen’s Lent reader, Show Me the Way. Today’s entry is forcing me to re-think my expectations of what this time of the year means and teaches. I hear the words “reflection” and “repentance” and I promptly give in to the temptation to make Lent about me—about my sin, my needs, my struggle to live a life of hope. I step into Lent and feel as though I’ve simply given my self-absorption a new, fancier name…a spiritual, church-sanctioned name, no less.

See what I mean about losing steam for Lent on the very first day?

The first sentence of Nouwen’s reading for today says: “A life of faith is a life of gratitude—it means a life in which I am willing to experience my complete dependence upon God and to praise and think him unceasingly for the gift of being.”

Oh, boy.

The very first line pierces me to the heart. Is my life of faith a life of gratitude? In my living and praying and studying and working and loving—in all of that, am I aware that it all revolves around being thankful to God?

The rest of the sentence helps me make sense out of where I want to be this season. I really am grateful to God for my life. I’m thankful for my wife and my step-daughter and my son. I'm amazed at the friends and colleagues God has given me. I still wake up most mornings a little surprised that I get to be the pastor of a church, a place that I love with people who are teaching me far more than I’ll ever be able to give back. I really am thankful, when I take the time to think about it, that God’s grace reaches into the darkest parts of my life, turns the light on and says, “I think we can do something with this mess.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The reminder today, as we look ahead to the Lenten season, is to be grateful to God for the gift of our very being. Whatever prompts you to “praise and thank him unceasingly,” I encourage you to make that the focus of the time between now and Easter. Whatever else you might do during this season of Lent, remember to pause and be thankful as often as you can.

We might just survive these 40 days after all.

Welcome to Lent

2011-03-08T04:31:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite introduction to the season of Lent, taken from a book by Henri Nouwen called Show me the Way. Lent is a hard season for us because it represents a call to repentance, reflection and a handful of other things we’re not so good at. Still, taking 40 days or so to think about Christ’s work in our lives before we dive into the happy hymns and chocolate bunnies of Easter can’t be a bad thing. Here’s the quote:

----------------------------------
“God’s mercy is greater than our sins.

There is an awareness of sin that does not lead to God but to self-preoccupation. Our temptation is to be so impressed by our sins and failures and so overwhelmed by our lack of generosity that we get stuck in a paralyzing guilt. It is the guilt that says: ‘I am too sinful to deserve God’s mercy.’ It is the guilt that leads to introspection instead of directing our eyes to God. It is the guilt that has become an idol and therefore a form of pride.

Lent is the time to break down this idol and to direct our attention to our loving Lord. The question is: ‘Are we like Judas, who was so overcome by his sin that he could not believe in God’s mercy any longer and hanged himself, or are we like Peter who returned to his Lord with repentance and cried bitterly for his sins?’

The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.”
----------------------------------

Isn’t that beautiful and haunting and challenging all at the same time? I tend to think so much of my own failures that I forget that my sin is not the point. God’s grace, given to us through Jesus Christ, is the true point of my life’s story, and yours...and yours...and yours.

We live out that struggle between the seasons on a daily basis, between the cold and death of winter and the restored and rediscovered life of spring. Between the awareness of just how far we stray from God, and the shock at what he has accomplished in order to draw us near. Lent is our time to pause and take notice of what is happening around us and in us. It’s not just for self-reflection, though that’s a key part of it. Lent is a time to sharpen our focus on Christ and his world, on the needs of people around us, on the gifts we’ve been given to meet those needs, and to discover all over again the hope that we have because of the Easter miracle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Easter will come, but for now we try to re-create the sense of conviction that being in God’s presence prompts in each one of us. To repent and ask for forgiveness. And to anticipate that day when life wins the battle once and for all. Welcome to Lent.

A Question on the Table

2011-02-08T02:10:00.000-08:00

(This is the first in a series of messages titled "Twenty Questions With Jesus.")

Mark 8:27-30

When I was a kid we used to play Twenty Questions on road trips. You know how the game goes—one person thinks of something, usually animal, mineral or vegetable, and the rest have twenty yes or no questions to try to figure out what the thing is. My sisters and I used to play it (in-between choruses of "You Are My Sunshine"), and now we play it with Ian.

Twenty Questions is usually a game we play to pass the time on a long journey. Today we’re going to turn that around a little and begin a long journey together. We’re going to spend the next twenty weeks looking at selected questions that Jesus asked during his ministry—there are actually hundreds of them recorded in the Bible.

We talk a lot about the sermons of Jesus, or his parables, or the conversations he had with his disciples. This is a little different from that. Jesus often used questions to help people understand what he was about—or to get people to wrestle with something he taught—or to prompt some kind of action that would show that his followers were learning how to live out what he was teaching.

Between now and Pentecost we’re going to play Twenty Questions with Jesus. But this won’t be a game we play just to kill time on a long drive. The goal is to give us some insight into who Jesus is and what Jesus wants from us…as we are each on our own journey of faith and growth and discovery.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are theological—they get at something we’re supposed to know about him and his purposes.

Sometimes the questions are ethical—they get at what we’re supposed to do or how we’re called to live.

Sometimes the questions Jesus asks are confrontational—they force us to see something to change or confess or leave behind.

The most important of the questions do all of the above, like the one we’re starting with today.

27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

This story appears in almost the exact same form in Matthew, Mark and Luke—the gospels that tell the story of Jesus as a story without very much interpretation. First Jesus asks the disciples who the crowds say that he is, and then he turns the question on the Twelve. Jesus asks them this question to see where they are in understanding his ministry, and then almost immediately he tells them that he’s going to have to die to make his point—to accomplish the mission that he came to do. He's not ready for this story to be spread just yet, so he asks them to keep it secret for just a little while longer.

The point of the passage rests on these questions. “Who do the people say that I am?” “Who do you say that I am?”

Questions are crucial to growing into mature faith. Questions are the ways we learn and struggle and come to understand things. I have all kinds of questions. They’re the same ones we all have.

Why is there so much suffering in the world?
What about other religions?
What really happens when we die?

I have all kinds of questions.

But in the end my ability to understand the responses God might offer to any of my questions—my ability to understand God’s answers is dependent on my answer to this big fat enchilada of a question that Jesus asks all of us:

“Who do you say that I am?”

Two things to notice about this question:

Part of this is theological: Who is Jesus? There are the textbook answers: Son of God; Savior of the world; prince of peace—you’ve probably heard those before. Jesus himself said “I am the way, the truth and the life—no one comes to the Father except through me.”

Lots of people don’t want to wrestle with that one—with what Jesus actually says about himself, and so they rely completely on their own feelings about who Jesus is…to them. The danger in relying only on our feelings or thoughts about Jesus is that he becomes a savior in our own image, instead of the other way around.

I have a Jesus Action Figure with me this morning. Have you seen one of these? It comes with “poseable arms and a gliding action.” I can do a lot of things with this little toy, but it doesn’t ask anything of me—it doesn’t ask me any questions—it doesn’t demand anything from my life. As a matter of fact this Jesus Action Figure is completely dependent on me for it to do anything. That’s not the Jesus of the Scriptures.

When Jesus asks us “Who do you say that I am,” he’s asking “Just how much of my teaching are you willing accept—to wrestle with and believe. And so part of this question is theological.

But I think that the biggest part of this question is missional: Notice that he doesn’t say: “Who do you think that I am…when no one’s looking—when you’re hidden away?” This is not just a question about belief—this is a question about our habits and practices as followers of Christ. Who do you say that I am? Who do you say that to? Maybe the better question is: Do you ever say anything about who I am to people? Do you say anything about me?

I’ve been reading Stan Guthrie’s new book called All That Jesus Asks. It’s the new addition to the recommended reading list in the bulletin. In one chapter he’s talking about the miracles of Jesus—the healings and battles with the spiritual realm—and he says this:

“In these events we see that Jesus, unlike the religious action figures sold at Wal-Mart, is not infinitely bendable, able to assume whatever postmodern pose we give him. He’s not the pious, otherworldly, slightly effeminate savior we see in so much religious art. No, his hands are rough, even cracked, from hard work. He’s stared evil and suffering in the face, seized them by the scruff of the neck, and lived to tell about it.”

As we celebrate Communion together today, we have the usual bread and cup, but today there’s also a question on that Table. Jesus invites us to come and share in this meal and to remember who he is and what he’s done for us. Jesus invites us to be together with him, but he also asks this question: “Who do you say that I am?”

We may have different answers to that question right now, but we can’t really get anywhere unless we’re willing to face it honestly, with all our doubts and struggles and questions.

As we come to the Table, my prayer for us is that we’ll commit ourselves to this journey of twenty questions—that we’ll enter into a time of prayer and study and reflection—that we’ll be ready when someone else asks us who we say Jesus is—that we’ll have an answer that introduces that person to the one who came and lived and loved and stared evil and suffering in the face and lived to tell the tale.

Let’s pray together.

A Big Hiatus!

2011-01-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

It's not your imagination! This page has been dormant for a few months now. I've been working a lot through the holidays, and when I get a chance to go online it's usually to update my Facebook page. I'm not giving up on the blog, just taking some time away to rethink what this page ought to be. Stay tuned.

John

More Than We Can Imagine

2010-10-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

(This message is one in a series on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians titled, 'Growing Together'.)

Stewardship Sunday

Ephesians 3:14-21

We continue our series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’ Why Ephesians? I’ll put the quote we’ve been reading into my own words: Ephesians gives us a peek at the way God’s Spirit takes lives like ours and turns them into his church. That sums it up pretty well.

So I’ve been telling the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile, but now I can’t do that anymore. Someone was poking fun at me this week, saying that the whole structure of this series is obsolete now that the miners have been rescued. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I can’t keep using the story.

The images we saw late Tuesday night and all day Wednesday into early Thursday morning—I caught myself laughing and crying and wondering how it all went so well. As we watched those men come out of that capsule, so many of them prayed and thanked God for making it back to the surface. And I know, everyone would say that if they’d been through the same ordeal. But did you notice that most of these guys talked about their prayers—talked about their relationships to Jesus Christ as if they’d known him before they went in the hole.

That’s important, because otherwise it would be too easy to discount the faith of the miners as foxhole faith. You know the saying: “There are no atheists in foxholes.” Well the miners we watched on our TV screens this week were buried a lot deeper than any foxhole, and their faith was deeper, too.

We’re studying Paul’s letter to the Ephesians because it’s designed to help churches grow—to helm them grow in depth of faith and in service to each other and the world. We’re talking about growing together, and this journey through Ephesians is one of the ways we can do that.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Last week Stephanie talked about the first half of this chapter. Paul starts in the first verse sounding like he’s about to pray, then he interrupts himself with a description of how God has spoken through him and worked through him to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to the world. In our passage this morning Paul picks up the prayer right where he left off.

And how does Paul, leading apostle of the early church, writer of most of the letters in the New Testament, rabbi of rabbis, Pharisee of Pharisee—how does big time Paul start his description of how he prays for the Ephesians?

On his knees.

Paul kneels and begins to pray one of the richest, most generous prayers in the entire Bible.

He prays for God to strengthen his church. That’s a good reminder for us: this is God’s church, not ours; God is our source of power.

He prays that Christ will live in and through the people of the church. Churches can easily slide into functioning as just another kind of human organization, like a school or charity or social club. The point here is that Christ—and all that that name means for us—Christ is who we follow, and it’s in Christ’s name that we serve.

He prays that the Ephesians will begin to grasp how much Christ loves them. This can be an incredibly difficult thing to swallow. After working in different kinds of ministries for 25 years or so, one of the hardest things I’ve seen people wrestle with is truly believing that God loves them no matter what, warts and all.

He prays that they’ll never forget that Christ’s love is the most important thing they’ll ever know. Now that one is a challenge, too. This is a pretty well-educated and successful crowd. I look out there and I can see some Harvards and Princetons and Penns—I can see folks who studied at great public universities, and people with advanced degrees in all kinds of subjects from business to science to the humanities.

No matter what you may think you know, Paul says here, it’s dwarfed by this one single thing—this one crucial data point: Jesus loves you. Jesus the Messiah, loves you.

Karl Barth was one of the giants in the world of theology in the 20th century. Late in his career he was giving a lecture and one of the students there asked him to describe his most important conclusion from a lifetime of studying the Scriptures. He paused for a moment, then sang the song: ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.’

Allowing ourselves to be embraced fully by the love of Jesus is the most important thing any of us will ever know.

In the end Paul prays that the Ephesians—that the church—will be filled to the very top with the fullness of God. That everything we do or say or give or create will somehow reflect the God who made us and redeems us and loves us in spite of what we might do—who loves us often times in spite of who we’ve become.

This is an extravagant prayer—it’s a prayer that’s meant to show us and remind us of how mind-blowingly generous God has been to us—how generous he wants to be to his church.

Eugene Peterson tells the story of an American family that adopted a Haitian girl who had been orphaned in an accident. They brought her to their home—there were already two teenage boys in the family—they brought her home and when they sat down to their first dinner together, the parents noticed something crucial. As the boys tore through their meals and devoured seconds and thirds of everything on the table, the little girl looked sad and worried.

The mother guessed correctly that the new addition to the family thought that this might be all the food there was, and so she took her by the hand and led her around the kitchen. She opened the fridge to show her that there would be plenty of food for the next day. She opened the bread drawer to show that there were more loaves. She showed her the pantry where there were mounds of food for the coming days and weeks.

What the mom did was show her little girl the abundance of what was available to her—that she would never be hungry again, even if she did have to share meals with her growing brothers.

When God adopts us into his family through Jesus Christ, and when the Holy Spirit steps in to shape us into his church—as all of that happens, Paul takes us by the hand in this prayer—he takes us around to show us how much great stuff is there for us to enjoy. He shows us the abundance of God’s grace and provision, of love and mercy for us. “I pray that you would be able to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”

But we know that prayer can be a challenge for us sometimes. The day after the miners came out of that hole in Chile, Mark Galli, the editor of Christianity Today, wrote a challenging article on prayer that got right to the heart of what bothers us most about bringing our concerns before God. Mark’s problem is what to make of all the times we pray for things—for healing, for peace, for good to win over evil once in a while—we pray for things that don’t go the way we ask. What does that mean for us as we pray?

“First, we are to ask God for things that are important to us, no matter how we feel about God or prayer or the thing being prayed for. Second, once we announce our desire to God, it’s his job to deal with it. Prayer is not manipulating heaven to fulfill our desires. It’s putting what we desire into the hands of a loving God and letting him fulfill it in his time, in his way.”

Our passage today ends with a benediction. This one might be familiar to many of you—in the church where I grew up this was the benediction almost every Sunday.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

It’s a challenge to us to open our eyes and see that to aim too low is to miss what God has in store for us—what God is prepared to give us—what God wants to do in us and through us.

C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency that people have of underestimating what God has to share with us. He writes:

“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

It’s this benediction that informs our giving and pledging as we move into our season of talking about stewardship. It’s the benediction that reminds us that our participation is not about fueling God’s work in this church and in the world. Our giving is our way of joining into the work that God is already doing—the places where God’s spirit is already active. As generous as this congregation can be, if it all depended on our giving we’d be in serious trouble.

But that’s not how the story goes. What we do here is part of God’s work that is more than we could ever imagine. We join in as a privilege, not a chore—as a gift and not just another bill to pay. As we continue to talk about how Paul’s letter to the Ephesians helps us grow together, and as we add to that our own conversation about the ministry of this church, keep this last verse in your mind:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!

Amen.

Radical Reassembly

2010-10-06T10:31:00.001-07:00

(This message is one in a series on Paul's letter to the Ephesians titled, 'Growing Together'.)

Ephesians 2:14-22

We continue our series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’ Why Ephesians? When we started we read this quote: “We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours.” That sums it up pretty well.

I’ve been telling the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. They’ve been there for 60 days now, trapped 2300 feet underground, and it looks as though they won’t be rescued for another month. Remember that when the miners were found they’d already organized themselves into teams—they were sharing regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this wasn’t part of their standard procedures. Most of this was handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.

That’s how we want to be here in this church.

What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.

That’s what we’re going to do.

As we work our way through Ephesians we’re going to be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything. Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.

I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.

Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Today’s passage is an important part of that.

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.

Some things to know about this text:

Look how active Jesus is in this passage. There are nine verbs to describe all that God has done through Jesus to grow us into a faithful church. Jesus is our peace, he made us one, he broke down the wall of hostility, he abolished the law, he created a new humanity, he made peace, he reconciled, he put hostility to death, and he proclaimed peace. Whatever else we learn from this passage about the way God interacts with us, we should at least be aware that he is active, that he’s busy, that he isn’t just sitting back and watching what his people do without getting involved.

Paul says that Christ ‘himself is our peace.’ Last year we spent a lot of time talking about the idea of shalom. 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, or 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.’ But most often it gets translated simply as ‘peace.’

When Paul calls Jesus our peace, he’s saying that in his life and ministry, through his teachings and healings, in his death and resurrection—through the work of Christ we’ve been offered a chance to experience the shalom we were meant to know—to live the life we were meant to live.

Paul says as much in the next lines: ‘Christ’s purpose was to create one person out of two—unity out of division—by reconciling us through his cross. That’s the core of the good news of the gospel right there—that whatever separates us from God or from each other or from the earth—that everything that divides us is somehow healed and reconciled through Jesus Christ.

But we’re still kept apart by what Paul calls hostility—the ‘dividing wall of hostility.’ Now that phrase in itself packs a pretty good punch. The dividing wall of hostility could describe all kinds of things—racial hatreds, the grudges that keep some countries fighting forever or at least ready to go to war. It could describe the way that different kinds of abuse make trusting another person seem impossible. A dividing wall of hostility could describe the way we interact with anyone who’s wounded us in some way.

Paul’s readers might have thought of those things, but more likely they knew about the wall in the Temple in Jerusalem that was meant to separate Jews from Gentiles. The Temple was the holiest place in the world for Jews. It represented their history, their present faithfulness, and also their hope for a Messiah and a restored kingdom. The Temple was one place where even the Romans didn’t intrude, and where the priests and leaders were allowed to make the rules.

On the wall in the Temple separating Jews from Gentiles there was an inscription that read:

“Let no foreigner enter within the partition and enclosure surrounding the temple. Whoever is arrested will himself be responsible for his death which will [soon] follow”

This was known as the ‘dividing wall of hostility.’ This is what was torn down through the ministry of Jesus the Messiah.

Listen to how Eugene Peterson translated this in The Message:

“Christ brought us together through his death on the Cross. The Cross got us to embrace, and that was the end of the hostility. Christ came and preached peace to you outsiders and peace to you insiders. He treated us as equals, and [in doing] so made us equals. Through his we both share the same Spirit, and have equal access to the Father.”

The point of all this is that we’ve been reassembled. We come to Christ with every single kind of brokenness—we come in pieces, but we’ve been put back together. It’s a radical form or reassembly—of being reconciled to God and to each other in ways that we didn’t think were possible—ways that aren’t humanly possible. We come in pieces, but we go with the peace that only Christ can offer.

What does all of this mean for us as we grow together as a church family?

First, part of growing together means focusing on what God has done for us individually. Whatever we’ve done that separated us from God—whatever sins we’ve committed or guilt that we carried—whatever brokenness we bring to him, he promises to heal and cleanse and restore. When people talk about coming to faith, this is what they mean: accepting the forgiveness and restoration that God offers us through Jesus Christ.

Second, growing together means just that: growing as a community that loves and sharpens and serves each other in peace and unity. Notice I said unity here and not uniformity. There’s a pretty important difference between those two. We don’t have to do all of this in the same way, by the same set pattern. But we are called to work and grow together as people who have been taught and empowered to live in community by God’s Holy Spirit.

And finally, growing together means that we take how we’ve been restored and made into a community—we take the way God has worked in our lives and we turn it outward, sharing it with our neighbors, strangers on the street, and the rest of the world. Growing together as a church community means going into those places where walls of hostility still separate and oppress people, and working to tear those walls down.

We come to Communion with the same expectations that brought faithful Jews to the Temple in Jerusalem. We come remembering what God has done in our lives through Jesus the Messiah, and how our lives have been transformed and restored to the shalom we were made for. We also come with our eyes open to what God is doing today—to the blessings we receive and the work we’re called to do together as his church.

Finally, we come because God has made promises to us. We come as people of hope—not some pie-in-the-sky dreaming about clouds and wings and harps, but a real-world hope based on the promises Jesus made to come back and make all things new. In Communion we share the past, present and future of our faith. We invite you to come to the Table this morning.

Grace Changes Everything

2010-09-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

(This message is one in a series on Paul's letter to the Ephesians titled, 'Growing Together.')

Ephesians 2:1-10

We continue our series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’

Why Ephesians? When we started we read this quote: “We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours.” That about sums it up.

Last week I told the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. Their part of the mine caved in and for the last 50 days or so they’ve been trapped a half-mile underground. It took 17 days for the rescue teams to locate where they were trapped, and the task of bringing them to the surface is expected to go into November.

Remember that when the miners were found they’d already organized themselves into teams—they were sharing regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their standard procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.

That’s how we want to be here in this church.

What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.

That’s what we’re going to do.

As we work our way through Ephesians we’re going to be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything.

Because we know that hard things are going to happen even as we grow in our lives as disciples. We also know that we struggle with believing that we can trust God at his word. And finally, we wonder where being a follower of Jesus fits in this crazy world. Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.

I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.

Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Today’s passage is an important part of that.

For years, every time I sat down to watch an American football game on TV, I saw the same thing. After a touchdown, the special teams would come out for the extra point. The offense and defense would get ready and the net would go up behind the goalposts to make it easier get the ball back after the kick. That’s when you’d see it. There was always some guy in the stands holding up a bright yellow sign that said Eph. 2:8.

I always wondered about that guy. What did he do for a living? Did any of his family or friends know that that’s how he spent his Sunday afternoons? What made him get a season ticket just so that he could have these few moments in each game when he might be seen on television holding up a Scripture reference that no one knew?

Our passage today includes that text of Scripture. Listen for God’s word to you.

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in 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. All 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. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

First, that is one abrupt start to a passage. We go from some pretty flowery theological language—even for Paul—in the first chapter to this. In the first chapter we hear “praise be to our God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms,” and “I pray that your heart may be enlightened in order that you may experience the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.” We go directly from that to ‘As for you’. Now when you hear a sentence that starts with As for you, you know it’s not going to go well for you. “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…”

I remember reading this and thinking: “I’m going back to the first chapter…it was a lot more fun.” But that would be missing the point. We can’t get to the important idea of God’s grace unless we get a reminder of just how much we need that grace in our lives.

The crucial truth to take from this text is that our sin isn’t the end of our story.

In the very next breath Paul writes: “But because of his great love for us…” God’s love and mercy are the starting point of our new lives, and he gives us that gift before we even understand that we need it. We saw in Romans last year that “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…” It’s like having a friend who starts to make up with you before you’ve even said you’re sorry.

And then we get to Grace.

“It is by grace you have been saved.” What is this grace we keep hearing about? The pastor I grew up with talked about it as ‘undeserved favor’, something we can’t earn or make for ourselves—something we have to receive from someone else.

Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “Grace originates in an act of God that is absolutely without precedent, the generous, sacrificial self-giving of Jesus that makes it possible for us to participate in resurrection maturity. But we can’t participate apart from a willed passivity, entering into and giving ourselves up to what has gone before us…Such passivity does not come easy to us. It must be acquired.” Uh-oh.

I’ll bet my lunch money for a week that none of us actively tries to acquire any kind of passivity, that none of us consciously trains our kids to be passive in any way. And yet, without learning how to give ourselves up to the presence and action of God from time to time, we miss a crucial part of the grace he offers us.

The bottom line is this: God’s graces changes our values and methods and priorities. God’s grace changes everything, because when we welcome and make room for God’s grace in our lives, we experience in a deeper way the life that he wants for us—the life that he gives for us. We find that our salvation doesn’t come from how much we earn or what we own or where our kids go to school. Our salvation comes only from God, and only in the form of a gift we don’t deserve.

The whole point of this text is wrapped up in the last three verses, including the one that guy held up on his sign: Ephesians 2:8-10. Listen to how all of that sounds in The Message.

“Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

What should we take away from this part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians?

First: Learning to be ready to take care of each other as a Christian community begins with believing that through Christ God has taken care of us first. Our text today reads chronologically: God acted, so we could become who we were meant to be, so we could go where we were meant to go.

Second: Through Christ we join God in the work he’s doing in this world. Churches tend to think we’re out there, leading the spread of the gospel in the world. But the best advice I ever got for how to become an effective church was this: “Look around and see what God is already doing in the world, and join in.” Being a maturing, growing church is about seeing where God is working, and throwing ourselves into the effort. I said last week that the point isn’t what the church ought to be doing, but what God wants to do through the people of the church.

That’s the best insurance against thinking that we’re the ones behind the good things that happen here. Last week we heard Zena and Natasha talk about their time on a mission trip with Habitat for Humanity. Pretty easy to feel good about that one—we helped pay their expenses, they went and did the work at the site—it would be easy to think that we were behind all of that. We weren’t. What happens in this place isn’t what we do, it’s what God does through us.

And finally: That work is done through the church—through the imperfect, broken, complaining, addicted, abused, jealous, greedy and forgiven people…people just like us. Understanding that grace changes everything begins with acknowledging that there are parts of our lives that we need God to enter in and change.

I could throw a list at you, but seriously, don’t we all know where we wish God would transform us into the people he made us to be? The key here is that we don’t have to be perfect, don’t have to be successful, don’t have to be rich, don’t have to send our kids to elite universities—we don’t have to measure up to have God use us in a meaningful way. The old saying goes like this, and it’s true: God doesn’t care about our ability, what he really wants is our availability.

When I think back on that guy at football games who held up the Eph. 2:8 sign, my first thought is probably similar to yours: ‘What a nut.’

But in the end all he was really trying to do was remind us of something very important, that it is by grace that we’re brought into God’s presence and kingdom—that it’s by grace that we have been saved. It’s by grace alone that we have anything in our lives that matters.

That reminder is the task of the church. That’s how we prepare for hard times—it’s how we learn to take care of each other when those hard times come—it’s how we fellowship and worship and grow in faith and serve the world. It is by grace that we learn to live the way we were meant to live all along.

This passage of Ephesians is the gateway to being a mature disciple of Jesus. Maybe the right response to the guy with the sign wasn’t to dismiss him. Maybe the right move was to buy a season ticket and sit next to him so he could hold a bigger sign.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll grow into a church that announces to the world the good news that we find in that single verse from Ephesians.

“For it is by grace you have been saved through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

There is just one hymn that will measure up to the power of that passage of Scripture. Let’s stand and sing it together: ‘Amazing Grace.’

The Grand Scheme of Things

2010-09-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

(This is the first in a series of messages on Paul's letter to the Ephesians titled 'Growing Together.')

Ephesians 1:1-10, 22-23

Today we begin a series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians titled ‘Growing Together.’ Why Ephesians? Check out the quote on the front of your bulletin.

“We immerse ourselves in Ephesians to acquire a clean, uncluttered imagination of the ways and means by which the Holy Spirit forms church out of just such lives as ours. This is the holy soil in which we have been planted, the conditions that make it possible for us to grow up in Christ, to become mature, ‘healthy in God, robust in love’”

That’s from Eugene Peterson, and it sums up as well as anything why we chose this letter for the autumn series of messages.

Last week I told the story of those 33 miners stuck in a hole in Chile. If you haven’t heard about it, the men were hit by a cave-in and trapped underground. They survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were, and now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until late-November.

But the fascinating part of this story describes what the miners have been doing down there. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.

When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.

That’s how we want to be here in this church.

What we learn from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a lot like what we can learn from those miners in Chile. Their skill and commitment, their willingness to stay together and trust each other—none of that happened by accident. It worked because they studied and remembered and practiced what to do when disasters strike. When that mine caved in no one had to tell them that they needed to look out for one another—to take care of each other. They’d been getting ready all along.

That’s what we’re going to do.

Don’t worry—we’re not going to turn our worship hour into a disaster preparedness class or some kind of first aid training. Not exactly.

What we’re going to do over the next 10 weeks is be honest about life and faith and the world, and we’re going to see how this important book of the Bible helps us become more a more mature church—a church family that’s ready for anything.

Because we know that hard things are going to happen even as we grow in our lives as disciples. If we’re honest with each other we’ll admit that life doesn’t always go the way we planned—accidents happen, wounds happen, disasters can strike. You don’t have to be pessimistic to say that—you just have to be awake. Too often church families are safe places only when things are going well. When a loss or a struggle interrupts our lives we can feel like the church is the last place we want to be.

I want that to change.

We also know that we struggle with believing that we can trust God at his word. Everyone has struggles with faith—seriously, we’d be crazy not to wonder sometimes if this is all true. The problem isn’t doubt. The problem is that sometimes the church is the last place we want to share the doubts that we have, the ones that keep us from believing and worshipping and serving freely and joyfully.

I want that to change, too.

And finally, we wonder where being a follower of Jesus fits in this crazy world. On the one hand we read about the God Delusion, and on the other tens of thousands of faithful Catholics are lining the streets to see the Pope. On the one hand Mother Teresa sets a standard that none of us will ever reach, and then a minister in Florida makes us embarrassed to call ourselves Christian. Where do we fit as people who want to be disciples of Jesus Christ? Too often churches forget that part of our job is to help people express and share and live their faith beyond the walls of this place—in the other 167 hours of the week.

I want to take that part of the church’s job more seriously.

Ephesians is going to provide road map for us as we grow individually and as a church family. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus has a lot to say about life and faith and how to live in a world that doesn’t always understand who we are. Listen to how this letter starts.

Our text this morning is Ephesians 1:1-10.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.

That’s a powerful and complicated statement about the grand scheme of things—the unseen reality of being an everyday follower of Christ. It’s an amazing hymn of who Christ is, what God did through him, and who we are because of it. Listen to how another translator brought it into English:

“How blessed is God and what a blessing he is! He’s the father of our master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down the earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love…Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments…And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making…It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we’re living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he’s working out in everything and everyone.”

Paul wrote this letter to the Christians in Ephesus to encourage them and remind them not to forget their first love. The letter is unique in that it’s the only one of Paul’s letters to churches that doesn’t address some serious problem. It’s not that the Ephesians had it all together—Paul is just writing one of his theological letters to a church that he liked.

In the end what we find in this passage and in the rest of Ephesians, is that the church somehow represents and gives shape to the resurrected Jesus. The one we celebrate on Easter Sunday is the one we represent in our lives and in this place every day, every week. In the words of Eugene Peterson, we gather as the church to ‘practice the resurrection’ in our lives and worship and service. He writes:

“Church is an appointed gathering of named people in a world in which death gets all the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation…The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word—Jesus life.”

Part of how we prepare ourselves and each other for whatever life throws at us is to remember that we are a community that is built on a resurrected Messiah. The engine of the church is the belief that this life isn’t all there is, and that through the resurrection of Jesus, death isn’t the last word. Reminding ourselves and each other that we’re resurrection people, even when it’s hard to grasp or believe, is how we prepare for the hard times that might come our way.

There really can’t be any doubt that Ephesians is written to support the church, or at least gathered groups of believers. The word ‘us’ shows up a half-dozen times just in the 8 verses after the opening greeting.

God blessed us, he chose us, he predestined us, he gave us grace—no, wait a minute, he lavished us with grace, and he made Christ known…to us.

If ‘us’ is the church, then what is it about us that makes us ready to help, ready to love and care and serve in Christ’s name? What is it about us that makes us a Christian community that can grow into a mature experience of life and faith and interaction with the world?

Listen to verses 22 and 23 of the same chapter.

And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

Three things to take away from this passage as we begin our journey through Ephesians.

Christ is the head of the church. That’s not a swipe at the Pope’s visit to London—any good Pope would confess the exact same thing. Christ is the head, the leader, the source of everything true and good and loving that comes out of the church. To forget that is to forget who we are and whose we are, and that’s never a good thing.

The church represents Christ’s fullness to the world. No one of us can do it alone, but as a community of faithful disciples learning how to share our gifts with others we become the body of Christ here, showing what he’s like to a world that needs to know.

And finally, what defines us as church isn’t what we do, it’s what Christ does in us and through us.

This past week a seismologist said that London was overdue for a serious earthquake. They haven’t had a real shaker here since 1580, and the fault line in the Dover Straits has been quietly building up tension for centuries.

The talk of earthquakes took me back to growing up in Southern California, and how much time was spent in school learning how to react when we felt the earth start to shake. We knew how to get under our desks, how to stand where buildings were the strongest, and eventually even how to apply some basic first aid. Then we’d go back to our normal lessons and get on with the task of learning the rest of what we needed to know.

Our walk through Ephesians is going to be a bit like that. We want to be a church, a community of believers, a family that knows how to respond in faith to whatever gets thrown our way. That’s how we’ll make a real and lasting impact on the world God made—the world God loves.

Listen to how those last two verses are translated in The Message:

“At the center of everything Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, and by which he fills everything with his presence.”

My prayer for us as we make our way through the letter to the Ephesians is that we’ll grow more and more into a church like that. One that takes its place, serving from the center of things—a church that Jesus Christ himself will speak through, and will act through. Make that your prayer, too.

Welcome Back to What?

2010-09-15T01:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome Back Sunday 2010

Joshua 1:6-9

Our text today is pretty straightforward and clear. Here’s what’s happening: The Israelites have been released from slavery in Egypt, but they were a little weak on the twin ideas of gratitude and obedience, and so God had them wander in the wilderness for 40 years. Even Moses got old and died during that time, and so now Joshua is their leader.

After all the wandering and problems and negotiating with Moses and the people over the years, here’s where we are. God’s people want to know how long they have to wait before they get to the Promised Land, God wants them to trust that he’ll do what he said he would do, and Joshua is taking over for the most important leader in Israel’s history. Everyone wants a straight answer here, and so God says this very clearly to Joshua.

6 “Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them. 7 Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”

There are a few things to know about this passage as we try to find out what it means for us.

First, the book we call Joshua describes the way God fulfills the covenant he made with his people. The first books of the Old Testament are filled with promises that God makes to his people, and in Joshua we see some of those begin to be fulfilled.

Second, our text falls within a time of conflict and danger and fear. There are wars, divisions among God’s people, frustration with the constant wandering, and struggles with how to live the life of faith.

Finally, for us this text is a reminder of the way God calls us to be his people. Notice that God calls Joshua to three tasks or practices or behaviors: to be strong and courageous, which we can interpret as being faithful and hopeful; to read and study and reflect on the Scriptures God gave us; and to live the way he calls us to live.

Whatever else we see in this text, I want us to take it as a wakeup call for the church—for all of us who want to be followers of Jesus Christ.

There are so many news stories competing for our attention, but one of the most compelling for me is the one about those 33 miners stuck in a hole—trapped underground in Chile. If you haven’t seen the story, the men were hit by a cave-in and they survived in a shelter for 17 days before anyone even figured out where they were. Now they’ve been down there more than a month. The problem is that they’re 2,300 feet underground—that’s more than half a mile. They’re drilling new holes to reach them, but it looks like they won’t be rescued until December.
Once they got a communication device down to the men—remember they’d been there for two and a half weeks—most just wanted someone to say clearly and honestly how long it was going to take to get them out of there.

But there’s something else about those miners that you might not know. Chile has a long history of mining—for gold and copper and nitrate and coal. It has a long tradition of mining, but not necessarily of mining safety.

When the miners were located they’d already organized themselves into teams—they have regular rations, they sleep and exercise and keep watch over each other in shifts. Most of this isn’t part of their health and safety procedures. Most of this is handed down informally from grandfather to father to son—they’ve gone through so many tragic mining events that they’ve learned how to be ready—how to take care of each other and live.

There’s something we can learn from these brave miners.

As a church, how do we gather ourselves and prepare to help each other when disasters happen, or just when normal hard times come? We know that bad things happen in the lives of people we know and care about—how do we get ready for that in our church life? How do we make ourselves ready to step in and care for people when they need us the most?

Maybe, on Welcome Back Sunday, a different way to ask that as we reconnect and enjoy our time together today is this:

Welcome back to what?

I’ve been thinking about that over the summer and especially this past week or so as we’ve been preparing for a new church year. I’ve been thinking about how to give a straight answer to that question…welcome back to what?

Welcome to a community where we try to be strong and courageous—to be faithful and hopeful—even when we really feel weak and afraid. To be faithful and hopeful is to believe that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he’ll do. That’s not easy—it’s why we do it in community, as a church family. How? That’s the second thing.

Welcome to a church family where we’re going to dive into the Scriptures and wrestle with what they meant when they were written, so we can understand what they mean for us today. We have a year-long adult Bible study on Sunday mornings where we’re going to explore the Psalms. A group of women are going to gather for a 10-week Beth Moore Bible study on the fruit of the Spirit starting in October. Our kids are learning Bible stories as they have fun in Sunday School, and our youth are learning to apply the Scriptures to the questions they’re asking about life and faith. Get the idea? We’re taking the Bible seriously…and faithfully.

And finally, welcome to a place that is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ—a place that wants to show the world who Christ is through Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship and Mission. As we start a new year make sure you check out the different ways we’re going to grow together in this place. The point is that we all develop into the disciples God made us to be.

Those are the same things God told Joshua to do in order to get ready for the road ahead.

Be faithful and hopeful,
Be immersed in the Scriptures,
and make your life a reflection of what you believe.

That’s what we want to do in this place as we live in Christian community.

This time of welcoming and welcoming back is a perfect time to say some other things, too. Whether you’re new here or you’ve been coming for a while, here’s what I want you to know:

No matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done or even what you’ve believed before, you’re welcome here.

Whether you feel close to Jesus or lukewarm about him, or if you feel stuck in a very deep hole and you can’t get out, you’re welcome here.

This is a place where you can connect with each other and with God, where you can grow in faith and serve Christ’s Kingdom—this is a church family made up of people who are looking for forgiveness and wholeness, and we want that message to be as clear as possible.

The promise to Joshua was ‘the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’ We believe that here, even when it’s a struggle, and we want to be a place where we practice God’s presence in everything we say, and everything we do. ---

Over the next few months we’re going to focus on what it means to grow in faith together as we look at Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church. It’s such a great book of the Bible, and I hope you’ll join us as we explore what it means for us as a church in London in the 21st century.

For now, though, welcome and welcome back. Let’s pray together.

Getting Back in the Saddle...

2010-09-06T01:59:00.000-07:00

OK, so I've been gone for a while.

We spent a month together with our families and friend in Glendale and Burbank this summer. It was a great (and necessary) time of rest and play and connection with people that we miss a lot during the year. I'll get back to writing soon, but here are some pictures from our summer in California.

Chinatown for Dim Sum with some friends.

Ian got to hang out with one of his best buddies from nursery school.

The Griffith Observatory in LA (where the knife fight in 'Rebel Without a Cause' was filmed.

Ian and Ericka

No wonder people find LA confusing...

The pendulum in the atrium (Latin humor)

Yes, there are two starches on my plate. Sue me.

Family dinner in Shell Beach.

I was going to say we played a little chess, but that would be wrong...

Ian and I fished off the pier, and also on one of the half-day deep-sea charters.

This amounts to a 'before and after' set of pictures.

Something to Boast About

2010-07-26T04:12:00.000-07:00

(This is the last in a series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

2 Cor 1:12-14

This past week I’ve been catching up on movies and finally saw ‘The Damned United’, the story of English football manager Brian Clough. Clough was a true character, and also quite possibly a genius when it came to coaching soccer. The film covers a part of Clough’s life where he was obsessed with another manager who had insulted him, and how his attempt to retaliate sent his career off course. Along the way we get a glimpse at Clough’s personality—he was known for being annoyingly confident, often without understanding how other people saw him. In one TV interview he said: “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the country, but I’m in the top 1.”

The complexity here was that Clough wasn’t just a braggart. The top league in England at that time was becoming known for its violence and brutal play. Clough believed that it was possible to play football at a higher, more honorable and beautiful level than he saw in the top league here. After watching the World Cup this summer, who could really argue with that?

We’ve been talking about the idea of the “active ingredient.” The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God's grace. For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand. And I hope that, as you have understood us in part, you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Second Corinthians is actually made up of a couple of letters Paul wrote to this important church. Paul had spent 18 months or so helping the church at Corinth get off the ground, and he’d continued to provide pastoral care for them through the post. If you read through this letter you’ll see that Paul refers to other letters that he’d written in the past to address key issues or problems.

Both 1st and 2nd Corinthians give us a glimpse at what it was like for Paul to be a missionary and pastor in the 1st century. He teaches theology, describes what good church leadership looks like, argues with critics, and encourages healthy behavior in these letters. Paul also tries to teach his readers how to think for themselves—to take teaching from any source and evaluate it on their own to see if it was worth following.

One writer said that these letters of Paul were meant to teach ‘the significance of Christ’s death, the meaning of the Holy Spirit, how God shows his power in our weakness, and how the believer’s life is both graced by God’s love and claimed for obedience in service.’

You know, the easy stuff.

In our passage at the start of this letter, Paul is responding to some criticism about something he wrote in an earlier letter. You know that feeling when you’ve been irritated and written an email and regretted it as soon as you hit send? Maybe that’s just me.

Paul isn’t backing down, but he is reminding them that he has dealt with them with integrity in the past, and so they should listen to what he says.

Paul leads off with a line that is anything but an apology or even an explanation. He says: ‘Now here’s our boast. Our consciences are clear. We have conducted ourselves in a way that is perfectly consistent with the way God himself has led us to act.’

It’s as if Paul kicked off the letter by saying: ‘I wouldn’t say I’m the best apostle in the world, but I’m in the top 1.'

All that talk about boasting rubs our modern ears the wrong way, doesn’t it? We’ve all been around people who are pretty impressed with themselves, right? We’ve all been around people who seem only too happy to tell you all of their accomplishments—what they’ve done on their own power and because of their own wisdom and ability.

That’s not what Paul is talking about here at all. (OK, well maybe a little, but it’s not his main point.)

It helps to get a 1st-century understanding of boasting and what it means in the Scriptures.

The word that translates to ‘boasting’ here has a rich meaning. The way it’s used here it really means ‘glorying in the acts of God’. It describes a mix of awe and wonder and delight in the way God works through his people—even when you might be talking about the way he works through yourself.

None of this is about announcing what we can do on our own power or wisdom or ability. ‘The Christian can boast in him- or herself,’ one writer put it, ‘only in so far as his life is lived in dependence on God and in responsibility to him.’

That doesn’t sound like the annoying kind of boasting or bragging at all. Paul is talking here about ‘boasting’ in the way he and his team lived in complete dependence on God, and how they interacted with the world and presented the gospel. He says that they did it with ‘holiness and sincerity’.”

Holiness and sincerity are two of the easiest words in the English language to dismiss or poke fun at or turn into a punch-line.

We dismiss Holiness because we associate it with being judgmental or holier than thou. The dictionary defines being ‘holier than thou’ as Self-righteousness (also called sententiousness), a feeling of smug moral superiority derived from a sense that one's beliefs, actions, or affiliations are of greater virtue than those of the average person.

Another describes it as "excessively or hypocritically pious; often with a sickening sanctimonious smile" Other words used are 'pharisaic, pharisaical, sanctimonious, self-righteous, pietistic'.

Well that doesn’t sound very nice at all.

We do the same with sincerity because in this cynical age we simply don't believe it—there’s far too much of the opposite in our culture, and so we don't trust sincerity when we see it or experience it. If you Google ‘sincerity’ you find that it’s ‘the virtue of one who speaks and acts truly about his or her own feelings, thoughts, and desires.’ When people act that way toward us we have a hard time believing it, right?

But when Paul uses those words here he means something very different—he uses them without sarcasm or irony—he means them.

But what did he mean?

In the Scriptures only God is holy, but when it talks about people holiness describes the idea of somehow being set apart for a special purpose. It describes being ethically pure or free from sin, but it’s more than that.

In the New Testament, holiness describes a type of faithfulness that isn’t simply doing the right things, but rather living by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s not connected to places or things or rituals. It’s the behavior that comes naturally out of true faith—out of a true relationship with the one who made us and redeemed us and loves us still.

In the Scriptures sincerity describes purity in relationships and other dealings. One dictionary defined it as ‘ingenuousness’, which gives you an idea of just how rare this quality is. Think about that. I’ve heard disingenuousness before, but I never even knew there was a positive opposite to that word.

The sincerity Paul writes about to his friends in Corinth literally means, ‘visible in the sunlight’. Out there in the open—honest—without guile or ulterior motives. This is about having integrity and a sense of honor in the way we deal with other people.

What does that mean for us as we learn to live as missional people in a missional church?

Being missional is as much about who we are as it is about what we do. Our text this morning hints at a character profile of what a mature Christian disciple is supposed to be like.

Part of it is vertical and part of it is horizontal. Part of it is about being connected to Jesus Christ, and part of it is about how we interact with other people.

The point here is that if we’re going to be authentic, effective communicators of the gospel in our lives—if we’re going to make our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods into healthier, more shalom-filled places, then we have to acknowledge our dependence on God, and we also have to live with integrity in the world.

Holiness and sincerity become a path for people to experience the gospel, which is the point of learning to live as missional people in a missional church. Holiness and sincerity become something we boast about—something we give God the credit for, something that draws others into experiencing what Christ is really about in this world.

This is really about what it means to be that active ingredient—that part of the culture around us that makes it better, healthier, more like God intended in the first place.

There’s a section of the book Deep Church that talks about this. The author writes:

“We Christians should be known as people who create culture for the common good, for all people and not just for fellow believers, culture that makes life better, more whole, for the entire city. While we’re distinct from the surrounding culture, we also engage it. Add to this the mandate in the Bible to see the welfare of the city, and we get a powerful recipe for cultural transformation.”

That’s what holiness and sincerity look like in practice. Being set apart from the culture, but also involved in every part of it—depending on God, but also living as people who share God’s love and grace with our communities.

In the end, this whole idea of being missional people in a missional church really boils down to these two things—maintaining our relationship with God, and living our faith honestly in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll have the faith and courage to live as Christ’s disciples here and wherever we go. We can boast a little about that.

Let’s pray together.

Terms and Conditions

2010-07-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

(This message is one in a series titled, 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Deuteronomy 10:12-22

We’ve been talking about the idea of the “active ingredient.” The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

12 And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13 and to observe the LORD's commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?
14 To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. 15 Yet the LORD set his affection on your forefathers and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations, as it is today. 16 Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. 17 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. 19 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. 20 Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. 21 He is your praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. 22 Your forefathers who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.

This passage comes near the end of a long speech that Moses makes to the people of Israel. It starts back in chapter five with the giving of the 10 Commandments, and moves through some teaching about how to live as the people of God. It’s in chapter six that we get the familiar prayer known as the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

Later in the sermon Moses retells the story of how God had brought God out of bondage in Egypt, and of how Israel responded by worshipping a golden calf. ‘Understand then,’ Moses says just as God’s people enter into the Promised Land, “that it is not because of your righteousness that God is giving you this land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

Moses tells the story of how he was so angry and ashamed that his people had worshipped idols that he smashed the two tablets God had given to him, and also how God had told him to make new ones just like the originals.

By the time we get to our text Moses is back on what it means to live as people of faith—how the followers of God are supposed to live. There are commands and calls to certain behaviors, there are teachings about who God is, there’s a reminder that God had saved them when they needed him the most.

Moses reminds the people that God had chosen them—not because they were good or worthy, but simply because God loved them and wanted them to share his blessings with the rest of the world. And there’s a reminder—did you catch this?—there’s a reminder not to be “stiff-necked” anymore.

I get most of my news on the web these days. It’s cheaper to read the online versions New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and others, than it is to try and manage subscriptions to all of them. Each time I sign up for a new service I’m asked to read the fine print and click that I agree with the “terms and conditions” of the arrangement.

We do that a lot, right? We enter into a contract or business relationship or partnership, and at some point we have to review the “terms and conditions” and to agree with them.

The dictionary defines the legal concept of terms and conditions as the “provisions specifying the nature of an agreement or contract.”

When we apply that definition to our text this morning, it leaves us with some pretty important questions.

If this passage is talking about what it means to live the life of faith, then what exactly is it saying about the terms and conditions of our relationship with God?

In other words, what it is about this ancient text describing what God wants from a group of recently settled nomads that can help us become active ingredients in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods?

How can it help us grow into missional people in a missional church?

I was hoping you’d ask that.

This text is laid out in an unusually straightforward way. We’ve all struggled with different parts of the Bible—with how hard it can be to understand what different texts meant and what they mean for us now. This one is different. There are three main parts.

First, there’s a list of things that God calls us to do.

We’re called to Fear God: This isn’t about being scared—it’s about having some understanding of who we are in relation to God. It’s the sense, at the same time, of our unworthiness before God and also what God has done to restore us.

God also calls us to walk in his ways. This one describes how we avoid the idea that there is some checklist of things we do to please God—it’s meant to remind us that this is a lifestyle—like a long walk in the same direction—not something we finish before going on to something else.

God asks that we love him and serve him. In another part of the Old Testament, in Micah 6:8, there’s a question about how we’re supposed to live. The answer, according to the prophet Micah, is supposed to be simple. ‘To act justly and love mercy and to walk humbly with God.’ Love God and serve him, that’s the point.

But none of this means that God is backing off of his Law. The last part of this list is to ‘observe his commandments.’ We push back on rules, but a review of the 10 commandments can be healthy every so often. Observing God’s commandments is one of the ways we act on what we believe.

In the next section there are some things about God that are designed to answer an obvious question that we don’t ask out loud very often: Why should I be interested in doing what God wants? Moses gives us five pretty good reasons: God is the creator and Lord of the universe, he loved us first, he defends widows and orphans, and he loves the outcast, the alien, the stranger.

Finally, and just in case the rest of that isn’t clear, God calls us to two crucial practices for the life of faith—two ways that we can show that we’re living by the terms and conditions of the covenant God offers us.

First, “circumcise your hearts”, he says. Make sure your faith is lived from the inside out and not the other way around. Somehow in Hebrew this is the opposite of being “stiff-necked”. To have a circumcised heart, as one writer put it, is to have your “mind and will purified and devoted totally to the Lord”.

Second, we’re called to “love the aliens among us”. What better way to honor the God who redeems us and calls us, than to love the aliens he loves, to reach out to the stranger the way he dies, to love the outcast the way he does? And just in case we’re not convinced, there’s always the reminder that once we were aliens and outcasts, too. But God reached out to us. God loved us in the life and ministry and death and resurrection of his son. God reached out to us and folded us into his family. What he wants in return is for us to do the same.

I’ll say that even more bluntly. How we treat the aliens and outcasts and strangers around us is a sign of the extent to which we grasp how much God has done for us to bring us back to him.

It’s in the example of Christ’s sacrifice for us that we see how far we’re called to go in order to make the rest of the world welcome in this place. It’s not fashionable, it won’t sit well with everyone, but it’s honest and has the advantage of being exactly what we were called to do—it’s exactly who we were made to be.

The book I’ve been quoting lately, The Monkey and the Fish, has something to say about this. Dave Gibbons writes:

“So who in your community is the outsider, the misjudged, the misunderstood? Maybe the one who seems the weakest? Who are the strangers and the friendless? Focusing on them as a church may mean you won’t grow as fast. And you may even lose some people. But your church will be fulfilling the most beautiful expression of who God is.”

I’ll say that a different way. When we reach out to the friendless outcast we show the world that we understand, just a little, about the way God reaches out to us. When we show love to the lonely around us we show people that we understand, just a little, about the God we worship and serve.

Those are the terms and conditions of living as God’s covenant people. It’s not rules and restrictions—it’s not a list of do’s and don’ts. It’s allowing our hearts to be transformed, and living our lives in a different way.

Being the part of our communities that make them healthier, better, more shalom-filled places is what the gospel of Jesus is all about.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll take some time this summer to reflect on what this all means in our lives—that’s we’ll review the terms and conditions of our relationship with God.

That’s how we’ll grow into missional people, and that’s how we’ll become a more missional church.

A New Identity

2010-06-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

(This message is part of a series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Gen 32:22-30 and 1 Peter 1:13-20

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.
Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

It’s a standard scene in movies about war or life in some kind of a repressive regime. A person is wanting to move from one place to another, or through some passage into another part of a city or country, and someone—usually a menacing looking guy—stands in their way and asks to see their ‘papers’.

Now these ‘papers’ are identity papers—they confirm who the person is and whether or not they have permission to move freely from one place to another. We all have them, even if using them isn’t as dramatic as in the movies. My passport identifies me as an American citizen, and my visa names me as a minister of religion. It also says nice and big that I have ‘no access to public funds’. I am, though, allowed to pay taxes here, even if it doesn’t say so in my passport.

The idea of identity papers gives us a chance to think more broadly about our own identities. It’s such a broad term, but it’s an important one for psychologists and sociologists.

According to my friend Wikipedia, identity formation is the process of the development of the distinct personality of an individual in a particular stage of life, in which individual characteristics are possessed by which a person is recognized or known. This process defines individuals to others and themselves.

An identity crisis happens when an individual loses a sense of their own personality and historical continuity. The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson. According to Erikson, an identity crisis is a time of intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of looking at oneself.

Healing for an identity crisis comes when the process of identity formation is restored or repeated, and individuals reclaim those characteristics that define them to others and to themselves.

In our church family we’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

Like a lot of you I’ve been taking hay fever medication this summer. Mine has 8mg of acrivastine in it—that’s the active ingredient in Benadryl—the part of the capsule that helps control my sneezing and itchy throat. I took some this morning so I could get through two services today.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices—we find our identities as Christian disciples—at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy."
Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

This passage from Peter’s letter goes hand-in-hand with the text from Genesis that Zena read earlier in the service.

Peter's letter was written to the Christian churches in what is now modern Turkey. This is a general letter—not written to one community with a specific set of problems, but written to all Christian churches with teachings that all of us can relate to. Our text comes at the beginning of a longer section on the responsibilities that go hand in hand with the gifts we’ve received from God. “Shape your priorities”, the writer says, “to the priorities of God.”

The gift that Peter is talking about here, just so that we’re clear, is the redemptive gift of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection. It’s the core message of the gospel that calls us to a new way of living—to a new identity as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

That core message, by the way, is the basic structure of why Jesus the Messiah came in the first place. It goes like this: God created us to live in perfect Shalom with him and with the world. Shalom represents the Hebrew idea of wholeness or completeness—“the webbing together of God, humans and creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.”

But that Shalom was broken by our sin—by our rebellion against God, and human history up to this point has been about God reaching out to us to bring us back into a whole relationship with him—to put the pieces of Shalom back together again. Jesus the Messiah came to bridge that gap in a decisive way—to offer everyone a way to be connected with God again, just as he intended from the start.

The central idea in this letter, as one writer put it, is “the contrast between what the readers had once been and what they have now become because of their obedience to Christ.” In other words, the focus of this letter is the way those who follow Christ experience a radical change in our identities.

But this isn’t anything new. God has been calling his people to a new way of life—to a new identity built on him alone—from the earliest pages of the Scriptures.

Jacob is one of the great characters of the Old Testament. He’s a sort of slippery character with marginal ethics when we see him. He cons his father and cheats his brother out of a blessing that should have gone to him. He gets conned by his father-in-law in one of the great two-for-one deals in the Bible. And when we see him he’s wrestling with an angel and won’t let him go until he gets a blessing from him. (Jacob has bit of a blessing fetish.)

But Jacob gets more than he asked for. As a part of the blessing he gets a new name—Jacob becomes Israel, and plays an important part in bringing God’s covenant to life.

See what I mean? Part of following God means allowing our identities to be transformed as God himself works in us and through us to remake us into the people we were meant to be all along. He might not always change our names, but he always reaches in to help us become the people we were meant to be.

In our staff meetings this year we’ve been reading a book together called ‘God Hides in Plain Sight’, which is on our reading list in the bulletin. The chapter we discussed last week was about the idea of baptism—of being cleansed of our sin and welcomed into the community of faith. But the author made the case that there was a lot more going on, too. He writes:

“Baptism is what occurs when we are shown who we are apart from our roles, our masks, our attachments, and our created selves. It is the means by which we take on the most real roles in our lives. It is when we hear a voice from heaven saying ‘This is my child in whom I am well pleased.’”

Part of becoming missional people in a missional church means recognizing that as we grow in faith our core identities change—they’re transformed—we go from who we thought we were and why we thought we matter, to who God calls us to be and why he loves and cherishes us.

How does this help us become missional people? How does this idea of identity change help us work together as a missional church?

If we look back at the passage from 1st Peter we see three steps toward aligning ourselves to God in a meaningful way—we see three practices we can apply as we seek to be active ingredients in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

First, we see ‘prepare your minds’. We can’t get around the need to understand our faith and to be able to articulate it. Reading and reflection—conversation and prayer are the ways we prepare our minds to engage the world as disciples of Jesus.

Next the text calls us to ‘be self-controlled’. This is not just about resisting sin, though that’s a part of it. It’s really about taking responsibility for the way you live your life; this is a direct challenge to the concern I hear sometimes about how hard it can be to let colleagues and friends and neighbors know that you’re a Christian. This is your identity. The rest is secondary.

Finally, ‘set your hope fully on the grace of Jesus Christ’. This is a part of the Christian life that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Hope is supposed to be one of the markers of faith—one of the outward signs of trusting that God is who he says he is, and more importantly, that he’ll do what he promised to do.

This is about developing the discipline of hope—about living lives that are marked by the discipline of hope.

That’s not how we talk about hope most of the time, is it? We think of hope as something that comes and goes—we might wake up some days and feel hopeful. But Christian hope isn’t just a feeling that may or may not hit us on any given day. Christian hope is something that we practice—something that we cultivate as we grow in our knowledge and experience of the way the living God works in our lives.

Hope isn’t just hoping that everything will be OK. Christian hope is trusting that God will come through—it’s living with the knowledge that somehow God will bring his creation to himself, and that in the meantime he loves us and cares for us.

It’s in the rest of our text that we see where this new identity comes from: ‘For you know that it was not with perishable things that you were redeemed, but with the precious blood of Christ.’

It’s through Christ’s blood—that symbol of struggle and sacrifice—that we are given our new identities. It’s because we’ve been redeemed and forgiven that we can leave our old lives behind and become something completely new and different: disciples of Jesus Christ.

Identity formation happens as we develop those parts of our personality that define us for others and for ourselves. The question for us is this:

Where does our faith fit into the way we see ourselves?

Where does our faith fit into the way others experience us—not just here at church but in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods.

Being missional people in a missional church means allowing our identity to be transformed. It means that through Christ’s sacrifice we can become the people he made us to be in the first place.

On the front of your bulletin this morning you’ll see a quote from a great little book that the Council is reading over the summer…

“…this presents an amazing opportunity for the church to become the most relevant, most vibrant, most vital part of people’s lives—both to the young and the old. But to pull that off, we need to radically shift our thinking from believing that success means being a safe place for people to catch up and be together for an hour or two on Sunday and maybe hear an entertaining message, to recognizing that we are, first and foremost, a movement of people called to a dangerous mission.”
(Dave Gibbons, The Monkey and the Fish)

My prayer for all of us, as we wrestle with what it means to see our lives and our church in a different way—my prayer is that we’ll prepare our minds for the task, that we’ll take responsibility for allowing our faith to be visible in our lives, and that we’ll live lives marked by the hope that comes from believing that God is exactly who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he would do.

Then we’ll be missional people in a church with a mission—people whose identities are reflections of the one who made us, who redeemed us, and who loves us still.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Amen.

Ready for Anything

2010-06-17T09:53:00.001-07:00

(This Farewell Sunday message is a part of our series titled 'Missional People, Missional Church'.)

Romans 15:14

It’s graduation season. Hard to imagine that we’re here again, sending kids off to college, seeing other kids move up to new grades or levels—I can’t believe that my son Ian goes to middle school next year. This is a season when people try to pass along some wisdom to those who are moving on to new things—new places. A lot of that happens in the tried and true literary form we call the graduation speech. Here are some examples.

There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live. -- John Adams

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.---Nelson Mandela

I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught. -- Sir Winston Churchill

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go. -- Dr. Seuss

Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As we celebrate our own day of transition here, I want to share some biblical wisdom for all of us to wrestle with—whether we’re leaving or staying here in London.

We’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief.

I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.

Paul’s letter was written to the new Christian church in Rome. It was mostly Gentile but it had a strong core of Jewish converts in it, too. There were 50,000 Jews in Rome in the 1st century, and many of them converted to the Christian faith. Many of the early Christian churches in Rome were actually converted synagogues, so there was a deep sense of connection between the Jewish and Gentile members of the Roman church. That’s why there’s so much about Judaism and Jewishness in Romans.

This letter was written in the year 55AD—fairly early in the history of Christianity. Remember that the Christian movement was still being persecuted at this point, and it would get worse as the church grew.

By the time we get to this chapter, Paul is starting to talk about his future plans, including a trip to Spain and Turkey, and eventually a visit to Rome. (Sounds a little like listening to people make holiday plans around here.)

Paul is an entrepreneur at heart—part of the reason he’s thinking of moving around is that, as he says later in the chapter: ‘It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on anyone else’s foundation.’ The church was already well-established in Corinth, even if it had some problems, and so Paul was getting restless to take the Christian message someplace where it could have an influence over as many people as possible.

In our text Paul is making plans to visit the young church in Rome to see if he can help them to take the next step. What’s clear is that Paul knows he doesn’t have to go there and start from scratch—there’s a group of leaders there who are ready to take the next step—ready to graduate to a deeper level of leadership and discipleship.

And so our text is Paul’s way of affirming the faith and growth of the Roman church—it’s like a commissioning or a graduation speech. Listen to it again: “I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

As we prepare to say goodbye to some good friends today, what should we notice in Paul’s commissioning of the Romans?

‘you yourselves are full of goodness’: This one has two-parts. First, there’s an admission here on Paul’s part that since he hadn’t been their teacher, that they’d reached their maturity largely on their own, or at least without the help of one of the major apostles. Second, we should notice that being ‘full of goodness’ isn’t about perfection or somehow learning to live without sin, but rather about being mature models of Christian kindness and mercy.

‘complete in knowledge’: Again, this doesn’t mean that they knew everything. When Will Durant, one of the great American historians, gave a commencement speech, he said: “Education is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance.” Paul the apostle would have agreed with that. Being complete in knowledge isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about having insight and understanding into God’s purposes and God’s plan. The Roman Christians, who had to overcome serious obstacles every day in order to live out their faith, knew enough of how their stories and God’s story intersected to handle themselves in any situation.

‘competent to instruct or admonish one another’: This is about taking that step from being beginners to being more mature in the life of discipleship. Part of that comes when we take our experiences and share them with others through teaching or exhortation—maybe even warning or correction. Mostly, though, this is about the Roman Christians being ready to be influencers in a city that was the most influential place on earth at the time.

As we mark another graduation season and especially as we celebrate this special anniversary for your church, what can we take from Paul’s commissioning of the Roman Christians? More to the point for all of us, as we talk about what it means to be active ingredients—to be mature Christians in a missional church, how does all of this help us grow as disciples where we live and work and study and shop? We’ll use the same outline Paul used.

Full of goodness: We’re called to be mature models of Christian kindness and mercy. That includes everything from simple hospitality to sacrificial acts on behalf of those in need. But mostly it’s about how our faith guides how we live in our homes and neighborhood and jobs and schools—how we live as active ingredients—how we become missional people.

Complete in knowledge: It’s crucial as we live our faith that we work to understand it, too. This isn’t about knowing everything, this is about understanding the content of the gospel. This is also about understanding how our own lives are being transformed through Jesus Christ. Where does your own story intersect with the gospel story? The answer to that question, however it is unfolding in your life, is about becoming ‘complete in knowledge’.

Competent to share our faith: This isn’t about getting degrees or reading books or passing tests. Being ready to share our faith is just that—growing into an awareness of how we can help others come to their own experience of the transforming with of Christ in their lives. This is about taking responsibility to be influencers for the gospel. Just as Rome was an enormously influential city in the ancient world, there aren’t too many places in the world today with more influence than London.

Where are the influencers for Christ in this city?

A lot of them are in this room right now. The real question is this: Will you step out in faith to influence this city, and the world, with the good news of the gospel?

Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome: “I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

I would say the same thing about you.

If you’re rooted here in London or at least staying for a while, being missional people means living our faith, understanding how it works, and sharing it with other people. That’s what this church is going to be talking about and practicing in the coming year.

If you’re leaving this summer then let me give you this challenge. Take how you’ve grown here and share it with the community of faith you settle in wherever you’re going to live next. Take your experiences here and let them become the fuel for how you live your faith in a new city or country.

We say the Charge and Blessing together each week, but it takes on new meaning as we prepare to say goodbye to another group of friends.

When I say ‘You go nowhere by accident’, remember that your response is ‘Wherever we go God is sending us. Wherever we are, God has put us there—he has a purpose for us.’

God can and will work in you and through you wherever you go—whatever you’re doing. Christ who lives in you wants to do something with your life wherever you are.

That’s what we believe, or at least struggle to believe. It’s what the Roman Christians were struggling to live out under terrible persecution and threat. It’s what we live to do each and every day as we grow into missional people in a missional church.

“I myself am convinced, my friends, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”

I really am.

Amen

Where Goes the Neighborhood?

2010-06-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

(This message is a part of our series titled, Missional People, Missional Church.)

Jeremiah 32:6-15

We’ve been talking about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

To be an active ingredient is to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients bring the message of the gospel—the message that heals us and restores health in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of what we believe about God, and what we do about that belief. Last week Jim Belcher talked about being resident aliens—people who participate and contribute to the culture, but who aren’t products of the culture.

Jeremiah said, "The word of the LORD came to me: Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, 'Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative it is your right and duty to buy it.' "Then, just as the LORD had said, my cousin Hanamel came to me in the courtyard of the guard and said, 'Buy my field at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. Since it is your right to redeem it and possess it, buy it for yourself.'

"I knew that this was the word of the LORD; so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels of silver. I signed and sealed the deed, had it witnessed, and weighed out the silver on the scales. I took the deed of purchase—the sealed copy containing the terms and conditions, as well as the unsealed copy, and I gave this deed to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel and of the witnesses who had signed the deed and of all the Jews sitting in the courtyard of the guard.

"In their presence I gave Baruch these instructions: 'This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Take these documents, both the sealed and unsealed copies of the deed of purchase, and put them in a clay jar so they will last a long time. For this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.'

Some background on Jeremiah: He served under five kings: one good one, Josiah, who found the Torah and renewed Judah’s faithfulness, and four more who were increasingly corrupt or cynical. Jeremiah preached a message of God’s judgment, including the threat of being taken away in exile, which was meant to turn Judah’s behavior back to God. Other prophets, more concerned with keeping their clientele happy than with preaching the word of God, minimized the threat of punishment for sin.

Through all of that, Jeremiah stood firm.

His life was threatened, he was beaten by the kings who were supposed to listen to him, he was ostracized by the people he was sent to serve, and at one point he was imprisoned in a sewer. In the end Jeremiah has to deliver the bad news that God was going to send his people into exile because of their disobedience. That’s where we pick up our story about Jeremiah and the field. The enemy army at the gates, the king was in denial, the other prophets were trying to make it seem like it wouldn’t be that bad, and the people responded by ignoring the whole thing. The culture of Jeremiah’s day was completely against him.

Through all of that, Jeremiah stood firm. Who was this guy?

From the Scriptures we can indentify five character traits of Jeremiah:

First, Jeremiah had a deep sense of integrity—he was honest and, as far as we can tell, impossible to bribe or corrupt. Second, and related to that, Jeremiah’s ministry was built on a foundation of courage in carrying out his convictions, even when he complained (remember that it’s Jeremiah who wrote an entire book called Lamentations.)

Third, Jeremiah was passionate in his opposition both to personal immorality and social injustice. (Both of those are priorities of God’s, too.) Fourth, as harsh as his message could sometimes be, Jeremiah showed a deep sensitivity to people’s sufferings.

Finally, and this is where our text finds us today, Jeremiah had hope for the future. He could complain with the best of them and his message was loaded with the promise of God’s judgment, but that didn’t take away his sense of hope that God would redeem his people just as he had promised.

How do we see that? Jeremiah buys a field in the path of an invading army.

Not exactly a wise investment, right? Jeremiah had the right to buy this plot of land, but no one would have blamed him if he’d passed on the opportunity. On the surface it was a disastrous use of funds—there was no apparent potential for any return on Jeremiah’s investment. And yet through it all, notice how public this transaction was. He paid the money and signed the deeds in the center of the city, where everyone could see. Why? Because God called Jeremiah to buy this field as an act of hope—a demonstration of God’s faithfulness.

Jeremiah stood firm, and bought a piece of property in the path of an invading army. What do we learn from that?

Being a Christian in London…or anywhere else, means keeping the faith—keeping our eyes on the essential truths of our faith—no matter what the culture tells us or how they might threaten us. Sometimes—and let’s be honest here: what I mean is in every waking moment—sometimes we have to stand firm in the path of all kinds of opposition to our faith in Jesus Christ, right?

The model for how we can do that faithfully and hopefully can be found in the life of Jeremiah the prophet.

We’re called to live with the same deep sense of integrity that Jeremiah had.

We’re called to have courage in living by our convictions, even if we don’t like doing it.

Our lives of discipleship should be driven by passionate opposition to both personal immorality and social injustice. I know that makes us uncomfortable, but, well, I just wanted to say that I know that makes us uncomfortable.

But through all of this—in the many ways we can stand in faith against anything the culture can throw our way—through all of this we have to demonstrate a sincere sensitivity to people’s sufferings and feelings. We’re not here to club anyone over the head. We’re here to speak and live the truth as we reach out with the love of Jesus Christ.

Finally, and this may be the hardest one of all, we’re called to have hope for the future—to believe that God will bring his process of redemption to completion just as he promised.

What this mean for how we’re called to live as Christians here in London or anywhere else?

What does this passage teach us about being the active ingredients—in our homes and jobs and schools and neighborhoods—people who live out what we believe not just here in church, but everywhere we go?

First, Jeremiah’s investment strategy teaches us that the culture can’t prevent us from living lives of faith. On the surface it might seem like a bad investment, but if God is who he says he is, then the call on our lives is to live and love and spend and invest as if it’s true.

Second, we’re meant to live our faith publicly—where the culture can see us. This is about getting out in our neighborhoods and living our lives according to the values of the Kingdom. This is not about standing in front of our houses and preaching on a soap box.

This is meant to be much louder than that.

It’s not just words, but how we live our lives—lives of integrity and conviction, lives that model personal morality and a commitment to social justice, lives that our aware and concerned about the sufferings of people less fortunate than we are.

Finally, God calls us to live faithful lives as an act of hope—a demonstration of God’s own faithfulness to his promises. God calls us to this life, even when it feels uncomfortable to us.

I’ve been reading a book called The Monkey and the Fish, about what it means to be faithful Christians in a culture that doesn’t know what to make of us anymore. The author talks about how uncomfortable it can be—and how important that discomfort is as we learn to live as Christ’s disciples. He writes:

‘Living a life of [faithful] discomfort means venturing into places we don’t feel like going, doing things we don’t wish to do, being with people we don’t feel comfortable being with, serving them, loving them, helping them—all of which demonstrates a not-of-this-world brand of love that is irresistible to all people in all places.’

Being active ingredients in our communities isn’t always going to be comfortable, but it’s an effective way to sharing the love and mercy we’ve received from Christ with other people. It’s the best way to share that ‘not-of-this-world brand of love that is irresistible to all people in all places.’

My prayer for us, as we move through this season of learning what it means to be missional people in a missional church—my prayer for us is that we’ll embrace the discomfort of being Jesus followers in a culture that doesn’t always understand what that means—that we’ll invest in our communities wherever we are—however long we’ll be there—as a way of sharing the blessings God has already shared with us. Amen?

Some Reflections on Ministry in London

2010-05-25T00:49:00.000-07:00

We've had Jim Belcher with us in London for the past few days. If you're not familiar with Jim, I'm happy to introduce you. Jim is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA, and the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (http://www.thedeepchurch.com/). Jim and I were at Fuller Seminary in the late 80s, and have gotten to know each other better over this past year. He's taking a writing sabbatical over this next year, and we were happy to host him while he was scouting a place for his family to live. Jim preached at the American Church in London on Pentecost Sunday, and the next day sat in on two conversations among church planters and other leaders here in my part of the world.

If you've read this blog over the last few years you know that London is a challenging place to do ministry. Without devaluing in any way my own seminary and practical training, it's safe to say that in order to be effective here, I had to learn a new set of skills to go alongside what I brought with me. It's the church planters who are teaching me what I need to know.

In my role as the pastor of a local church, some of the challenges to doing ministry come from within the congregation itself. It's a largely transient group; many of our families are here for 2-3 years and then are reposted to another country or back to the US. Our congregation is also made up of different denominational traditions--there isn't much shared knowledge or understanding of how to think about (or govern) a local church. Mostly, though, London itself can often pose the most daunting challenges to leading an effective, growing congregation.

In Southern California you often hear about the growing sense of secularization in the culture, made worse by the way church members move around. It's hard to say this without sounding dismissive, but in comparison London can make LA look like a stable community of unified Christian believers. (I'll pause to let that sink in.)

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. A church planter from Camden Town, an under-churched, poly-cultural, bohemian part of London with a tiny fraction of residents identifying themselves as Christians, said that many of the people in his area move every 12 months. Why? Because the standard length of a lease for a flat is one year, and after that many people move in search of more affordable housing. How do you do ministry in a community like that? The need is there, to be sure, but there is little chance to get a foothold.

Partly our conversations focused on staying theologically healthy as we reached out to our various communities. The rest became a free and wide-ranging discussion of what might work in some places (or, as it turned out, not in others), to share the gospel in a way that draws people into healthy relationships with God, with themselves, with each other and with the earth. There weren't any miracles or magic conclusions reached, but it was good to hear where people were struggling and, in some cases, seeing fruit in their ministries.

For me this past week has revealed a new and unexpected part of my own ministry here. My church is relatively stable organizationally, and that allows me to offer a gathering place for those who are out on the front lines. Just today another young church planter (from LA, no less) came by for a chat and we ended up making some tentative plans to offer space for one of their projects, and also to get together from time to time for prayer and conversation.

This convening and supporting of missionaries and church planters is becoming a part of my ministry beyond my work with ACL. It occurs to me today that I couldn't be more surprised...or happier about it.

The Electromagnetic Radiation of a Wavelength, Visible to the Human Eye

2010-05-18T02:58:00.000-07:00

Matthew 5:14-16

Two men were arguing over which one knew the most of the Bible. The debate went on for a while and then the first guy said to the second guy, “I’ll bet you $10 you don’t even know the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

The second man said, “I’ll take that bet.”

They put down their ten dollar bills, and the first one said, “All right go ahead, say the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the second man began, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom...”

And at that point, the first man handed the money over and said, “Here’s the $20. I never thought you would have known it.”

Clearly neither one of these guys knew their Bible very well, which is too bad. The Scriptures represent the most important part of God’s plan to communicate with his creation. They are the centerpiece of God’s revelation—his revealing of himself—to all of us. Knowing the Bible is an important part of how we know God—how we know his mind and heart—and how we prepare ourselves to be the light of the world—to share what we know and believe with anyone and everyone.

We’ve been talking over these past few weeks about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

We continue our series on what it means to be the active ingredients—to live our faith in a way that make our communities better, healthier, more shalom-filled places. Active ingredients that bring the message of the gospel in authentic ways to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. Those are the terms we’re going to use over these next weeks and months.

We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live as God’s people in the world.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Our text is the flipside of the passage last week about salt. In the 1-2 punch that Jesus was delivering to his listeners, this is the second strike. People came to Jesus to find out what he was offering—what was in this faith business for them, and Jesus turns it around so that the point was how this faith made a difference in how they treated others—what they were willing to share with the world.

He starts by appealing to their egos. ‘You are the light of the world.’

Who wouldn’t love to hear that? Who doesn’t want to be the star of the game, or the head of the class, or the life of the party. ‘You are the light of the world.’ I can see the crowd feeling pretty good about that.

But it might have started to turn with the second line. ‘A city on a hill can’t be hidden.’

That one might have made them squirm a little. If you’re going to be a source of light, then there’s nowhere to hide—nowhere you can’t be seen. This is one of the mixed blessings in battle of using radar. It helps you find what you’re looking for, but it also let’s other people find you. Nowhere to hide. I wonder how many people got up and left after that part.

Then Jesus breaks the tension with a joke. ‘No one lights a lamp and then puts a bowl over it.’

People would have chuckled about that one. Of course no one would do that—what a dumb thing that would be. Lighting a lamp and covering it with a bowl would be, well, it would miss the point of having the lamp in the first place.

Jesus would have agreed. ‘When you light a lamp you hang it up so that everyone in your house can benefit from the light.’

And then he drops the bomb. ‘Let your light shine where everyone can see it, so that they can see the way you live and give their own praise to your Father in heaven.’

Meeting Jesus in a meaningful way and not sharing it with someone else is like lighting a lamp and covering it with a nice big bowl. It just doesn’t make any sense. It misses the point of having the light in the first place.

Meeting Jesus in a meaningful way brings with it the call to share and to live that story with the people around us.

We finally got around to seeing the movie, ‘The Blind Side’, last week. As a matter of fact, we saw it on Friday night and liked it so much we watched it again on Sunday.

The movie was based on a book that was about the changing economics of football. In 1985 Joe Theismann, the quarterback for the Weashington Redskins, was hit so hard by a guy he never saw coming that he shattered his leg and never played again. Even now I can see some of you wincing—you remember how many times they replayed that tape. 'The Blind Side' partly tells the story of how NFL teams had to rethink the value of each player on their squads. Eventually, while the quarterback remained the highest-paid player on every team, the left tackle—the one who protects a right-handed QB’s blind side—is now often the second-highest paid player.

But the book and movie also follow the story of Michael Oher, a poor kid in Memphis who has the physical ability to thrive in this new era of football, but who needs some help in getting his life in order.

The movie also tells the story of a Christian family and their response to a young person in need. The focus is really on the mom in the story, Leigh Ann Touhy, played by Sandra Bullock. The mom’s story—and the story of the way her family responded—is pretty compelling. What surprised me, and one of the things I’m loving about the book, is that in this upper-middle-class white evangelical Republican cast of characters, person after person does exactly the right thing…explicitly because of their Christian faith.

The principal of the private Christian high school that took Michael in, a man named Steve Simpson, had a plaque on his desk with a verse from Second Corinthians. It read:

‘God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in his good works.’

One of the amazing things that comes out in both the book and the movie is that the administrators of the school thought it was more important to give Michael Oher an education than to make a sports hero out of him. Principal Simpson, the one who had that plaque about sharing our abundance, admitted Oher to the school with the provision that he wasn’t allowed to play sports until he could function on his own as a student.

Simpson didn’t have to do that. In a part of the US that is football-crazy he probably seemed like he’d lost his marbles for keeping this potential star off the field.

‘No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a bowl. They put it on a stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.’

In the end these people acted as the light of the world—they believed and prayed and agonized over whether or not they were doing the right thing. Teachers, parents, administrators all seemed to care deeply that what they believed would somehow help them make the right decisions about what to do to help this poor kid.

The family at the center of the story did their best to share the light of their love for Jesus with Michael Oher—and with the world. The point is that they started with their own home. They had two kids of their own—a young son and a daughter who was Michael’s age. They were successful and respected in the community. They were proper Southerners who’d been educated in Mississippi and gotten rich in Tennessee.

The movie plays this part for laughs, but anyone who knows the South knows what kind of a social risk they took.

This conservative, white, wealthy, socially prominent family opened their home to a kid in need who happened to be an orphaned black teenager who was 6-foot, 5-inches tall and weighed 350 pounds…at 16 years old.

Here’s the point—other than that you should go and see this movie and read this book today. Here’s the point. Whatever else made up the values of this Southern family, everything was secondary to doing what their faith called them to do.

When they were presented with the need of Michael Oher, the Touhy family chose to fire up that lamp, hang it on a stand, and let it give light to everyone in their house and neighborhood.

‘No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

So back to this idea of being ‘the light of the world’.

The scientific definition of light goes like this: It's the electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength, visible to the human eye.

Now I don’t know what most of that first part means, but the second part makes perfect sense to me—the part about it being visible to the human eye.

So much about our faith is personal. We wonder and study and pray, mostly to ourselves. So much of our faith is personal.

But right in the middle of our private search for some kind of a connection with Jesus we get confronted by this little verse—so easy to breeze right past while we’re looking for something else.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

That’s what was happening in the story of ‘The Blind Side’. The book described how the economics and values of professional football were transformed through a terrible injury and a need to protect the most important player on the team.

But the real story wasn’t about how the values of football changed. The real story was about how the values of a family were transformed through their faith in Jesus Christ. How they took the gift of light that came from their encounter with the Messiah, and shared that light in their home and with the world.

Try this version of that same text.

‘You are the light of the world. You can’t hide it, and no one should even try. When you get a little light going in your own life, make sure your own house is lit up. Then let someone else experience it too. That’s how they’ll know that the God you talk about is real, by your actions, by the way you share your light.’

Our faith becomes real when it begins to generate some light.

Our faith becomes real when we live it and share it and make different decisions because of it.

Our faith becomes real when it is visible to the human eye.

Whatever it is that we believe about God, about the work of Jesus Christ to redeem and restore our lives, about the role of the Holy Spirit to empower us to be the people we were made to be. Whatever it is that we struggle to believe as Christian people, what matters is how it offers light to people who think that the darkness in this world is all there is.

“You are the light of the world…let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

As we think about what it means to be missional people—to work and worship together as a missional church—keep those words in mind.

As we take a few moments to recognize the way some special volunteers here share their light with others, keep those words in mind.

Our faith becomes real when it is visible to the human eye.

How will you share that light with your world?

That was the point of that joke about the two guys who didn't know much about the Bible. Being the light of the world begins with knowing God’s word, where we see what that light means and what it promises. It begins with entering the Scriptures and wrestling with what they teach. It’s in that act of faith that we’re refined into the disciples God made us to be.

My prayer for all of us is that we’ll allow the refiner to enter in, to make his values our values, and send us out as agents of his light for everyone to see.

Amen.

Let’s stand and sing together: ‘Refiner’s Fire’

Salt and Other Necessities

2010-05-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

Matthew 5:13-16

In the Financial Times last week there was an article about the ‘European Christian Equity Index’, a new investment opportunity that is trying to earn competitive returns without trading in shares that involve alcohol or firearms or gambling, among other things.

It’s probably easy to poke fun or to be cynical about this. But I see it as an attempt to join what some people believe with how they invest. Whatever you might think about it, if the last few years have taught us anything it’s that we should pay more attention to how and where we earn our money.

13"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled.
14"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

We’re going to spend two Sundays in this brief passage. This week we focus on the salt in the passage, and next week we’re going to talk about the light.

We’ve been talking over these past few weeks about the idea of the ‘active ingredient.’ The active ingredient is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

The technical term for the active ingredient in a medicine is pharmakos, which originally described a drug or even a magical substance. That same word also described the ‘scapegoat’ in ancient Greece, part of the practice of placing whatever harms the health of a community on an animal, and then sending it out into the desert. The hope was that the scapegoat would restore the health of the community—of the people and of the land.

We continue our series on what it means to be the active ingredients that bring the message of the gospel to the places where we live and work and study and shop.

Along the way we’re going to see how living what we believe can be a way to help restore health to our communities—to help take away whatever threatens the life and shalom of the world around us—to bring reconciliation and justice and even peace to the places we go and live in every day.

This is a journey through what it means to be missional people in a missional church. Those are the terms we’re going to use over these next weeks and months.

We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live as God’s people in the world.

The Christian faith is a missional faith. The church, meaning everyone who follows Christ in faith—the church of Jesus Christ has a mission, and the mission of the church is to wrestle with what it believes and teaches about what God is doing in the world, and to be instruments of God’s love and plan everywhere we go, and in everything that we do.

That two-part definition is the sole mission of the church. Knowing God and living what we know is what we’re called to do and to be as missional people in a missional church. That’s the point for all of us as we move through the spring season.

What does that mean?

In one sense, being mission-minded and mission-hearted means understanding the gospel and what it offers for us and for the world.

It also means that we allow that gospel to season everything that we do, everywhere that we are.

The guiding text for this series is as familiar as it is crucial. It gets at the heart of what the life of Jesus teaches us about being the Body of Christ.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

Knowing about God is important. Living what we know is the rest of the story.

It’s in living what we believe about Jesus Christ that makes us active ingredients in our homes and lives and schools and jobs and neighborhoods.

So back to our text. It’s hard to imagine our lives without salt, and yet it’s a strange sort of relationship. Mark Kurlansky wrote a book a few years back about salt and its role in history. (I’ll pause for you to snicker at the idea of reading a history book about salt.)

He helps us understand the origins of the salt we take for granted on most of our tables. He writes:

"When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans."

He also mentions a booklet produced in 1920 by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of St. Clair, Mich., that listed a mere 101 uses, from ''keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables'' to ''making ice cream freeze,'' from ''removing rust'' to ''sealing cracks,'' from ''cleaning bamboo furniture'' to ''killing poison ivy.'' And that's not to mention all the medicinal applications, like treating ''dyspepsia, sprains, sore throats and earaches.'' Today, Kurlansky writes, the salt industry boasts more than 14,000 uses.

An ancient Egyptian document makes the claim that ‘there is no better food than salted vegetables’.

The Romans thought salt was an aphrodisiac, and used the term ‘salax’ to describe a man in love. We get the term salacious from the same place. I’m still trying to figure out how that part works its way into the sermon.

And salt has had a whole range of other important properties and roles in the history of civilization.

Preservative: The use of salt as a preservative for food transformed civilization and made it possible for more people to eat healthier food than they could before. Until the advent of the freezer, salt was the primary tool for preserving food and making it possible to distribute it around the world.

Medicine: Salt was used to clean out infections and heal any number of illnesses. Salt itself has been the active ingredient in a range of medicines right up to modern times.

Defining value: At one point salt was the major economic unit of the civilized world. It was used to pay employees and soldiers, and for a while functioned as the exchange rate mechanism between nations. It’s where we get the word ‘salary’.

Seasoning: This last use of salt is the one most familiar to us. It tastes good. We put it on food and whatever we’re eating comes to life. We get the word ‘salad’ from an old word for ‘salted vegetables’. Can you imagine eggs or French fries or even a steak without salt? Candy makers know that even sweet things taste better with a little salt.

How does this help us to be missional people? To be a missional church?

How does an understanding of the role of salt help us to become the active ingredients in our own places and lives?

Think about the properties of salt that we just talked about. There are four principles here about salt that can help us become the people and the place God calls us to be.

Preservative: We’re supposed to be deeply involved in the world around us, keeping it fresh and preventing it from getting rotten. God made this world to be nourishing—not just in food but in culture and commerce—family and political life, too.

Medicinal: As followers of Christ we’re called to be agents of healing and comfort, figuring out ways to offer cures or solutions to whatever makes our communities and cultures sick. The gospel has important things to say about personal and social morality. Just because we’ve done it poorly in the past, doesn’t mean we can surrender the field. Being active ingredients in our communities is how we share Christ’s work with the world he came to redeem.

Defining value: We don’t get paid in salt anymore, even if we’re worth our salt. But as Christians we’re called to claim our voice in defending the value of everyone and everything God has made. That’s why we work for economic and social justice in the world—it’s why we give and serve in efforts to stop the abuse of God’s people wherever it happens.

Seasoning: I love this one, because it reminds us that this business of being disciples of Jesus is supposed to be enjoyable—it’s supposed to make life better, more flavorful. It’s not right that meeting the savior of the universe in a transforming way somehow dooms us to being the stick in the mud at a party. Life is a gift, and enjoying life honors the gift God gave us all. When we become people who enjoy our lives not in spite of our faith, but because of it, we become salt to the world around us—people whose very lives make other people’s lives better.

If you don’t believe me on that, read the 8th chapter of Nehemiah. God’s people are back in their homeland and they gather to hear the Scripture read out loud. They start to weep and worry, but God tells them through a prophet to stop their crying, to get their best food and drink and to throw a party. He tells them to find people who don’t have enough and share it with them so they can celebrate too.

It should be a source of joy to know us. It should be a source of happiness and anticipation for our neighbors to see us and spend time with us. Does it work that way for you and your neighbors?

The invitation to all of us as we seek to live as salt in our communities is to reflect the joy of being forgiven, transformed people. As we move through this series of messages, that’s going to be our focus.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ The call is on us to do the same.

That European Christian Stock Index I mentioned before is just one example of how to do this in the world. It’s not the whole answer, and it may or may not work in the long run. But it’s an attempt to enter into the broader world—into the culture around us—and to live and thrive as an example of Christian values.

Jim Belcher, who will be preaching here in two weeks, makes a case for living in a way that is connected to our communities—being agents of the gospel in the culture. He writes:

“We should be known as those who create culture for the common good, for all people and not just fellow believers, culture that makes life better, more whole, for the entire city. While we are distinct from the surrounding culture, we also engage it. Add to this the mandate to seek the welfare of the city, and we get a powerful recipe for cultural transformation.”

I’ve said this before, but the people in this room on any given Sunday have enough influence and control enough resources to change the world. Will you?

It’s in joining what we believe to what we do—allowing our faith to call us to action—it’s in seeing how what we believe informs how we live—it’s in all of that that we become salt—the active ingredients in our homes and jobs and communities that communicate and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ in meaningful ways.

Next week, as we honor our teachers and youth volunteers, we’re going to shift our focus to the ‘light’ part of this passage—the part about how we take in and reflect the word of God in our lives. We can bridge the gap between the two with our song of response. Let’s stand and sing together, ‘Thy Word is a Lamp Unto My Feet’.

The Life of Jesus and the Body of Christ

2010-05-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

John 1:1-14 (esp. v14)

If you look very closely on a container of medicine you’ll see something listed as the ‘active ingredient.’ The technical term for the active ingredient in a medicine is pharmakon, which originally described a drug or even a magical substance.

The pharmakon—the active ingredient—is the substance in medicine that makes the drug work—that makes us feel better. Whatever else makes up the rest of the pill or liquid, it’s the active ingredient that makes it work—the part of a drug that actually heals us, that makes us feel better, the part of the medicine that’s designed to restore our health.

Keep that in mind as we explore this familiar—and crucial—passage from Scripture.

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
6There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

That’s such an important passage for helping us understand who Jesus Christ was…and is. John builds this case that describes Christ as being in the center of things since before time began, and then screeches everything to a halt with the most amazing, audacious, revolutionary statement ever written in any language.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

We begin a series today on what it means to be missional people in a missional church. We find our missional habits and practices at the intersection of our minds and hearts—where what we know and believe about God, about the gospel of Jesus Christ—where all of that comes together in how we live. Put another way, we're going to spend a few months exploring what we learn from the life of Jesus about being the Body of Christ.

The Christian faith is a missional faith. The church, meaning everyone who follows Christ in faith—doesn't 'do' mission. The church doesn't simply have a mission, the church is a mission. The mission that defines the church is the sole mission of the church. That’s important as we move ahead through these next 8 weeks or so.

What does that mean?

In one sense, being mission-minded and mission-hearted means understanding the gospel and what it offers for us and for the world. It also means that we allow that gospel to season everything that we do, everywhere that we are.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

Knowing about God is important. Living what we know is crucial.

It’s in living what we believe about Jesus Christ that makes us active ingredients in our homes and lives and schools and jobs and neighborhoods.

Remember that word for the active ingredient…pharmakos? I was pretty happily surprised this week to learn that the other meaning of that word in the ancient world was scapegoat.

The pharmakos, or scapegoat, in ancient Greece was someone who was chosen or forced to take responsibility for a plague or famine or war that threatened the community. The scapegoat was saddled with all of the blame and sent out of the community—they took the punishment for whatever was happening in the hopes that the rest of the city or nation could be saved.

I hope the parallels to the gospel are pretty clear here.

In the 16th chapter of Leviticus we learn about the origins of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish tradition. One of the symbols of God’s atoning work in that holiday is the scapegoat. The goat is presented as a living sacrifice, saddled with the sin of the community, and then released into the desert.

The core of the gospel, of the Christian message, is that Jesus takes on that scapegoat role—that in order to complete his work of atoning for our sins, he takes all of that sin on himself so that we don’t have to.

But the story of Jesus turns the old scapegoat story on its head. The main point of the Jesus story isn’t that he went out into the desert and never came back. In fact, the point of the gospel is exactly the opposite.

The point of the Jesus story is that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

That’s the lesson in this passage for how the church is designed and called to live. In the life of Jesus we see him going out and living with people, with the ones who needed to know him, with the ones who were in desperate need of forgiveness and reconciliation and atonement.

Jesus came and went out into homes and neighborhoods and public squares and offered his life-changing power to whoever would listen.

Jesus came and went out into the world as the active ingredient that takes away sin and death and whatever else threatens us. It’s in the message of Jesus that we find something that makes us whole and healthy again—that restores the shalom we were meant to enjoy in the first place. It’s the message of the gospel that makes it possible for God, people and creation to live together in justice, fulfillment and delight.

So what do we do about this?

If the life of Jesus is the model for how the Body of Christ is called to live and serve, then there are some marching orders for us as we begin this journey together.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us.’

If part of the point of Jesus’ ministry was that he came and lived his real life out among real people, then we’re called to do the same.

To put it very simply: The mission of the church isn’t about being in church. It’s also not only about going to foreign countries to serve, although that’s an important part of our ministry.

The mission of the church—what it means to be a mission-minded, mission-hearted family of people—the mission of the church is to live the gospel of Jesus Christ wherever we are—whatever we’re doing.

It’s about being the active ingredient in our homes and families and jobs and schools and neighborhoods—the active ingredient that makes Jesus real to the people we come into contact with.

When we look at it that way, coming to church isn’t really the point. The real point is coming to church so that we can be inspired and equipped to go out into the world as God’s messengers.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us,’ and the call on our lives is to do the same.

To go out and put flesh on the message of Jesus—to be the active ingredient that brings health and healing—to bring the message to life as we live our lives among the people God loves and wants to restore.

Over the next few months we’re going to circle this topic as we grow together in our understanding of what it means to be the people of God. We’ll use terms like ‘missional’ and being mission-minded and mission-hearted, we’ll talk about joining together the words of or message to the actions in our lives.

We’ll talk about a lot of things, but whatever we say here it all comes back to the way the life of Jesus shows us how to be the body of Christ.

‘…the Word became flesh and lived among us,’ and the call on our lives is to do the same.

Amen.

The Best News We Almost Missed

2010-04-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

Easter 2010

Luke 24:1-12

I went to seminary during an era when there were still debates about the role of women in church leadership. My seminary represented a pretty unique mix back then of being relatively conservative in theology, but progressive in practice. Sometimes that meant that there were a lot of male students who didn’t think that the women belonged there. It also meant that a lot of the women who did come to seminary had to struggle for acceptance either from their churches or their fellow students. The president of the seminary used to say that everyone who came to Fuller came over someone else’s objections. That was certainly true for most of the women I knew.

But it led to a peculiar kind of inequality back then. Guys could decide to go to seminary and no one would bat an eye. If they said they wanted to go, their churches would usually send them. But in a lot of traditions, when a woman said she wanted to go to seminary and into ministry, she had to prove herself in some significant way to her church and to everyone else.

Here’s the interesting inequality that led to. I knew a lot of guys in seminary who were destined to be average or below average ministers. Some of them didn’t belong there at all. But the women I knew during those years were some of the most intelligent, dynamic, effective leaders I’ve ever seen. When I taught preaching at Fuller, the women students regularly did better than the guys—they’d overcome too much not to do their very best work.

I’m not bringing this up today to make our Easter celebration a case for women in church leadership. That’s a case in my view that has already been won.

I say all this just to point out what a central role women played in the report of Christ’s resurrection. Whatever else may have happened to our understanding of women leaders in the church’s history, our most important story—the single best piece of news in the entire Good News—the account of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and his transformation into a new being—all of that begins with a handful of women who found the empty tomb and spread the word to the rest.

What if those guys hadn’t listened? What if they hadn’t believed the report that Mary and the others brought back with them? What if these 1st-century men had simply ignored the women when they came to say that Jesus had kept his promise and defeated the power of death forever.

We might have missed the whole thing.

Who knows what might have happened had the Romans found the empty tomb and closed it back up again. They might have put another body in there—they were pretty good at killing people back then—there wouldn’t have been much of a problem finding a spare body laying around.

What if the Pharisees or the High Priests of Judaism had found that Jesus had been raised and tried to cover it up? In Matthew’s gospel they tried to bribe the Romans guards to keep the story quiet.

We might have missed the whole thing, but we didn’t. The four gospels each tell the story in slightly different ways, but the one detail that is consistent in each book—besides the fact of the resurrection itself—is that the first people to figure it out were the women among the followers of Jesus.

As we celebrate Easter today, have a good thought for the women in the story. Their culture didn’t offer them much in the way of freedom or opportunity or even value, but in our Christian story they play a crucial role. We should never, ever forget that.

Now to the Easter story as we find it in Luke’s gospel. Don’t miss it—listen for what God is going to teach you today.

1On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.' " 8Then they remembered his words.

9When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. 12Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

It’s impossible for us to imagine the devastation felt by the disciples and the other followers of Jesus. This group of average men and women had given up jobs and homes to follow the one they believed to be the Messiah. They’d been threatened, rejected and dismissed, and now this Jesus character had gotten himself killed. So they’re sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, and some of the women in the group go to prepare the body of Jesus for permanent burial. You know the rest. He wasn’t there, and so they ran back to tell the others—they were the first evangelists of the resurrection.

One of my favorite lines is spoken by one of the angels who the women find in the tomb. ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?’

My other favorite comes when Luke describes how the men reacted.

‘They didn’t believe the women,’ Luke tells us, ‘because their words seemed like nonsense.’

This is one of those days in the church year when we set aside what we think about how the world works and celebrate a pure miracle. We celebrate that miracle even when the details of it might seem impossible—it might even seem like nonsense to us.

But our struggle to understand it doesn’t change what happened in the gospel story. Jesus came, he loved and he served, he suffered and he died. He was dead and buried, in the tomb for three days. And then suddenly he was alive again—not the same, exactly. But fully alive and calling us all to follow him as his disciples.

We talk a lot about the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, and that’s a good thing. But it’s easy sometimes to miss just how important—literally, how crucial—the resurrection is for our faith and hope. In the Cross we’re forgiven for whatever we’ve done or thought or believed that has kept us from the relationship with God we were meant to have.

But in the resurrection we’re promised a new life in the future—not just forgiveness for our past. Daniel Kirk, a young New Testament professor in California, has an article this week in Christianity Today. He writes this:

‘Resurrection and new creation are inseparable. The future for which we long and hope is the moment when God recreates this world and populates it with renewed, embodied people. Resurrection tells us that a new creation is coming. The resurrection of Jesus tells us that this new creation has already begun.’

Maybe the question we can all ask ourselves is this: What is it that we think Easter means?

I asked that question on Facebook last week and got some great answers:

A member from our last church said that Easter is ‘The completion of God's plan of redemption.’

Elizabeth Woodworth, who used to be a member here, wrote: Easter is ‘the ultimate assurance that things are going to be OK.’

One of my closest friends from home just wrote: ‘Do-over.’

My cousin Mary Francis added: ‘His resurrection is the hope that lives in me. Just as Jesus overcame death, so shall I.’

What do we think Easter means?

George Barna compiles polling data on religious issues in the States. He was relieved, I suppose, to find that 67% of Americans knew that Easter was a religious holiday.

More troubling, though, was the finding that only 42% of Americans who responded linked Easter to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

A full 2%--that’s 6 ½ million Americans, folks—said that Easter celebrated the birth of Christ. Seriously. That one may come back again this Christmas.

1% of those who responded said that Easter was a celebration of the second coming of Christ. Not exactly.

What do we think Easter means?

It’s important for us to link the Cross and the empty tomb to the way God forgives our sins and makes us into the people he meant for us to be all along. The Cross makes us clean, but it’s the resurrection that gives us hope that God can finish what he started.

We talk about sin sometimes as the breaking of rules, when the analogy that explains it best is anything that threatens our lives—whatever threatens to keep us from living the way we were meant to live.

Last month a 7-year-old boy named Carlos got a hero’s welcome when he visited the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The week before he was hiding in a locked bathroom while his parents were being robbed. He called 911—the American version of 999—and he said:

‘Some guy is being mean to my mom and dad. Bring cops, a lot of them. Bring soldiers, too. Come really fast.’

When the robbers heard the police coming they left without hurting anyone, and so little Carlos was honored for his courage.

That phone call Carlos made was a lot like a prayer. That prayer is familiar to anyone who has struggled with some sin or behavior in our lives. Carlos is an example of how we all come before God with the things that threaten us. ‘I’m afraid…send cops, send soldiers…send someone!’

We run and hide and we cry out for a savior, and we find that God’s already sent one, Jesus the Messiah.

What is it that we think Easter means?

If the sacrifice of the cross saves us from the sin that leads to death, then the resurrection calls us to a new way of life.

We see all through the New Testament that through faith we’re called to abandon old ways and live by the values of God’s Kingdom. It’s as if when we come to faith, Christ looks us in the eye and says:

‘Why do you keep looking for life among the dead?’

Our lives are supposed to mean something more than just what we have, or what we spend, or even what we give away. Our lives are supposed to mean something more than that. We were created to live in what the Old Testament calls Shalom.

We’ve talked about this before. 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.’

That ‘justice, fulfillment and delight’ has another meaning in the New Testament. It represents the love we experience from God, and the love we’re made to share with each other and with the earth.

Simon Barnes is a writer for the Times here in London. A few weeks ago he wrote a piece about his second son Eddie, who has Down’s Syndrome. After telling some stories about how Eddie faces the world and how the world responds to him, Barnes writes:

‘Eddie’s function is to be loved, and to love in return. Perhaps that is everyone’s real function.’

Maybe that’s a part of the Easter message that we forget too often.

Maybe the most important thing for us to remember—to wrestle with this Easter is this: All of this happened because God loves us so much. John 3:16, maybe the best known passage of Scripture in the entire Bible, reminds us that

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him, even if that person dies, that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.’

What we celebrate at Easter isn’t just Christ’s death for us—that’s only half of the gift of Holy Week.

What we celebrate is the way God demonstrates that death isn’t the end. That the promise to us is that somehow we will spend eternity in the presence of the one who made us and redeemed us and loves us still.

In Christ’s death, love itself was crucified. But in the resurrection that love rose again and returned stronger and more powerful than ever. He offers each one of us the chance to love and be loved in the way we were meant to be from the beginning of time.

This Easter—on this resurrection Sunday—take a moment to reflect on the gift we’ve been given in Jesus Christ. This isn’t nonsense—it’s a great big cosmic do-over. Don’t miss it.

Spend some time today, this week, thanking God for the ways he loves us and comes after us. For the way he died for us, but even more for the way he rose again and welcomes us into new life.

Amen, and Happy Easter.

Wants and Needs: Palm Sunday

2010-03-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

John 12:12-19

If my parents had gotten me what I wanted for Christmas in 1977 I probably wouldn’t be here today. In my part of the world that was the year of the moped. You remember those, right? Part bicycle, part motorbike, all noise. I wanted one so badly—I could just imagine the freedom of being able to see my friends—to get to school and even to church more quickly and in more style. I used to dream about tooling around Burbank on my own wheels, but it wasn’t to be.

First off, they were pricey, but more than that, they weren’t safe. The winter of '77-'78 was the first time I can remember hearing about ‘El Niño,’ a weather pattern that dumped about 40 inches of rain on Southern California. I might not have survived driving around town in that weather—I’m glad I’m still here to tell that story. More than that, though, my parents knew that in a year or two I would be learning to drive a car, and that once that happened the moped would probably never come out of the garage again.

In the end it wasn’t so much that my parents didn’t give me what I wanted, it was that they knew I wanted the wrong thing.

Closer to home, I saw in the paper the other day that a woman had received a police warning for ignoring Health & Safety regulations [if you're in the US, think OSHA on steroids]. Here’s what happened: This lady, a mom herself, was walking by a local school and noticed a 6-year-old boy stuck 20 feet up in a tree. He’d climbed up there and was too scared to make his way back down. The school administrators had checked their manuals to figure out what to do in that situation, and had decided to implement the ‘observe from a distance’ option. (I’m not making this up.) The woman walking by had consulted, um, her common sense, and helped the boy out of the tree. When the police came they told the woman that she had ‘approached the school in an inappropriate way,’ and warned her not to do it again.

Seriously, I understand the reason for the rules and regulations that are designed to keep us safe and healthy, I really do. But do you see how what happened here is a perfect example of the rules we want sometimes come at the expense of the safety we really need? Keep that in mind as we look at the familiar Palm Sunday story of Jesus entering into Jerusalem.

12 The next day the great crowd that had come for the Feast heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem.
13 They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,

Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the King of Israel!

14Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it, as it is written,

15Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey's colt.

16At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.
17 Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. 18 Many people, because they had heard that he had given this miraculous sign, went out to meet him.
19 So the Pharisees said to one another, See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!

By the time we get to our text, Jesus has been teaching and healing out in the countryside for a few years. His heart has always been set on going to Jerusalem—it was the home of the Temple, the central worship space of the Jewish faith. Just before our story Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and that story had spread all across the region.

Jerusalem at the time was under Roman occupation. There was a Hebrew king acting as the local political leader, but he answered to Rome’s representative. The Pharisees and other religious scholars worked behind the scenes, and made the rules for the Jewish people. This period of Roman occupation had a strong influence on the Jewish hope for a Messiah. God had made all of these promises about sending a savior, but over the years the hope for the Messiah had turned into a hope for a new political leader who would raise an army and overthrow Roman rule.

So where we pick up the story Jesus is headed into Jerusalem, and the people wave palm branches and shout ‘Hosanna’ and call Jesus the ‘king of Israel.’ The Jewish leaders are worried that Jesus is going to rock the boat with Rome, because so many people are starting to believe that Jesus is the promised one. In the midst of all that intrigue, Jesus enters the city and begins the final stage of his ministry. The people lining the street couldn’t have been happier. The Messiah was finally here, and things were about to change.

Somehow, though, all of this went terribly wrong. The same people shouting ‘Hosanna’ and ‘Blessed is the king of Israel’ will be shouting ‘Crucify him’ by the end of the week. The words of the people waving branches make it clear that they thought Jesus was their king. The problem was that Jesus came as the king they needed, instead of as the king they wanted.

The issue here is the difference between Realm thinking vs. Reign thinking. Realms have lines and boundaries—they mark out territory at the exclusion of other places. Realms are bound by time and space—they are by their very nature, limited. The concept of a Reign is much different. When Jesus preaches about the Kingdom of God, he’s not talking about a realm, he’s talking about his sovereign rule over all people and all places—he’s talking about his power over all things, even death.

In our text today the difference between realm and reign thinking shows itself as this important difference between what we want and what we need.

This question about wants and needs in material things has become more important over the past few years. Amitai Etzioni wrote about this in the aftermath of the banking crisis. He wrote that once our real needs have been comfortably met, we add extras—what would have been luxury items in the past—we add those to the list of things we need to survive, and fall into the trap of getting and buying and spending and consumerism.

It’s not just about money. We do it with our careers and our kids, too. More money, great schools for our kids, bigger houses, better cars. How much of that really makes us happy? How much of that has strayed from what we wanted to what we can’t live without?

It might surprise you to know that in most Western nations there is no real correlation between more money and increased happiness. A disproportionately high number of people in industrialized countries report feeling unsatisfied—even deprived.

Mostly it’s because no matter how much stuff a person has, we tend to feel unsatisfied when people around us have more. Any of that sound familiar to you?

Tim Keller is a author and pastor in New York, and one of his books is on our reading list in the bulletin. In that book, Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down, he makes the connection between the things we’ve redefined as necessities and the biblical idea of an ‘idol.’ He writes:

“What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would hardly feel worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing…

An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is worship.”

It should hit all of us right between the eyes that the stuff we’ve placed on a pedestal—the earning and status and possessions and success for our kids that we’ve made the most important things in our lives—hit should come as a warning to all of us that all of that can be defined as worship. Because we know, right? We know that God is the only true focus for our worship, and that anything else that gets in the way of that is, uh-oh, an idol.

We want things we can control, but often they can end up controlling us. That’s what the people lining Jerusalem Boulevard 2000 years ago couldn’t see. It’s what we tend to miss while we’re planning out our lives and the futures of our kids.

We want the realm—the list of things that we think will make us happy, but what we need is the reign—the rule of God in our hearts and minds. Jesus enters Jerusalem offering the world everything it ever really needed, but they reject him because what he was offering wasn’t what they wanted.

How’s that work for you?

What is it you want from Jesus the Messiah?

How does it measure up against what you really need from him?

Health and safety represent two of the core desires we all have for ourselves and for the people we love. But we’ve already seen that the health and safety we want can get in the way of the health and safety we need.

As we move into this Holy Week and Easter season, the call to each one of us is to let Jesus be the savior we need. He’s more than just a good guy, or a role model or a moral guide.

Jesus the Messiah came to rule in our hearts and minds and to bring us into full, healthy relationships with God, with ourselves, with each other and with the earth.

The only question left on the table is this: Will we let him? Will we allow Jesus to be the savior we need, even if that turns out not to be what we think we want?

Don’t let another Easter season go by without wrestling with that question. Don’t let the celebration of Christ’s sacrifice go by again without understanding what it means for you.

We complicate a lot of things in this life of faith. The gospel of Jesus Christ shouldn’t be one of them.

Jesus the Messiah came as a fulfillment of God’s promises. He lived and loved, he healed and served, he died and was raised again so that we could be reconciled to him and to each other.

He offers all of that to all of you—to each one of us. If that’s something you want to know more about, then find me or Stephanie or the person sitting next to you and talk about it. Don’t let another Easter season go by.

Over these last few weeks of Lent we’ve been talking about the Lent Challenge—praying the Lord’s Prayer five times each day between now and Easter. Let me encourage you to do that in the coming week. We can start right now…

An Unusual Kindness

2010-03-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

(The following message is the fourth in our series titled The Journey to the Cross: Four Practices to Prepare Us for Easter.)

1 Peter 4:7-11

My grandparents were models of hospitality. I used to love to take my friends over to both their houses.

My mom’s folks loved to sit and talk and laugh. My grandfather couldn’t walk, and so in him you knew you had a captive audience, but most of the time he was the one doing the talking and telling jokes. The rest of us could walk just fine, but we stayed put, sitting at his table.

My dad’s parents were from Italy, and so most of their hospitality centered on food. My friends in junior high and high school used to love going over there, especially on baking days, because my grandmother would put plate after plate of delicious things in front of us.

The language barrier never stopped my grandfather from telling stories. He would start in a sort of broken English, but as he got going he would slide back into his distinct southern Italian dialect, and then I’d have to stop him every so often to translate.

What made my grandparents hospitable—what they knew about hospitality—was a lot more than just opening the door and offering some food. My grandparents knew how to share their lives with people who came to visit them in their homes. My friends still remember so much detail about my grandparents’ lives—whether it was about coming to Los Angeles from Nebraska, or from Italy. About battling polio on one side or losing a son in World War II on the other.

The comfortable chairs and the great food were just the means—just tools for making someone welcome. The real hospitality was in the telling of stories—the sharing of lives and experiences.

Lent is a time of reflection and preparation for our remembrance and celebration of Christ’s love for us as we find it in the Easter miracle. Over these four Sundays we’re exploring some practices that will prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week and Easter. The habits and practices we’re looking at are prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality.

Each one of these serves to help us understand and experience what Christ has offered to us—each one of these gets us out of our regular routines and practices and makes Lent and Easter more meaningful. As a part of that we’ve been saying the Lord’s Prayer five times each day in the run up to Easter—we’ve been calling it the Lent Challenge…sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

As we come closer to the end of this year’s journey to the Cross, it’s important for us to notice that all four of the practices and habits we’re talking about: prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality—all four of these are relational practices. They’re ways that we interact with God and with each other—ways that we make the values of God’s Kingdom become a part of the way we live each day. Keep that in mind as we make our way toward Easter Sunday.

7The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. 8Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 9Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. 10Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. 11If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Don’t you love the way that starts? ‘The end is near!’ You can picture someone walking around in a sandwich board… OK, now purge that image from your mind. That phrase is really there to cultivate an attitude—a posture of expecting Christ’s promises to come true at any time.

This letter was written to a group of churches in modern-day Turkey—communities of Christians who were learning to live their faith in a hostile culture. There wasn’t a widespread persecution going on at the time it was written, but there were local attacks throughout the Roman Empire against churches and Christians. The main point of the letter is that we’re called to live differently because of our faith, and that sometimes that means we’ll be rejected—feel uncomfortable—even have to suffer.

The writer uses the language of the weak to describe how Christians were supposed to engage their culture. He calls them exiles or slaves or aliens to make the point that living as a Christian in a hostile culture won’t be easy.

In our passage today the message is that the way we treat each other and the world around us is a sign of the God we believe in. Our actions—what we do in our daily lives—is meant to communicate who God is and how much he loves the world he made.

Part of that is this idea of ‘ungrudging hospitality.’ ‘Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling,’ the Scriptures say.

What do we need to know about this idea of hospitality? Finding some sense of what it meant then will help us figure out what it means now, and for that we’ll look just briefly at another passage where the same word appears.

In Acts 28 Paul was shipwrecked on an island with Luke and some of the other apostles of the early Christian faith. Luke tells the story like this: ‘Once safely on shore, we found that the island was called Malta. The islanders showed us unusual kindness. They built a fire and welcomed us all because it was raining and cold.’

The word that translates to ‘hospitality’ in our text this morning is in this passage, too. But it’s not the obvious choice—it’s not where Luke says ‘they built a fire and welcomed us because it was raining and cold.’ It’s not the word ‘welcome.’ The word that translates in our text to hospitality, in this text translates to ‘unusual kindness.’

I love that. It’s not normal kindness—it’s not the sort of kindness you can fake or put on. It’s unusual kindness—the unusual kindness that comes from going the extra mile—from reaching out with generosity and grace and even transparency. Unusual kindness leads us to see people who have been shipwrecked somehow, and build them a fire and get them out of the cold. I can see them sitting around, glad to be alive, telling stories about what had just happened.

This is where I learned so much from my grandparents.

In my grandparents’ homes the telling of stories became a sort of nurturing, healing act. When my friends and I listened, we found ourselves being taught and mentored—prepared for adulthood by learning from the stories of people who were a few generations ahead of us. For my grandparents, the sharing of the stories became a way healing the pain from things that had happened to them.

One of my grandfathers couldn’t walk. He’d survived polio in the 40s but did his best to move and work and even play, despite his disability. He and my grandmother had a hard life, but they found joy in opening their home to anyone who wanted to come in. They couldn’t go every place that they wanted to, so they made their home a place of welcome and the world came to them.

My Italian grandparents lost their oldest son in 1944. They’d hardly had time to learn English before they had to navigate Army red tape and plan a funeral in their new country. There were two huge portraits of my uncle Pasquale in their house, one in a suit and the other in his Army uniform. The pictures were so big that they became a part of the conversation whenever anyone came over for the first time. It was a happy home, but it was seasoned by this one tragic event, and it helped them to talk about it over the years as people got to know them.

Like I said before, my grandparents’ hospitality was a lot more than just comfortable furniture and food. It was about the way they shared themselves—their stories and their laughter and their sadness—with people who came to visit.

Why is that important? Because the hospitality we’re called to show as Christians is more than just being welcoming people, even if it starts there. It’s a lot more than just food or coffee hour or a handshake.

Christian community—true hospitality—is about sharing life together. It’s about entering into each other’s joys and struggles and even each other’s pain. We do it not because it’s some weird magic exercise that God asks us to do because it entertains him. We do it—we enter into the lives of our friends and neighbors and even strangers, and allow them to do the same with us—we do it because Christ did it for us first.

Let me put that another way: True Christian hospitality is when we allow someone to be close enough to us that they can see both our brokenness and what Christ is doing to redeem and heal it.

If Lent is a time of reflection and preparation for remembering and celebrating Christ’s sacrifice for us—if Lent is about stripping back the facades we make and looking honestly at how our lives are being transformed by Jesus—and Lent is about all of those things, by the way.

If Lent calls us to remember, then it also calls us to share. It’s in that sharing—the sharing of our lives and stories—that we become people of true welcome—people who demonstrate that unusual kindness we see in the Scriptures. We don’t do it because we’re great—We do it because we’ve been loved greatly.

When we think about it that way, it’s not really about our houses or churches at all. And as much as I love being a product of my two different families, true hospitality becomes less about following our ethnic and cultural traditions, and more about being transparent about our need for God no matter where we came from. It becomes less about the comfort of the furniture and the quality of the food we serve. It becomes less about where we are and more about who we are.

I’ve been reading a book this week called Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers. There are a couple of quotes from the book on the front of your bulletin today.

The author writes this about where true hospitality happens: ‘The place of hospitality therefore does not require a fixed location but a people—a people who share a common life of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace and, most centrally, of worship. Where then do we lay our heads? All of these practices teach us that we lay our heads upon Christ and each other, and in doing so reveal the beauty of Christ’s body to the world.’

See, hospitality has a point—it isn’t an end in itself. We practice true Christian hospitality because in some tangible way it reveals the beauty of Jesus Christ to the world. Because in ways that we might never be able to put into words, the graciousness and welcoming and fellowship or true hospitality demonstrates the way we’ve welcomed and given grace by Christ himself.

That’s why we stand and confess what we believe when we baptize—when we welcome someone new into the family. We start the story there, and promise to keep telling the story as long as we’re together.

In the Presbyterian Catechism that we’re using in our confirmation class, one of the questions is about how we treat others, especially those of other faiths, Here’s what it says:

‘As much as I can, I should meet friendship with friendship, hostility with kindness, generosity with gratitude, persecution with forbearance, truth with agreement, and error with truth…I should avoid compromising the truth on the one hand, and being narrow-minded on the other. In short, I should always welcome and accept these others in a way that honors and reflects the Lord’s welcome and acceptance of me.’

That’s it. That’s the essence of Christian hospitality. We’re called to welcome and accept these others in a way that honors and reflects the Lord’s welcome and acceptance of us.

There’s some risk in that, right? Taking down the walls and facades we’ve built means that we’ll be exposed somehow to the people in our lives. Let’s be honest—for a lot of us, coming to church means putting on our best face, not our truest face. It means acting how we think we should act, not how we really are.

But if we’re looking to Jesus as the model for how we should live and love and forgive and show hospitality, then we have to acknowledge that he took all those risks for us first.

He came, he lived and loved, he shared his stories and wisdom, and he became vulnerable even to the point of death.

As we move into Holy Week next Sunday—as we reflect on Christ’s sacrifice and prepare our hearts for the joy of Easter morning, remember that it’s the little things that matter most. It’s the unusual kindness God invites us to share in our hospitality that becomes a visible mark of the way the Holy Spirit is working in our lives.

My prayer for all of us is that we would learn to open ourselves to people in our lives, even the strangers, and that we would welcome and accept these others in a way that honors and reflects the Lord’s welcome and acceptance of each one of us.

To do that we need to keep ourselves connected to the one who goes ahead of us even now. The Lord’s Prayer keeps us linked to God and his plan. Let’s pray that prayer together this morning.

Room for Reason on Health Care?

2010-03-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

It’s sad, in a way.

Yesterday I posted an article on my Facebook page about the rate at which mothers die giving birth in the US. Several organizations had ranked the US 41st in the world (at the bottom of industrialized nations) in terms of death rates for women in childbirth. I prefaced the link with a comment that I was a) unsure that the current health care proposals are the right answer, and b) hoping that someone from the Republican/Libertarian side would offer a better, more market-driven solution.

The responses confirmed my worst fears about the way this issue is being discussed, and highlighted how difficult it is to be a dissenting conservative these days. In all the reaction (and let’s be honest, overreaction) to the idea of a government-run health care system, not one of the responses mentioned the tragedy of the mothers who are dying. Think about that. Most of the respondents, but not all, were parents. Most of the parents were men with daughters. None, not one, mentioned the real lives behind the statistics—the ones that represented kids growing up without their birth moms, husbands raising children without wives, or, at least as likely, orphans placed in foster care. Think about that, too.

Now before anyone pushes the nuclear response button (seriously, haven’t you had enough of that already?), let me say a few things that require some nuance to communicate (and understand) fully.

First, I’m not in favor of a radical re-vamping of the US health care system. It takes a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of American culture and values to think that replacing the current system with an entirely new one isn't a fool’s errand at best. But, we spend 16% of our GDP on a health care industry that doesn’t provide basic services to all of our residents, and that clearly isn’t working either. (For all the reasonable and unreasonable fears about the British National Health Service, it’s still a fact that everyone here has good—not great—medical coverage, and it costs 8.4% of GDP.)

Second, I do believe that there is a profitable solution to be had, one that offers basic coverage to everyone, but it is being subverted by the intransigence of the two dominant political parties. One of the qualities that makes America such a great place—and such a great economic engine—is that it encourages and delivers solutions to problems that a) meet the needs of the public, and b) turn a profit for employees, shareholders and, through taxation, our public sector. To say that this is not possible is to redefine America into something it has never been—a place devoid of the ideas and acumen we cherish as a pillar of our national culture.

Even Britain—and pay attention here if you’ve only seen a caricature of the health care picture here—even Britain’s marketplace offers a broad range of private insurance options that kick in if the NHS can’t provide what you need. And they’re not just for the rich. How do I know that? First, because I have that insurance myself. My church generously provides me and my family with a basic private insurance overlay which costs about £2000 per year, and includes vacation coverage in that amount. (That means that when we visit the US, where we no longer have insurance, we’re still fully covered.)

But I can also argue that private health care isn’t limited to the rich by analyzing where it is advertised. Most of you will know that advertising is targeted so that specific ads will reach the greatest number of potential customers. Toys are marketed during Saturday morning cartoons, feminine products are pushed on the Lifetime channel, sports events are soaked in beer commercials, and luxury items can be found in high-end magazines. Advertising is placed where it will reach the highest proportion of people likely to buy what is being advertised.

Here in London, private health insurance is advertised in the Underground and on buses.

Companies selling private health policies in the UK, after considering where they might get the most bang for their advertising buck, have chosen users of public transportation as their primary audience. If you separate the tourists from the equation, then the expectation is that commuters—not rich people, but people with jobs—are likely to want and to be able to afford private health insurance. Oddly enough, and this is one of my areas of serious dissent from the current president’s plan, there is more choice in health care in Britain than we find being proposed in the US. I’ll say again that this is a complete and utter misunderstanding of American culture and values.

But getting back to the article in my original link, I never thought I’d see Americans of any political stripe roll over and tolerate being 41st in the world at anything. Even if, as some suggested, the left-leaning orientation of the article’s sources (the World Health Organization, Amnesty International and the Guardian newspaper) exaggerated the details to smear Americans—even if they inflated US stats by 10 places or so in the rankings, I wasn’t raised in a country that would have been happy being ranked 30th in any important table. The competitive juices would have flowed, the partnership between government and private enterprise would have kicked into gear (with all the necessary tensions there), and somewhere, somehow, some American would have figured out a way to do it better, cheaper and in more colors.

The responses I hear to the health crisis tell me that spirit is dead.

It wasn’t killed by the government. It wasn’t killed by illegal immigrants. It was killed by the very people who would have found a solution just a generation ago—it was killed by pro-business, pro-private enterprise, pro-innovation conservatives who spend more time talking about what’s wrong with the other side than they do proposing a better way to solve the problem.

For the first time in my adult life, the right seems less culturally American than the left.

So what do we do? I want you to hear this in the refreshing spirit in which mean it:

I don’t know.

This is a huge problem for us to solve, and I don't pretend (as some will) to have the answer. The way our provision of health care has evolved over the last century has left us with a system that is, on the one hand, amazing in its life-enhancing creativity and excellence, while on the other, unattainable for too many of our neighbors. The solution to this problem will come when advocacy for independence and profitability is tempered by advocacy for justice and universal access. If that seems like too much coded language, let me say it a different way: As trite as it may sound, we won’t find our way out of this until the two sides with important vested interests can work together.

In the meantime, and to get back to the shocking details (even if only true by half) in the story I linked to yesterday—in the meantime people are still dying unnecessarily. People at the bottom of the economic ladder, but who will (as past generations have) contribute to the growth and profitability of our nation in years to come, need the rest of us to come up with a solution in the same way we did for polio, illiteracy and Hitler.

That’s what I was trying to say.

As We Forgive our Debtors

2010-03-15T03:22:00.000-07:00

(The following message is the third in our series titled The Journey to the Cross: Four Practices to Prepare Us for Easter.)

Matthew 18:21-35

Ernest Hemingway’s short story, ‘The Capital of the World’, starts with a local joke about the fact that Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is short for the name Francisco. In the joke there’s a father who came to Madrid and placed an ad in the local newspaper which said:

‘PACO, MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA AT NOON TUESDAY. ALL IS FORGIVEN. PAPA.’

The punch line was that the police had to be called to disperse the crowd of more than 800 boys named Paco who answered the ad and came looking for their father's forgiveness.

There’s something so sad about that story—it points us to a truth that we don’t like to talk about that much: the need we all have to give and to experience forgiveness.

We talked last Sunday about the fact that everyone needs to confess sometimes. Today we shift to the other side of the relationship—the call to forgive.

21Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"
22Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
23"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' 27The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28"But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
30"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' 34In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

Lent is a time of reflection and preparation for our remembrance and celebration of Christ’s love for us as we find it in the Easter miracle. Over these four Sundays we’re exploring some practices that will prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week and Easter. The habits and practices we’re looking at are prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality.

Each one of these serves to help us understand and experience what Christ has offered to us—each one of these gets us out of our regular routines and practices and makes Lent and Easter more meaningful.

As we come to the midpoint of our journey to the Cross, it’s important for us to notice that all four of the practices and habits we’re talking about: prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality—all four of these are relational practices. They’re ways that we interact with God and with each other—ways that we make the values of God’s Kingdom become a part of the way we live each day. Keep that in mind as we make our way toward Easter Sunday.

So back to our parable.

The plot of our text today is fairly simple. A king discovers that one of his managers has embezzled a huge amount of money—an amount so great that it could never be paid back. (We know now, of course, that that could never really happen, right?)

The king’s response was to sell the manager’s family and all of his possessions, not to pay the debt back, but as punishment for what he’d done. The crooked manager begs for mercy, and in the second-most shocking detail in the story, the king shows mercy and lets the man and his family go free.

The crooked servant then goes out to someone who owed him a small amount of money, and demanded payment of the debt. But it’s more than that. The text says that he basically mugged him—he choked him first and then shouted at him to ‘pay back what you owe me!’ When he couldn’t pay up, the man begged for mercy, but our lead character has him thrown in debtor’s prison.

The king hears about it and calls his manager to explain himself. The question the king asks is the question that our text confronts us with today:

‘Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’

Let’s come back to that one.

Often we think of this story as a comment on Jewish law or practice about forgiving. Actually, it’s a reversal of an Old Testament story of revenge. In Genesis 4, Lamech boasts that if anyone ever attacked him, he would avenge it 77 times. When Peter comes to Jesus with his hypothetical question about how many times he’s supposed to forgive the annoying people in his life, Jesus turns it around by quoting one of the truly violent revenge stories of the Scriptures.

The oldest sense of the word forgiveness—it goes all the way back to classical Greek—means ‘the voluntary release of a person or thing over which one has legal or actual control.’ By the time Jesus uses the word here in Matthew, it describes the essence of what Christ came to do—to forgive, to release, to share the good news that through him, ‘no account will be made of the sins that we have committed,’ one writer described it. It’s the very opposite of revenge, which is the point Jesus is making.

Notice also that the story Jesus tells begins with this key phrase: 'The Kingdom of God is like…' That’s a key that this parable teaches something that is close to the center of the gospel. We’ve talked about the Kingdom of God a lot here, and for good reason. It’s Jesus’ favorite topic.

Remember that God’s Kingdom isn’t a realm with boundaries and limits. The Kingdom of God is God’s reign—his rule and power over all things, even death. So many of his stories and miracles and sermons point to what the world looks like under the reign of God—what the values of the world would look like if they allowed God to rule in their hearts and minds and lives.

The parable this morning is about how we are called to forgive—the extravagant, lavish, reckless acts of forgiving that Jesus asks us to do. There’s no mystery here. The point Jesus is making in this parable is that we should forgive as God has forgiven us through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s all.

Jewish law and common sense and our own gut feelings and personal boundaries might tell us that seven times is plenty of chances to give someone who wrongs us—someone who sins against us, someone who owes us, someone who has messed up something that is ours.

It’s enough to have to try to forgive people seven times, but Jesus tears that up and proposes a ridiculous number—77 individual acts of forgiveness. And that’s not a total for our lifetime. That’s a number of forgiving acts with each individual person who does us wrong.

The number isn’t meant to describe a new, improved, more stringent set of rules. It’s not to raise the limit on how many times we’re supposed to forgive. This isn’t a new Law for us to follow.

The number Jesus gave as his answer about forgiving people was meant to be so high as to mean that we should never stop forgiving each other—that there is no limit to how many times we’re supposed to forgive—that if we’re called to forgive as God forgives us, then the job is never, ever, really finished.

That raises a question for us about how exactly God forgives us. What do we mean when we say that the God of the universe has somehow cleansed us from whatever sin or brokenness was keeping us from connecting with him?

And that takes us back to the question the king asks in our parable today: ‘Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’

Miroslav Volf, in his book called Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, describes in detail what the Scriptures say about how God forgives.

Volf reminds us that God doesn’t keep a record of our debts (Romans 4 and Psalm 32).

God covers our sin—he hides what we’ve done even from his own sight—he puts it behind his back, we see in Isaiah 38.

God removes our transgressions as far as the east is from the west, and he blots out our sin so that we’re without stain or blemish. He sweeps our sin away like mist, we see in Isaiah 44.

And then, in the real miracle of miracles for us, God chooses to forget—literally not to remember our sin. That one is so important that we see it in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Hebrews.

When Jesus tells that story where the king asks: ‘Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ This is the mercy he’s talking about. Peter asks Jesus a lame hypothetical question, and Jesus gives him a real-life answer.

But that doesn’t mean that any of that is easy for us. Check out the quote from Volf’s book on the front of your bulletin.

“How should we forgive? The simple answer is that we should forgive as God forgave in Jesus Christ. But before exploring many facets of that simple answer, I need to address a serious objection. How can we forgive as God forgives when we are obviously not God? We are human—wonderfully, finitely, and sinfully human. We are not divine. How can we do anything as God does, let alone forgive?”

Volf goes on to talk about the link between God’s forgiving and the way we’re called to forgive. Our forgiving is faulty, he says, but God’s is perfect. Ours is provisional, but God’s is final and eternal. Volf writes: ‘The only way we dare forgive us by making our forgiving transparent to God’s, and always open to revision. After all, our forgiveness is only possible as an echo of God’s.’

Our forgiveness is only possible as an echo of God’s.

We saw one of the most dramatic echoes of God’s forgiveness in the response of the Amish community to the shooting at one of their schools. The details were horrible, but almost immediately afterward the families of the kids who’d been lost expressed their forgiveness to the shooter. The news media couldn’t make sense of it, and neither could any of the rest of us, if we’re honest. Because it wasn’t just words.

The forgiveness the Amish showed had some teeth to it—at the shooter’s funeral, more than half of the people in attendance were Amish. To this day that particular part of the Amish community visits the widow of the man who committed the crime—they provide financial support to his children.

It’s no coincidence that in that Amish they do something that we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks. They pray the Lord’s Prayer—sometimes as many as five times a day. The forgiveness they showed didn’t really have much to do with the person they were forgiving. It was a recognition that as forgiven people, they were called to forgive.

As that line from the Lord's Prayer—‘forgive us our sin, as we forgive those who sin against us’—as that phrase works its way into our hearts and minds and lives, we’re able to reach out with forgiveness because we know we’ve been forgiven already.

So how does this help us prepare to remember Holy Week and Easter?

In the Hemingway story, all those kids—800 of them—came looking for forgiveness from their father. But only one of them could be the true son that the father was looking for.

In our own stories we come to God looking for forgiveness, and we find that because of his one, true son, he has an unlimited supply—that all of us are covered by his love and grace and mercy.

What God asks for—not as a condition of forgiveness, but as a response to it—what God asks for is that we forgive each other as recklessly and lavishly as he’s forgiven us.

‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’

It sounds so matter-of-fact—it sounds so simple, but we know it doesn’t work that way. Without the model of the way Jesus forgave, and without the Holy Spirit working within us to shape us into the people we were made to be—without the Son and Spirit we can never truly be about the Father’s work.

As we continue this journey through Lent—this journey to the Cross—as we pray and confess together, the call on us is to add forgiveness into the mix.

As we release people from the weight of whatever they might have done to us, we come closer to living the lives Christ made possible for us.

As we give up our right to claim whatever is owed to us by the people in our lives, we find an even greater gift given to us.

And through all of that forgiving and releasing and erasing, we become an echo of the way God has loved and forgiven us first.

To make this practical, during this Lent season, find someone who has wronged you somehow. Tell them about it, and in faith offer them the gift of forgiveness.

Nothing prepares our hearts more for the joy of Easter than to share what God has done for us with someone else.

Nothing shows God more that we’re starting to understand how much he loves us, than if we share that love with someone else.

‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’

Let’s pray that together as we prepare our hearts for Holy Week and Easter.

More (but not less) Than Sorry

2010-03-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

(The following message is the second in our series titled The Journey to the Cross: Four Practices to Prepare Us for Easter.)

Psalm 51

I read this week that there’s a new self-help line in France. It’s called ‘The Line of the Lord,’ and it’s designed to give people a chance to confess their sins over the phone. The service, which costs 50p per minute, tells callers: ‘For advice on confessing, press #1. To confess, press #2. To listen to some confessions, press #3.

I wonder which number gets pressed the most?

Seriously.

Still, the French Confession line points us to a truth we don’t like to talk about too much: Everyone needs to confess sometimes.

It’s not just phone-in services—and it’s not just the French. I looked on the internet for English-speaking confession sites last week, and stopped counting after 50 separate sites designed to give people a chance to confess something—to come clean about something they’ve done.

Everyone needs to confess sometimes.

Our text this morning is one of the great prayers of confession in the Scriptures. Listen as David confesses his sins to God.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+51&version=NIVUK

Lent is a time of reflection and preparation for our remembrance and celebration of Christ’s love for us as we find it in the Easter miracle. Over these four Sundays we’re exploring some practices that will prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week and Easter. The habits and practices we’ll look at are prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality. Each one of these serves to help us understand and experience what Christ has offered to us—each one of these gets us out of our regular routines and practices and makes Lent and Easter more meaningful.

As a part of that I offered a challenge last week to pray the Lord’s Prayer five times each day between now and Easter. If you weren’t here last week, feel free to start today. Even though the prayer is only 30 seconds long or so, it’s harder that it looks to do it five times every day. I managed it just once last week, but some of you have emailed me with questions or things you’re learning by praying the prayer. Keep those notes coming—you guys are teaching me a lot with your comments.

So about our text: It was one of the biggest political scandals in the history of the nation. King David had an affair with the wife of one of his military officers, and has the man killed to cover it up. Then he married the woman, and thought he could live happily ever after. The details of the story are in 2 Samuel.

The airing of this scandal in public was as dramatic as any in the history of the world. I’m just old enough to remember watching the Watergate hearings, and after that there were Cabinet and Supreme Court nomination battles in the States. Here we’ve seen recently the Chicot Inquiry on the war in Iraq, but there is a long string of public hearings on accidents and political corruption dating back to 1847—the first public inquiry in the sense that we know it was a study of the educational system in Wales. Isn’t that interesting?

The airing of the scandal surrounding King David threatened to throw his nation into complete chaos. Here’s how it happened.

Nathan the prophet—God’s mouthpiece in David’s administration—came to him with a story about two men, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a large herd of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had just one sheep, that he had raised from birth and was a part of his family.

When a guest came to visit the rich man, as Nathan told the story, it was the custom for him to prepare a feast for him. But the rich guy didn’t want to use one of his own herd, so he took the poor man’s one sheep and killed it and served it to his guest.

When David heard the story he was furious—the Scriptures tell us that he ‘burned with anger against the man,’ and so he said to Nathan: ‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die. He has to pay the man back four times over, because he did this thing and had no pity.’

I can just see David feeling pretty good about himself at that point. He was the King, he had all the power, and he knew that God loved him. I can see him sitting back on his throne, smiling and feeling proud, ready to look around to his advisors and ask ‘what’s next?’.

It’s right at that point that Nathan points his finger at David and says:

‘You are that man! This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says: I anointed you king over Israel—I gave your master’s house to you—I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little for you I would have given you more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?’

Can you imagine?

Can you get a feeling for what it would have been like, there in the courts of power, with the king making plans and decisions about all kinds of things. The whole cast of characters in the court were there—advisors, visitors, servants—and all of them heard the king accused of the worst kind of sin. That’s how this scandal was made public. And it’s in David’s exposure as a philandering, murdering scoundrel, that he sits down and writes the psalm of confession we read today.

It’s worth looking at a few things about this psalm.

First, notice how completely David takes responsibility for his sin. ‘I have done evil in your sight—my sin is always before me.’ That probably wasn’t his first reaction, but by the time he sits down to share his experience in this psalm, he understand that only by coming clean completely can he be forgiven and restored.

Second, listen to what David asks for. ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God…Restore to me the joy of what it means to be your child.’ David wants to be made new again—to have a chance to start over.

Finally, notice that David promises to share what God has done for him with others who are burdened by their sin or brokenness. ‘Then I will teach others your ways, and sinners will turn to you for forgiveness.’ There’s a clear link here between David’s prayer and the covenant relationship God invites us to live in. We’re talking about this in our Bible studies on Sunday. God promised Abram that he would bless him, so that he would turn around and be a blessing to the rest of the world. God blesses David, and David turns around to share that blessing with those around him.

God blesses us, even when that blessing is being forgiven for our sins. God blesses us, but it’s with the understanding that we’ll share that blessing with others.

There’s a great practical example of this in an old West Wing episode. Josh is struggling with something and Leo offers to help him. Leo tells a story about a guy in a hole who’s asking for help. A friend hears him and jumps into the hole. The first guys says ‘great, now we’re both stuck in here.’ The second answers by saying, ‘yep, but I was in here before and I know the way out.’

We learn in confession that God loves us and has blessed us, and the natural response is to share that good news—to find someone else in a hole and show them the way out.

The church staff is reading a book together. It’s in the reading list in your bulletin—it’s called ‘God Hides in Plain Sight.’ The book is a meditation on seeing God in the everyday—about experiencing the sacraments—all seven of the Roman Catholic sacraments—in the events and practices and cultural things that we see around us.

The author talks about confession as a way to order our inner lives—to take the rooms or spaces in our hearts and minds that might be cluttered by sin and brokenness—to take those rooms and tidy them up in confession.

“Confession, penance, forgiveness and reconciliation are part of the heartbeat—part of the order in our disorder—of what it means to be a whole human being. At various levels in our lives there is conflict, some of which will never be completely resolved. But at those deep relational, spiritual, or even institutional levels, we make the climb out of the river difficult when we keep retrieving our past and carrying it with us. Usually we need someone’s help in letting go of it…”

‘Usually we need someone’s help in letting go of it…’ Confession calls on us to be in relationship, with God and with each other. We can confess to God directly, of course, but more often than not that confession isn’t complete until we share it with someone in our lives. Until we ask for someone’s help in understanding what we’ve done, and how God will forgive us and restore us.

Confession that goes beyond just saying that I messed up—confession that is a means of sharing our messy lives with someone else—that kind of confession is an important part of being Christian disciples together.

If we think about confession that way, then it becomes a lot more than just saying sorry. It’s a part of being in Christian community—part of what it means to be a church.

Everyone needs to confess sometimes, and during this season of Lent it’s a healthy thing to be reminded of—to practice—to let it help us reflect and prepare for remembering Christ’s sacrifice for us.

Everyone needs to confess sometimes.

When I went to my 10-year high school reunion in 1991, we had to list what we were doing in a little book that everyone got when they came to the party. I had just graduated from seminary the year before and was working as a college and youth minister near my hometown. I have to say that I learned as much that night about what people need from their minister as I did in any seminary class I took.

Over the course of the evening people came to my table and made their confessions. People I knew, people I’d lost touch with, and even people who never said a word to me during high school—they dropped by the table to say hello, and ended up telling me some of their darkest secrets—they were looking for a way to get out from under their deepest sins.

Everyone needs to confess sometimes.

Jesus knew that when he taught his disciples to pray. If you’ve been saying the Lord’s Prayer this past week you know that right there in the middle of the prayer there’s a confession line: ‘Forgive us our sins.’ You can’t get away from it. ‘Forgive us our sins.’ It’s a part of any basic prayer—it’s a part of how we begin to align our hearts and minds with the heart and mind of God himself.

Everyone needs to confess sometimes. But how does that help us move through the season of Lent? How does that help us prepare for Easter?

If we think of confession as a way of sharing our lives honestly with each other, it prepares us for Holy Week and Easter by reminding us of why Christ served and died for us in the first place. One of the reasons Lent is more somber than the rest of the church year is because we’re asked to reflect on why we need a sacrificial savior at all—why Christ’s sacrifice was necessary.

It’s in confession that we get the answer to that question. God sees who we are and what we are, and his response is to love us sacrificially—to act decisively to bring us back to him.

God sees who we are and what we are, and in the practice of confession, so do we.

Remembering what Christ has done through the events of Holy Week and Easter—and why he did those things—being people who remember is a part of the life of faith.

Confession isn’t there just to get us to focus on ourselves. Confession, in the end, gets us to focus on God. It reminds us of who God is and what he’s done and what he promises to us.

Confession prepares us to experience God in a new way—to experience his love in the places we need it most.

I invite you, as we move through the season of Lent—of preparing our hearts for the miracle of Easter—I invite you to make confession a part of your life. The Lord’s Prayer is a place to start, as we ask God to ‘forgive us our sins.’

Reaching out to someone else to share your life is the next step. Building connections like that, in relationships that are built on trust and faith, strengthens our community and makes us more into the church that God calls us to be.

However it works for you, I invite you to make confession a part of your preparation for Holy Week and Easter.

We’ll do our part right now, as we say the Lord’s Prayer before coming to the Table together. Hear especially that crucial sentence of confession, and make it yours.

Let’s stand and prepare our hearts for Communion by saying the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lent Challenge: Prayer

2010-03-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

(The following message is the first in our series titled The Journey to the Cross: Four Practices to Prepare Us for Easter.)

Luke 18:1-8a

And so we come to our second Sunday in Lent.

Julie and I had a conversation last night over dinner with some friends about how different traditions use different practices to remember this season. Some give something up, others go to special services, you get the idea. For us, however you practice this season, Lent is the 40 non-Sundays before Easter. Sundays are always festive days—we’re not supposed to deprive ourselves of anything on the Lord’s Day. That’s why Lent is such a bad time to diet—on each Sunday we’re supposed to feast on whatever we’re giving up.

Lent is a time of reflection and preparation for our remembrance and celebration of Christ’s love for us as we find it in the Easter miracle. It’s an old tradition—it dates back at least to the 4th century—it’s a part of the church calendar that moves us from the joy and expectation of Advent and Christmas, through the more somber season of thinking about the Cross and Christ’s suffering for us.

Over these next four Sundays we’re going to explore some practices that will prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week and Easter. The habits and practices we’ll look at are prayer, confession, forgiveness and hospitality. Each one of these serves to help us understand and experience what Christ has offered to us—each one of these gets us out of our regular routines and practices and makes Lent and Easter more meaningful.

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'

"For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!'"

And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly.

As we look at this parable it’s important to remember some things about Parables as a specific type of writing. They’re not allegories, but instead they’re stories that are designed to create a feeling or reaction, like a short story as opposed to a novel. They’re more confrontational than informational. They’re meant to confront us with a glimpse of what the Kingdom of God might look like.

Luke’s gospel was written a generation after the events of Jesus’ ministry, and it was designed to encourage Christians who were under attack or persecution. There’s a cultural context to the story we read, too. Luke’s readers would have had a clear understanding of the relationship between the powerful and the weak—about what it meant to be powerless. The persistent woman in the story would have gotten a lot of nods from the people listening to the story—as a widow her plight would have resonated with Jesus’ audience.

Since this parable isn’t an allegory, the characters aren’t meant to specifically represent God or us or anyone else. In the parable we read today the judge doesn’t represent God. He’s a device that is meant to highlight God’s love and grace and mercy. The point Jesus is making goes something like this: If a crappy, unjust judge would take this woman’s case—even if just to get her off his back—if even this corrupt politician would do the right thing in the end, how much more would our Father in heaven act on our behalf.

So what do we learn about preparing for Easter in this passage?

First, there is a persistence to prayer here that goes against our shopping mentality. On the back of your bulletin there’s a description of prayer that goes like this:

“Prayer is a dynamic and vital part of our journey of faith in Jesus Christ. We pray, not as we shop for goods—with a list in hand and limited funds to spend—but rather as faithful people bringing our hopes and fears before God, whose love and power and resources have no end. In prayer we learn to align our vision and desires with those of God himself, and in the process become mature disciples, ready for service.”

Mostly, though, prayer is about bringing our lives before God—all the time—not just when we have something we want from him. Remember that even Jesus prayed all night—if prayer was a simple matter of placing an order and waiting for goods, he never would have done that.

So how can we experience prayer as a way to prepare for Easter?

The answer to that is deceptively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you want to see how prayer can help you move through the Lent season and get you ready for Easter, the answer is to pray.

Pray for your friends and families.
Pray for this church and our ministry together.
Pray for your kids and the ways they’re being shaped in their schools and friendships.
Pray for the person sitting next to you today.
Pray for your neighbors.
Pray for strangers.
Pray for people who drive you crazy—the ones who really get under your skin.
Pray for your priorities.
Pray for peace, everywhere.
Pray for a heart that is as soft toward others as God’s is toward you.

In the interest of full disclosure here I have to say that I know this part is difficult. I’m the last guy who should be up here giving instruction on prayer. I’ve been a Christian for most of my life and I still don’t feel like I get this part of the life of discipleship.

I know this is hard. But Jesus understood that, too. That’s why when his disciples came to him and asked that he teach them to pray, he gave them the prayer that we say here almost every Sunday.

Developing a life of prayer is a challenge that will take our whole lifetime to wrestle with. But the one part of that that isn’t a mystery is in knowing where to start.

We begin precisely where Jesus himself told us to begin. We start with the Lord’s Prayer.

Last year we spent a couple of months walking through this prayer—seeing it for the radical statement of faith that it is. That’s something we want to rediscover over and over again.

I want to give you a challenge during this Lent season, as we reflect and prepare on the Cross of Christ and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. As we develop the practices of the Christian life I want to challenge all of us to do something over these next weeks before Easter.

Pray the Lord’s Prayer five times a day.

That’s it. That’s all. It’s not magic, but it is a way to get our minds and hearts focused on the one who made us and redeems us and calls us to this new way of life.

Pray the Lord’s Prayer five times each day.

Let the words soak in. Let the prayer teach you something about the mind of God—about God’s plan—about God’s heart for you and for this church and for the world.

Pray the Lord’s Prayer five times each day.

Right now I know that some people will be thinking that they don’t have time to do this—that they can’t fit this into their busy, stress-filled lives.

You know the word I want to say about that (the one that would cost me my job).

Here’s a reality check: The Lord’s Prayer takes about 30 seconds to say. It might be a little longer for the ‘trespasser’ crowd, but not by much. We’re talking about less than 3 minutes total out of your day. Three minutes to get your mind and heart focused with God as we prepare for Easter. Three minutes each day to take a stab at praying just as Jesus himself taught us to pray.

Pray the Lord’s Prayer five times each day between now and Easter.

For those of you who like to have a plan for things (and you know who you are), try this: Pray it once when you wake up. Pray it before breakfast, lunch and dinner. Pray it again as you go to bed.

If you miss one, then you miss one. If you miss a day, don’t give up. This isn’t magic—this is about learning to align our lives and minds and hearts and priorities with the mind and heart and priorities of God. Talk about it in your home or with friends or people here at the church. If praying the Lord’s Prayer raises questions for you, then write them down and talk about them with someone.

As you pray the prayer, let the prayer enter into your life and start to work on you—to change the way you think and feel and even believe. Just try it—we can make it our shared Lent project this year.

John Ortberg is a pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California. He’s a really effective teacher and writer—one of his books is called ‘The Life You’ve Always Wanted,’ which is on that reading list in your bulletin, by the way. The book is about how to develop spiritual disciplines in our daily lives. He wrote this about prayer:

“Prayer, perhaps more than any activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God. Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together. In addition to all the other work that gets done through prayer, perhaps the greatest work of all is the knitting of the human heart together with the heart of God.”

I don’t know too many people who aren’t in some way looking for a concrete expression of their relationship with God.

I don’t know too many people who would reject the idea of their heart being somehow knitted together with the heart of God.

That’s what God offers us in the life of prayer.

That’s what I’m inviting you to do during these next few weeks of Lent.

As we reflect on Christ’s ministry and sacrifice for us—as we prepare together to celebrate the miracle of the resurrection as if it were happening for the very first time—as we continue to grow together in our faith and discipleship…

Pray the Lord’s Prayer five times a day—pray it with the annoying persistence of the widow in the parable.

Let it become a part of the rhythm of your day—let it become part of the rhythm of your life.

We look ahead with humility and joy and anticipation to the events of Holy Week and Easter. As we continue that journey to the Cross, let’s stand and pray the Lord’s Prayer together.

Mission: More Than a Check

2010-02-01T03:18:00.000-08:00

(The following is the fourth in a series of messages called Shark Church: What the Church Can Learn From Sharks.)

Colossians 3:15-17

So today we continue our series called Shark Church. I’ve been making the case over these past few Sundays that the church can learn a lot from the way sharks live. We’ve seen how that works through Fellowship, Worship and Discipleship, and today we come to Mission.

Our text this morning comes from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Just to review, a shark is an amazing natural machine. A shark is basically a muscle with teeth—it rarely gets tired or takes any rest. In fact, a shark spends its entire life doing three things:

It swims, it eats, and it makes baby sharks.

A shark that is true to its nature simply swims, eats, and reproduces. We’ve also learned that a shark never stops growing during its entire life-cycle. That’s an important part of what sharks can teach us.

Over the past three years, to start the year, we’ve talked about what it means to be the church. The church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

If you’re going to memorize one sentence over the next four Sundays, make it this one:

A faithful church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

As we think about what that means, we’re adding this image of the Shark Church—about churches that learn from the way sharks live. Because a church that is true to its nature—a church that is faithful to its calling—is like a shark.It never stops moving. It seeks out nourishment. And it makes new disciples. A faithful church never stops growing during its lifetime—that’s so important for us to wrestle with.

If a shark swims, eats and procreates, then as churches we’re called to move forward without ever thinking we’ve arrived at some kind of church perfection. We’re called to nourish ourselves through prayer and study and service and reflection. And that we’re called to go out and make new disciples—to share the message of the gospel in a way that draws people into community and into faith. That’s the point of being a Shark Church.

One of the great things about our text this morning is that it hits every one of the qualities of a faithful church that we’ve been talking about. A little background is in order.

Colossians was written to a community in what is now Turkey. It was a wealthy city, and also a place where there was some important debate happening about what it meant to be a follower of Christ. Paul writes some of the great defining language that we use to describe who Christ was and is, and also some powerful teaching for what it means to function as a church—as a community of faith.

In our text today you see all of the elements of church that we’ve been talking about.

Fellowship is there. ‘Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.’ The idea of being one body—one unit called and set aside for a purpose. Paul challenges the Colossians to be ruled by Christ alone as they live out their faith together.

Worship and Discipleship make an appearance as a part of the same sentence. ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.’

Notice how the word of Christ is supposed to dwell in us richly—literally to live in us and produce something new and effective and mature and wonderful. When we talk about studying the Scriptures it’s not just out of simple habit or devotion. It’s not so that we can check something off of our daily to-do list. We study the Scriptures to get a glimpse into the mind and heart and purposes of God, so we can be transformed into the people he made us to be in the first place. We challenge each other with the wisdom we absorb from our study.

And then there’s Worship. Notice also how diverse the worship is that Paul is talking about. ‘As you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God’. We said a few weeks ago that the means or forms of worship that we use aren’t nearly as important as getting ourselves into a place where we’re worshipping in spirit and in truth—where we’re so drawn to Christ that we fall at his feet in praise and worship.

And so we come to Mission, but in a different way than we might be used to.

“And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it in all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Our lives are meant to be lived in a constant state of gratitude to God for the ways he’s loved us first.

Notice what this doesn’t say.

He doesn’t say to set aside a special time to be grateful for God’s love.

He doesn’t say to pick some gifted people to offer thanks to God on your behalf.

He doesn’t say to devote part of your organization to sharing the gift of love you’ve received from God.

The text doesn’t say any of that, because none of those get at the heart of the life we’re called to as Christians. Because the life we’re called to as Christians is a life where every single part reflects our faith—reflects the fact that we’ve been purchased for a price—reflects the ways God calls us to be his hands and his voice to other people.

This is about more than a mission committee or a mission project or even a mission trip. This is about everything we do, both individually and as a community.

We’ve been spending some time here learning about the concept of a missional church. A lot is being written about that topic these days. The narrative goes something like this.

When Western civilization was largely Christian, there was a shared language that the culture understood and that made it easy—or easier—to communicate the message of the gospel. In that time churches had what people knew they needed, and so people went to church. But we live in a post-Christian age—the old Christendom no longer exists in the same way. Because that’s true, people don’t naturally gravitate to the church anymore, and so we have to change the way we function as the church of Jesus Christ.

If people aren’t coming to us anymore, then the new way of doing church has to include going out into the world—taking the message and meaning of God’s work through Jesus Christ out into the world.

Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, introduces some new ways to think about how we ‘do’ church.

He talks about learning to speak in the language of the culture instead of in church-speak. That makes sense if the people we’re trying to reach don’t know what we’re talking about when we roll out the jargon of the life-long churchgoer.

He talks about entering into the culture’s stories in history and the arts—in film and in music—and connecting them with the gospel. There are all kinds of stories of redemption and reconciliation in movies and books that give us open doors to telling the story of Jesus and his saving work.

Keller talks about training people in our churches not just for service in churches but also for service in whatever they do when they’re not in church. We don’t just want to make good elders and committee members and Sunday School teachers and youth leaders. We want to be a place that intentionally helps bankers, teachers, builders, cleaners—and even the occasional minister—we want to help everyone do what they do Christianly, in a way that reflects who they are and whose they are.

Keller talks about living is such a way that the model and message of Christ are visible and tangible in our lives, that people we come into contact with have an experience of Christ’s message because we live it every hour of every day.

All of those together begin to get at what it means to be a missional church.

That means that the church isn’t really as complicated a place as we’ve made it over the years. When it’s firing on all cylinders—when it’s being true to its shark-like nature—when the church is fully functioning then every part of it is somehow contributing to the overall mission of the church.

That mission, simply put, is to go out into the world as ambassadors of Jesus Christ and as reflections of his redeeming work. To allow our encounter with the risen Christ to transform every area of our lives, and to live differently because of that.

It’s not a committee—it’s a reason for being.

It’s not a trip—it’s a way of life.

It’s not an annual focus—it’s a daily way of focusing our time and energy and money and service toward the goal of knowing Christ and making Christ known in every part of his kingdom.

My friend Neil Uchitel wrote an essay a few years back where used the analogy of military recruitment to describe two different models for the work of the church. For those of us who grew up in the States, we remember the ads for the Army. They showed strong men and women, with the tag-line: ‘Be All That You Can Be’. A few years later it became: ‘An Army of One’.

Both of those say something about Army culture. The ads point to what a soldier will get from their time of service—the focus is on the benefit to the recruit—what the recruit will receive by joining the Army.

Contrast that with the Marines. You may have seen their ads, the ones that ask the reader if they think they can be one of the ‘Few, the Proud, the Marines’. That ad represents an entirely different way of thinking. It’s not an invitation to come and take something away from your time of service. It’s a challenge to be transformed into something—someone—different. Marine culture highlights what you become, not what you receive.

There is a therapeutic model of doing church that has gotten popular over the past 20 years or so. It focuses more on meeting needs than it does on transforming lives.

Some people resist the therapeutic model of doing church because they think it’s intrusive or meddling in their personal lives. Bad news—the problem isn’t that the needs-based, therapeutic model churches are too intrusive, it’s that they’re not intrusive enough. The Christian faith, and the way we live out that faith in church—none of that is supposed to be a smorgasbord where you come and pick and choose what you want and leave the rest.

The faith, and the way we express that faith in community, is supposed to reach in and transform every part of our lives—it’s meant to remake us into the men and women we were made to be in the first place—in the end we leave this place as changed people, with a call on our lives and a new mission to accomplish: the mission of living the gospel of Jesus Christ in everything we do—every relationship we have—every plan that we make. Christ reaches into us, and we respond by reaching out to share his love and grace and reconciliation with the world.

Next week I’ll be taking a ministry class at Fuller Seminary. Alan Roxburgh, the professor who will be teaching that class, describes what the church is called to be:

“God is about a big purpose in and for the whole of creation. The church has been called into life to be both the means of this mission and a foretaste of where God is inviting all creation to go. Just as its Lord is a mission-shaped God, so the community of God’s people exists, not for themselves but for the sake of the work.

Mission is therefore not a program or project some people in the church do from time to time; the church’s very nature is to be God’s missionary people. We use the word missional to mark this big difference. Mission is not about a project or a budget, or a one-off event somewhere; it’s not even about sending missionaries.

A missional church is a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God’s missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.”

What this means for us in this church is that we’re going to start thinking about all the things we do—all the ministries and giving and service and worship—everything we do is focused on accomplishing the mission of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Some things won’t look all that different, and some things might need to be changed in radical ways—some things may need to be rethought and rebuilt from the ground up.

The key is that we’re called to notice that the rest of our culture doesn’t always speak our language anymore. We’re called to see that gap, and to change the way we do our business in order to cross it. The call on us is to go out into the world and learn the language of the culture, and to create new ways of sharing Christ’s message.

What we’re called to do is offer our lives back to God in a way that honors what he’s already done for us. That’s what it will mean for us to grow into being a missional church. Buckle up.

Amen.

Discipleship: More Than Information

2010-01-25T01:22:00.000-08:00

(The following is the third in a series of messages called Shark Church: What the Church Can Learn From Sharks.)

Mark 8:31-35

Just a mile or two south of here, in the Imperial War Museum you can find an Enigma machine. Enigma was the code used by the Germans in WWII, and the machine was how they sent and received top secret messages about troop movements, battle plans, and anything else an army might want to keep secret. The Allies had cracked the code early in the war—it was a joint effort between the Poles and the British, and later the Americans—they had the code early on, but they were pretty stingy about how they used, it.

Think about that. The war was raging, but Allied leaders had to decide when to use the code they’d cracked. The secrecy was mostly for one crucial strategic reason—you didn’t want the Germans knowing that their code was broken, or they might find a new one. The Enigma story is one of the great subplots of WWII.

For us today, as we think about what it means to be disciples of Jesus, the Enigma story serves as a reminder of the difference between knowing…and living by what we know.

[Jesus] then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.

So we’re in a series called Shark Church. I’ve been making the case over these past few Sundays that the church can learn a lot from the way sharks live.

A shark is an amazing natural machine. A shark is basically a muscle with teeth—it rarely gets tired or takes any rest. In fact, a shark spends its entire life doing three things:

It swims, it eats, and it makes baby sharks.

A shark that is true to its nature simply swims, eats, and reproduces. We’ve learned that a shark never stops growing during its entire life-cycle. That’s an important part of what sharks can teach us.

Over the past three years, to start the year, we’ve talked about what it means to be the church. The church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

If you’re going to memorize one sentence over the next four Sundays, make it this one:

A faithful church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

As we think about what that means, we’re adding this image of the Shark Church—about churches that learn from the way sharks live. Because if we think about it, faithful churches are like sharks.

A church that is true to its nature—a church that is faithful to its calling—is like a shark.

It never stops moving. It seeks out nourishment. And it makes new disciples. A faithful church never stops growing during its lifetime—that’s so important for us to wrestle with.

The Discovery Channel offers a Shark Week—seven days devoted to programs about shark behavior, shark bites—all shark all the time. We’re offering a Shark Month—a look at what the church can learn from sharks.

Here’s how we translate shark instinct into a road map for the church.

If a shark swims, eats and procreates, then as churches we’re called to move forward without ever thinking we’ve arrived at some kind of church perfection. We’re called to nourish ourselves through prayer and study and service and reflection. And that we’re called to go out and make new disciples—to share the message of the gospel in a way that draws people into community and into faith. That’s the point of being a Shark Church.

Our passage today comes in the middle of Mark’s gospel. Mark’s story of Jesus is the one that moves quickly from story to story—he uses some variation of the word ’immediately’ more than 40 times. There isn’t even time for him to tell the birth story of Jesus in the beginning. His gospel starts when Jesus’ ministry starts.

Where we pick up the story Jesus has just miraculously fed another crowd of people—4000 this time. He moves from there to the healing of a blind man in Bethsaida, and then to a critical story—really the turning point in Mark’s gospel.

Jesus takes his disciples to a place called Caesarea Philippi, and starts a conversation with them. If you’re familiar with the story of Jesus and his disciples, you know that Jesus is always trying to get them to understand who he is and why he came. Most of the time they get it wrong, and Jesus just shakes his head and tries again. But this time something different happens.

Jesus asks them who people say that he is. This isn’t the way it sounds, exactly. Jesus isn’t worried—it’s not the way we might have done this when we were kids: ‘Do you think the cool kids like me?’ That’s not the question.

Jesus is prompting his followers to ask themselves who they think Jesus is. When he finally puts the question to them, it’s Peter who answers. He says: ‘You are the Messiah.’ Christ is simply Greek for Messiah, and so when Peter says this he’s the first one to say that he believes Jesus is the one the Jews had been waiting for—that he was the Promised One, the savior, redeemer, King of Israel who would fulfill all of God’s promises.

Jesus clearly liked Peter’s answer. In Matthew’s gospel, after Peter’s response, Jesus says to him: ‘Blessed are you—You’re the rock upon which I will build my church.’

And then we get to our passage. Maybe this time, Jesus is thinking, maybe this time I can tell them what has to happen to me. If Peter can understand it, maybe the rest will, too.

And so Jesus starts to tell them that he has to suffer, that he will be arrested and tortured and rejected by his own people, and that he has to be killed.

Peter, the one who understands who Jesus is, takes him aside, the Scriptures tell us. He takes Jesus aside and began to rebuke him. I wonder what he said.

‘C’mon, Jesus. We’re just hitting our stride together—we’ve got a crowd of people who think we’re pretty cool, you just told me you were going to build the church on me (thanks, by the way, for your confidence in my ability), and none of that can happen if you can’t get a grip on your risk management. C’mon, Jesus—get with the program!’

Can you imagine? Let that sink in for a moment. Peter, the one who has grasped that Jesus is the Messiah sent by God himself—that in some mysterious way he is God himself—takes Jesus aside for a little life-coaching.

You know what’s coming. Jesus yells at him and calls him Satan and sends him to the back of the class. And then he says this: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’

This is a key text for our understanding of discipleship—for our understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

In the New Testament the word ‘discipleship’ is usually linked with the idea of ‘following.’ The word usually represents someone who has answered the call of Jesus, and whose whole life has been redirected in obedience. Whose whole life has been redirected in obedience.

We see some examples of that as Jesus calls his disciples. Think back on the stories where Jesus walks up to someone—they might be running a business or collecting taxes—a few of them were even fishing. Jesus simply comes to them, looks them in the eye and says: Follow me. And they go. They give up everything—they leave it all behind and go with this teacher wherever he leads.

What does that mean for us? How do we follow this Jesus?

How do we renew our commitment to being disciples of Jesus the Messiah?

It’s so important for us to remember that the gospel of Jesus Christ is more than just information. It’s more than simply knowing about Jesus.

The key is in recognizing the difference between knowing and living by what we know.

Remember that in our text this morning Jesus was talking to a group of people who knew him well. They’d traveled with him, shared meals with him, struggled with him, learned from him. Think about what that means: they knew his likes and dislikes, how he took his coffee, what he had for breakfast, which things aggravated him, which things helped him relax. The disciples knew a lot about Jesus.

Jesus valued that—we see how much he relies on the friendships he has among the disciples. Jesus values their knowledge, but he also tells them it’s not enough.

That’s why Jesus jumps all over Peter. When Peter decides that Jesus shouldn’t suffer and die—that he should stay out in the countryside as a teacher, calls him the worst name he could imagine: ‘Get behind me Satan!’ he said. Why?

Because Peter thought it was enough just to know Jesus—to be in his presence and enjoy hanging out with him. Peter liked the status quo—he wanted to keep on enjoying things the way they were—he didn’t want to have to do anything or change his routines or live differently.

The call from Jesus is quite different from that.

Jesus describes three ways we can move from knowing about him to living differently because of what we know.

First, ‘Deny the self.’ That’s different from self-denial, like giving up cake or meat or anything else. Denying the self is more about seeking God’s will and God’s priorities over our own. This is much deeper than a diet. This is about applying what we know to the way we live. It’s about growing in our understanding of the very heart and mind of God, and aligning our lives to his. Denying ourselves is not so much about what we give up as it is about what we take on as we live as Christ’s disciples.

Second, ‘Take up your cross.’ This is a tough one—obviously it’s not simply to carry a cross around, or complaining about something going wrong in your life. This isn’t about the kind of fake martyrdom that makes people look for sympathy by saying: ‘It’s just my cross to bear.’

This is not only about suffering or the appearance of suffering. But it is about living differently because of Christ’s sacrifice.

To take up the cross is to carry the meaning of Christ’s gift of forgiveness into every area of our lives.

To take up the cross is to make Christ’s redeeming work as visible in our lives as it would be if we were carrying his cross on our own backs.

To take up the cross is to live as an invitation to life the way it was meant to be. The life made possible by Christ’s atoning work.

Finally, in the end what Jesus asks for is that we ‘follow him’—that we follow in his footsteps—the action steps we see as we grow in our understanding of what Jesus said and did and lived.

Following is a tricky thing to ask for in a room full of leaders, don’t you think? I mean, it can be a challenge for people who are used to things being a certain way to willingly try to change the way they live.

That’s the challenge of discipleship.

Our faith in Jesus Christ hits the road, or sprouts teeth, or whatever image you want to use that means ‘This is real now.’

Our faith comes alive when we start to live what we know and believe about who Jesus is—about what he did—about what his promises are—about what he calls us to do and to be.

Our faith comes alive—we grow as disciples of Jesus—when our lives become reflections of his life and ministry. When everything we do—when our whole lives are redirected in obedience to Jesus.

We become disciples when we answer Christ’s call to deny ourselves, to take up his cross daily, and to follow him. This is more than just information—this is a road map for life the way it was meant to be.

My prayer for all of us, individually and as a community of faith—my prayer for us is that we will live as Christ’s disciples, hungry for knowledge and courageous in living out what we know.

Shark Month continues next week with a look at what it means to be a missional church. Stay tuned.

Let’s pray together.

Worship: More Than a Show

2010-01-19T08:15:00.000-08:00

(What follows is the second in a series of messages called Shark Church: What the Church Can Learn From Sharks.)

Matthew 28:1-9

I remember seeing a movie as a kid that confused me. I grew up in an era of tough guys—of Starsky and Hutch, John Wayne and Dragnet. Our male heroes moved through crimefighting—and through life—as if nothing could bother them…no one could boss them around. The movie that threw everything sideways for me was Captain Blood, one of the great Errol Flynn pirate movies.

The story was set in the late 17th century, when Britain was about to change royal families…not without some conflict. Captain Blood found himself on the wrong end of the political intrigue and became a pirate. Throughout the film he was heroic, aggressively independent, and totally in charge—until he comes face to face with his rightful King. When they meet, Captain Blood falls to his knees, bows his head and asks for orders, completely submitting to his lord and master.

It looked so strange to me.

You know our text today as one of the Easter stories, but it's too good a passage to only focus on once a year.

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you."

Picture that story for yourself. The disciples and the women who were faithful followers of Jesus have been through a lot up to this point. They followed Jesus around for three years, went with him to Jerusalem and saw him arrested and beaten and killed, and now they’ve seen him resurrected and returned to them. And then, just as soon as things were getting back to whatever normal looked like for them, Jesus was about to leave again. But before that the women have an encounter with Jesus on Easter Sunday. They recognize him and fall to their knees. They clasp his feet and express their love for him. It’s a powerful moment of intimate worship.

So we’re in a series called Shark Church. Let’s review some of the shark facts we learned last week. A shark is an amazing natural machine.

Some sharks lose up to 30,000 teeth in their lifetime.

The largest living shark in the world, the whale shark, can grow up to 50ft. long.

A shark can smell a few drops of blood from a mile away.

Some fisherman say the mako shark can swim up to 60mph.

A shark is basically a muscle with teeth—it rarely gets tired or takes any rest. In fact, a shark spends its entire life doing three things:

It swims, it eats, and it makes baby sharks.

A shark that is true to its nature simply swims, eats, and reproduces. We learned last week that a shark never stops growing during its entire life-cycle. That’s an important part of what sharks can teach us.

Over the past three years, to start the year, we’ve talked about what it means to be the church. The church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

If you’re going to memorize one sentence over the next four Sundays, make it this one:

A faithful church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

So last week we started to explore our theme for these next few Sundays: Faithful churches are like sharks.

I’ll say that again: A church that is true to its nature—a church that is faithful to its calling—is like a shark.

It never stops moving. It seeks out nourishment. And it makes new disciples. A faithful church never stops growing during its lifetime—that’s one for us to chew on.

The Discovery Channel offers a Shark Week—seven days devoted to programs about shark behavior, shark bites—all shark all the time. We’re offering a Shark Month—a look at what the church can learn from sharks.

So if a church that is true to its nature is like a shark, then what’s the church’s nature? It is the church’s God-given nature to be built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

So last week we talked about fellowship. What about worship? My Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms defines worship this way: ‘Worship is the act of adoring and praising God, that is, ascribing worth to God as the one who deserves homage and service.’

In that sense worship isn’t limited to what happens here on Sundays. Worship happens anytime we offer praises to God—anytime we remember or share the fact that God is God and we’re not—worship happens whenever we serve each other and the world out of gratitude for what God has done for us.

But for many of us we think of worship as simply the service of worship we attend each Sunday.

Soren Kierkegaard recognized 150 years ago that there was a problem with that. He saw congregations coming to worship for the show. They sat still while the professionals—the minister and the choir—worshipped on their behalf. I know this may stray into the eye-glazing zone of theological detail, but this was a central issue of the Reformation. Protestants protested—literally—against the idea that only a priest could approach God, and that the average church member needed that priest to worship for them. The Protestant tradition is partly built on the idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’—where every individual can encounter God for themselves in prayer, confession and worship.

Kierkegaard criticized the idea of the professionals doing the performing, with God as the prompter and the congregation as the audience. He said that true Christian worship had the congregation as the performers, the minister and choir as the prompters, and God as the audience. In Kierkegaard’s eyes worship was active, not passive—it was a contact sport.

But what goes into good worship?

Jim Belcher’s book, Deep Church, still challenges me in the way that I think about the answer to that question. Jim writes:

“Worship can be grouped into five acts: calling, cleansing, constitution, communion and commission. God calls us to worship, we recognize our need for cleansing, we hear him speak in his Word and sacrament, and then we are sent out to love God and serve others. Each act is dramatized by powerful singing and meaningful prayer. It should be a drama that rivals the best storytelling in Hollywood.”

Given all that, it’s tragic how often worship becomes a dividing point among Christians. We don’t disagree as much about the elements of worship as we do about the methods or forms of worship. Strangely, it most often comes down to musical styles. And that’s too bad, because arguing about style is an exercise in missing the point.

Last year Julie and I spent a week in Turkey with pastors from other international churches. We spent time walking around the ruins of ancient cities—it was an amazing tour through some of the places where the Christian church was born and grew.

The city of Ephesus was unforgettable. So much of the layout of the city has been restored—the main road through town, the amphitheatres, and the beautiful façade of the ancient public library. But a lot of the buildings had crumbled, too. As I looked through the chunks of columns laying around I noticed that many of them had holes that ran through the center of them—if you looked from the proper angle you could see long-ways though the columns, like through the barrel of a gun.

I asked our guide about that and he said that the original buildings—the ones that dated back 2000 years or more—had iron reinforcing through the center of the columns, and that that was what had made them so strong. But in the Middle Ages, the people in that area had forgotten how to make iron, and so they knocked down the ancient buildings and melted down the iron to make their tools.

That struck me as sad. Instead of figuring out how to make iron for themselves, medieval craftsman simply rested on the work of their ancestors.

The same thing happens in churches.

Instead of testing and experimenting with our own creativity to develop meaningful ways to worship God, we trot out the work of past churches and use their innovations as our own. That’s not what we’re supposed to be about. In our churches we don't want to forget how to create—to build new things in new ways. We don't want simply to mine the work of those who came before us. That's a short route to staleness, dullness and darkness.

Because the point of worship isn’t simply playing and singing what we like. The point of worship is to get us into a place where we drop to our knees and offer praises to God—where we fall and—just like the women did in our text this morning—where we fall and clasp the feet of Jesus and worship him.

If 18th century choral music gets you there, then great. If the repetitive praise choruses of the 70s get you there, you have my blessing. If Gregorian chants or modern rock or the sound of popcorn popping gets you there, then have at it.

Because the issue isn’t what gets you there. The issue is getting ‘there’ somehow. And what does that look like?

What does ‘there’ look like?

Worship is all those things we heard in the definition from my Pocket Dictionary, but it’s more than that. Worship is intimately connected to the mission of the church. Bryan Chappel is the president of Covenant Seminary in Missouri, wrote this about the role of worship in the church.

“Our worship should be an intentional expression of [our mission to share the gospel]. Love for Christ compels us always to consider how we may present and re-present the gospel so as to bring the most glory to God and the most good to his people…Unless we make the communication of the gospel the frame and focus of our worship, our ceremonies possess only a form of godliness—without the power of God.”

So if the communication of the gospel is the ‘frame and focus’ of our worship, why is the music so important? How does music help us worship?

For that we can get a little help by coming back to some new shark facts. A few years ago some German scientists were trying to encourage sharks to mate in captivity. They tried everything (though I’m not sure what that means: dinner? wine? a romantic movie?). They couldn’t get anything, er, going, and so they turned to a trick that had been working in zoos with land animals for years—they played music.

Along the way they learned that some songs worked better than others at revving up the sharks. Some of the songs that worked best were Joe Cocker’s ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’, and Justin Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’. I’m serious here. Some songs had no effect, but others got the sharks a little frisky. Some songs got the sharks in a place where they could be true to a central part of their nature.

I’m guessing that no one in church (or anywhere else) has ever asked you this, but here goes:

What style of worship makes you frisky for God?

Not the ones that make you feel comfortable or safe or that are familiar. Which ones remind you of your love for God? Which ones draw you into a sense of connection and closeness with your savior? Which ones get you in a place where you want to kneel before God and clasp his feet and worship him with reckless abandon?

The answer to that question matters. Why?

Because this is more than a show. This is more than simply being entertained and comfortable. This is more than a show. This is our worship response to the gifts God has given us. I’m not talking about financial resources or big houses or safe lives. God calls us to worship for his deeper, more fundamental gifts: life itself, forgiveness through Christ, the calling on each of our lives to participate in the Kingdom of God.

When the disciples and the women in our text recognized who Jesus was, they bowed down and worshiped him. They didn’t do it because it was familiar or a part of their tradition. They didn’t do it because it was comfortable. They did because of who Jesus was—they did it because of what Jesus had offered them in his ministry and death and resurrection.

When a church is true to its nature—when it moves ahead and feeds itself and makes new disciples—when it is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ and expressed through fellowship and worship and discipleship and mission—when a church is true to its nature, people will recognize that Jesus the Messiah is here—we’re be reminded of who he is and what he offers to each one of us.

And then we’ll worship—individually and as a community of faith—the gospel of Jesus Christ will be the frame and focus of everything we do. We’ll worship in spirit and in truth and with all our heart and mind and strength.

Shark Month continues next week with Discipleship. Let’s pray together.

Fellowship: More than a Club

2010-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

(The following message is the first in a series called 'Shark Month: What the Church Can Learn from Sharks'.)

Acts 2:42-47

I grew up with big family meals, and then I married into a family that loves to throw great dinners. My Italian Grandma’s table would sag under all the great food she made...it was amazing. Every holiday we’d fill up on our favorites while we talked and laughed and enjoyed being together. My mom and mother-in-law both throw great parties built around eating and talking and loving our time together. As the date gets closer I’ve been looking forward to our visit back home for meals with friends. Tom Barlow and I are taking a class together at Fuller Seminary in February. I told him to come hungry, because we’re going to hit all my favorite places.

Food and fellowship go together—that’s the origin and the continuing meaning of Communion: a meal that represents who we are together in Christ.

42They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Now a lot of you may be wondering about the picture [of a shark] on the front of the bulletin. There’s a point to that, which we’ll get to in a minute.

On the Discovery Channel each year they have something called ‘Shark Week,’ a celebration of all things sharkish. The programs have these great, dramatic names. Here are some of the titles: Shark Quest, Day of the Shark, How Not to Become Shark Bait, Anatomy of a Shark Bite, Ocean of Fear, and Blood in the Water. The DVD collection is called Shark Week’s Greatest Bites.

You get the idea.

My nephew Garrett loves that week—it used to be his favorite week on TV. He knows more about sharks than any kid I know, so I asked him to share some shark facts with me. Here are some of his favorites.

Some sharks lose up to 30,000 teeth in their lifetime.

The largest living shark in the world, the whale shark, can grow up to 50ft. long.

A shark can smell a few drops of blood from a mile away.

Some fisherman say the mako shark can swim up to 60mph.

If you rub the skin of a shark from head to tail, it feels smooth. But when you rub their skin from tail to head, the denticles ("little teeth") can cut your hand.

A shark is an amazing natural machine. It’s basically a muscle with teeth—it rarely gets tired or takes any rest. In fact, a shark spends its entire life doing three things:

It swims, it eats, and it reproduces. A shark that is true to its nature simply swims, eats, and makes baby sharks.

Over the past three years, to start the year, we’ve talked about what it means to be the church. The point each time has been that a healthy church—or a thriving church—or a contagious church—and now this year a faithful church—a faithful church, a church that is true to its nature, is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

If you’re going to memorize one sentence over the next four Sundays, make it this one:

A faithful church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission.

So that brings us to the edge of our theme for the next few Sundays: Faithful churches are like sharks.

I’ll say that again: A church that is true to its nature—a church that is faithful to its calling—is like a shark.

It never stops moving. It seeks out nourishment. And it makes new disciples.

Think back on our text. The disciples are confused and terrified after Christ’s death and resurrection and departure. The Holy Spirit comes and empowers them. Peter preaches the first Christian sermon and 3000 people, people from all over the world, came to faith in Jesus Christ. By the time we get to our text we see what these thousands of people were doing together—how they lived together and began to flesh out what it meant to be a community of faith.

What we see in our text is an image of what true Christian fellowship looks like. The church in Acts was a church like a shark: it never stopped moving, it fed itself physically and spiritually, and it reproduced. Let's see how that looks in the text.

‘All the believers were together and had everything in common…Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.’ The church in Acts was a church on the move. Of course it needed to create some structure for itself eventually, but at its core the church was designed to be a community that never sits still—that moves and shares and loves and serves.

But the church didn’t just move for the sake of moving.

‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching…they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.’ The church in Acts was conscious of its need for nourishment. They were hungry to learn—they listened and studied and questioned and tested. They allowed themselves to be fed—and they fed themselves—so that they could worship God with passion and with a sense of his will for them and for the world. They also made a priority of learning so that they could serve more effectively—so that they were prepared to meet the challenges of the world around them.

But one of the things I love about this picture of the early church is how much focus there was on eating real food. They were devoted to breaking bread as a community, and when they went home they ate some more. This is a church I would fit into pretty easily. ‘They ate together with glad and sincere hearts.’ When I read that I think back on how much I loved big family meals when I was growing up—how much I still love getting a group of people together for a meal we can share ‘with glad and sincere hearts.’

But it’s important to notice that this community was partly focused on the people who weren’t there yet. All this activity and nourishment caused something special—something attractive—to happen. This was a church that knew how to reproduce—to procreate—this was a church that drew people into their life of growing together and serving together.

‘The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’ People were flocking to this noisy crowd of happy, growing, loving Christians. In the middle of a country occupied by the strongest military the world had ever known—in the middle of a city defined by a faith that was waiting for the Messiah to appear and didn’t believe that Jesus was the one—in that dangerous setting this happy, curious, loving group of powerless people drew new men and women and kids into their fellowship, every single day.

The church was designed to be a magnetic fellowship like that one—a church like a shark—a gathering that never settled for the status quo, that hungered for real understanding of the nature of God, and that multiplied by welcoming new people into Christian community.

A church that is true to its nature—a church that is faithful to its calling—is a lot like a shark.

It never stops moving ahead. It constantly seeks nourishment. And it makes new disciples.

Join that with the idea that a faithful church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ and expressed through fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission—join that with the image of a shark, and you get an idea of where we’re headed over the next month.

So what about our need for fellowship?

I think I’ve shared this quote with you before, but Bruce Larson wrote this about our need for fellowship.

“The neighborhood bar is possibly the best counterfeit there is for the fellowship Christ wants to give his Church. It’s an imitation dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but it is a permissive, accepting and inclusive fellowship. It is unshockable. It is democratic…The bar flourishes not because most people are alcoholics, but because God has put into the human heard the desire to know and be known, to love and be loved, and so many seek a counterfeit at the price of a few beers.”

But God created us for a kind of fellowship that’s more than just a place where everybody knows our name. He made us for community that can withstand disaster, whether it comes from outside or it’s self-inflicted. This is more than a club. The fellowship Christ makes possible is more than just a set of by-laws and a secret handshake.

That’s where we come back to the image of the shark, that amazing creature that swims, eats and procreates. God made us to be a community that moves through life together without ever getting stuck or thinking we’ve arrived at some kind of perfection. He made us to seek him through the study of his Scriptures and the experience of his presence in the world. He made us to go out into all the earth and make new disciples in his name.

Our fellowship together is something that is deeply meaningful and important. It gives us a place where we can grow and test our gifts—where we can be supported in hard times and where we can share our joys when they come to us. It’s a place where we deepen our understanding of who God is and who we are. And it’s a place not where we hide from the rest of the world—it’s a place we leave to go out and draw new people into faith in Christ and a sense of belonging in this community.

This is more than a club. This is the church of Jesus Christ. And the more we follow the example of the shark, the closer we come to being the place God calls us to be. That’s what we’re going to talk about between now and the end of the month.

One last shark fact.

Did you know that a shark never stops growing during its entire life? That’s amazing to me. As long as a shark is alive, it continues to grow.

Think about that for a moment. That may be one of the most challenging lessons from sharks that we can learn as a church. When we keep moving, keep being fed on God’s word, and work to bring new people into the faith, we’ll keep growing in depth and in numbers.

Welcome to Shark Month at the American Church. We’ll pick this up again next week as we talk about worship.

Let’s pray together.

Annual Report Cover Letter

2010-01-07T08:08:00.000-08:00

(What follows is my letter to the American Church in London congregation, introducing our report for 2009.)

Dear ACL Family,

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, the one who draws us together and gives us a sense of purpose and calling to serve as his people!

It has been an eventful year, filled with challenges and blessings and new opportunities for ministry. In this document [the annual report] you’ll read some reports from leaders within our church—men and women who have responded to God’s call in important ways as we continue to learn how to be a faithful church. As I have read through these myself I’m reminded of the litany shared in some churches:

God is good! God is good!
All the time! All the time!

We have certainly experienced God’s goodness in this church over the past year. Starting with the opening of our Cold Weather Shelter last January, we saw tremendous growth in our capacity to serve our community—to share God’s provision to us with others who were in need. What a great experience that was!

As we said goodbye to Kate Obermueller after two wonderful years here, we welcomed Stephanie Kremmel as Director of Student Ministries. Energized by a fantastic group of volunteer teachers and helpers, we’ve seen huge growth in children’s Sunday School and in our youth groups. Young people are being loved, having fun, and catching a glimpse of God’s amazing care for them, which is the point of student ministries. Our kids have led us in worship in the Junior and Youth choirs, under the direction of Joanna Davies, and in June we saw two of our young people preach the gospel on Youth Sunday.

The economic crisis was keenly felt by people within our congregation, and we lost a few recent arrivals who had to move back to the States unexpectedly. But in the midst of that, as you’ll see in the financial report, giving has remained faithful and solid throughout the year. It is this consistent partnership that has made the growth in ministry here possible. We’ve been able to make improvements to the church building, and more are on the way, and we’ve also made repairs and refurbishments to the manse that allow us to enjoy it as a gathering place. You will hear soon how we will finally upgrade the means of access to our church building so that all people can participate in the life of this community.

The Latchcourt room-hire business is an important piece of the overall picture of how ACL operates, and any celebration of the past year has to include thanks to Monty Strikes for his hard work. Latchcourt still provides about half of the church’s income, and helps us build relationships with the surrounding community. Thanks, Monty!

Behind the scenes there are some volunteers who help make this place go, but who won’t show up in any reports. Dick Biddick helps to assemble the bulletins and prepares the Sanctuary for worship each week. David Smith arrives early Sunday mornings to set up the Main Hall and help make the front of the church presentable, no matter what Saturday night’s revelers leave behind. It’s a hard job, but hopefully not a thankless one! Thanks to both of you for your faithful service.

Over this past year we were blessed to have Olivia O’Neill and MaryAnn Barlow take on part-time interim roles in the church office. This gave us time to think about what the church secretary position should look like as we move forward, and also allowed us to wait for the right person to become available. We welcomed Jhoana Serna in November, who now manages the office, creates our bulletins and other communications, and assists Monty in the management of Latchcourt.

This past autumn Stephanie and I attended a handful of new expatriate events, and met some great new people who have made ACL their church home. Our Thanksgiving potluck, organized by Julie D’Elia and Vicky Jones (again with the assistance of a great group of volunteers), was attended by more than 130 people. All season we’ve enjoyed a string of fantastic events which have drawn us together as a community: the Welcome Back Picnic, Stewardship Sunday, Thanksgiving Day at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Advent Action Day, and the Santa Party and Christmas Open House at the manse. More are on the way for the coming year.

As we look ahead there are some wonderful things in store for our church. The Children’s Sunday School is starting a new curriculum called “Camp Iwilligoway”, the Adult Bible Study will continue to wrestle with what the Bible teaches about faith, wealth and the good life. Our youth groups will continue to reach out to young people who are hungry for connection and spiritual growth. We’ll broaden our experience of worship as we learn more songs and experiment with different forms, old and new. The Cold Weather Shelter has started again, with new and returning volunteers making the most of their opportunity to serve. Your mission committee is making plans for us to reach out together in some exciting ways—stay tuned for details. See what I mean?

It’s great when a letter about the life of the church is abandoned, rather than finished. There is so much more I could say, but there simply isn’t room. Maybe the best way to end this is with the same reminder I shared in the beginning. As we reflect on how God has grown us and shaped us over this past year, and as we look ahead to where we’re going next, what I really want to say is this:

God is good! God is good!
All the time! All the time!

God bless you and keep you,

John

A Post-Christmas Meditation

2010-01-04T01:13:00.000-08:00

Matthew 2:13-18

Christmas, and especially the weeks right after Christmas, can be such a pressure-filled time of year.

When I was in seminary I lived with a couple of guys who were training to be counselors and therapists. They told me that the month after Christmas was a time when they saw more new clients than in any month of the year.

That didn’t surprise me all that much. I knew that I always felt a big letdown after Christmas—that I was familiar with the idea of the Christmas blues.

After the joy and celebration and gift giving and receiving and parties and food and more parties and food. After all that, it’s hard to adjust back to normal life. It’s hard to get back into our routines.

It could be a lot worse. We’ve been focusing on Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus this year—Matthew’s has a different tone to it. After Jesus was born, when the Magi came to honor him, King Herod got in the mix and tried to track down this new Messiah. There’s some great intrigue here: Herod tries to use the Magi to identify this new king, but they figure it out and return to their homes by sneaking out of town by a back-road.

Our text today describes what happened just after the great events of the Christmas story. It follows almost immediately after the stable and the shepherds and the angels and the gold and frankincense and myrrh. The angel in our text today pops in to tell Joseph and Mary that their child’s life is in danger—that they need to go on the run.

Without minimizing any of our post-holiday blues, it could have been a lot worse.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

"A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."

Herod is really one of the worst villains in the Bible. There’s virtually nothing redeeming about him. He sits on the throne because the Romans are using him to keep his own people under control. We’ll see later that his own family is a mess. And in our story today he seems to be doing everything he can to kill the Christmas spirit—to stamp out the joy of the birth of the Messiah. This episode has been called the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ throughout Christian history. I have a little boy. I can’t even bear to think about this story.

There are a lot of things that try to kill the Christmas spirit in us, right?

We’ve been watching the news about new terror threats, about political arguments that seem not to have any hope of resolution. A friend of mine saw a fight in a shop on Oxford Street the day after Christmas and decided that he finally understood what Boxing Day meant.

There are so many things that try to kill the Christmas spirit in us. One way to defend the meaning of Christmas from outside pressure is to remember the point of it all. The birth of the Messiah is God’s breaking into human history to demonstrate his love for his creation.

We started Advent this year with a look at John 3:16—‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.’

We keep the joy of Christmas alive when we remember that one single verse. God loves us so much that no price was too high to pay to prove it to us.

This horrible text that we read this morning—that awful story of the slaughter of the innocents becomes an attempt to slaughter our innocence. It reminds us that even the Christ child needed to be protected when he was vulnerable—his family had to take him all the way to Egypt to keep him safe.

It reminds us also that we’re vulnerable, too. That our faith and joy and hope have to be protected sometimes—that outside things can attack them sometimes.

When that happens—when the post Christmas blues feel like they’re going to take over—when our faith and joy and hope seem like they’re slipping away—when that happens we ask ourselves:

‘Where is all this Good News we’ve been promised?’

The answer to that question is that it’s right there where we left it.

In a stable, lying in a manger, receiving gifts he can’t use from people he’ll never see again. Tiny and vulnerable, and reminding us that we are, too.

The good news doesn’t change, even when our mood does. The good news that God loved us so much that he sent his son to offer us forgiveness and restoration and eternal life. That Good News hasn’t gone anywhere.

The Good News is still in the words of the angel, the one that told the shepherds not to be afraid.

‘Do not be afraid,’ he said.
‘I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people.’
‘Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you—he is Christ the Lord. This will be the sign to you: You will find him as a baby, wrapped up in cloth and lying in a manger.’

That good news hasn’t gone anywhere. Thank God.

Amen.

Christmas Eve Homily: Emergency!

2009-12-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

John 1-5, 14

This time of year always makes me think about the way we celebrated Christmas when was a kid, and some of the gifts my parents gave me.

In the early 70s my favorite television show was called Emergency!. Those of us of a particular vintage will know this one as an action show where the main characters were two paramedics who rushed around Los Angeles saving people’s lives and looking heroic as they did it. I can still remember their names—Gage and DeSoto—and even the number of their rescue vehicle: Squad 51. One of the doctors in the show was played by Bobby Troup—he’s the guy who wrote the song, ‘Route 66.’ You can’t get this kind of detail just anywhere.

The whole concept of paramedics was new back then. Before these specially trained professionals became a regular part of local services, ambulances simply responded to calls, threw the injured person in the back of a station wagon, and took them to a hospital. The paramedics changed all that, along with the advent of the 911 or 999 emergency phone numbers.

Anytime you see ‘para’ in front of a word, it means ‘beside’ or ‘beyond’ or ‘alongside’. Paramedics worked beyond the reach of a hospital, alongside the care someone would get once they could be stabilized in the field. Countless lives have been saved by these men and women who go out to the injured or sick, and give life-saving treatment right where people need it most.

When I was 10, though, I didn’t know anything about the details. I just loved watching the TV show—for Christmas that year my parents gave me an Emergency lunchbox with a matching thermos. Somehow that lunchbox connected me to these guys swooping in and rescuing people in need.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

Where Matthew and Luke explain the details of Jesus’ birth story, John explains the meaning behind Jesus’ birth and ministry. In John’s gospel there are no wise men, no shepherds, no baby in a manger. In John’s gospel you see why all of this happened.

John starts his gospel story by talking about The Word, the Logos, the ultimate truth about everyone and everything. He starts his gospel by teaching us that the Word—the one we know as Jesus Messiah—the Word has been there all along—he was the source of all things seen and unseen.

And then he throws in the kicker. In verse 14 John adds the part of the story that lets us know this isn’t like any other story.

Not everyone got it at first, but then again, not everyone recognizes greatness, even when it’s right in from of them.

Last week the Times of London ran a story on the first reaction by the BBC to some rock bands who went on to greatness.

‘Unconvincing derivative distortion’ was how they described Led Zeppelin when they auditioned to play for the BBC. That was roughly my mom’s reaction, too. But unless I’m wrong they went on to make some pretty good records.

When one young man tried out to perform they dismissed him as ‘a singer devoid of personality.’ That was David Bowie. Can you imagine a singer with a more unique series of personalities than Bowie? Maybe he hadn’t settled into Ziggy Stardust just yet.

Even the Rolling Stones didn’t make it through the audition stage the first time. Hard to imagine.

People have been responding to Jesus the same way since the very beginning, misunderstanding who he was—missing the point about what he offered.

So what’s the point of the Christmas story?

The coming of the Messiah as God’s answer to our 911/999 call. Like the emergency services we count on to save our lives and homes and to protect us from dangers, God comes to us. He offers us what we need to live and thrive and serve in his name.

The whole idea of God coming in human form has always tested my ability to get it at first—to understand what it means when the Scriptures teach us that:

‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’

How often do we stop to think about what that means?

Alan and Blyden met almost 50 years ago in grade school in my hometown, Burbank, California. They were close friends all through high school, but didn’t have a lot of contact after that. Two years ago Alan was diagnosed with kidney disease, and got the news that he would die without a transplant.

Blyden, who lived in Utah with his family, heard about it through a friend, and after he visited his old friend he made a huge decision. He gave one of his kidneys to be transplanted into his friend—his gift made it possible for his friend to have a second chance on life, all because of this gift.

When he was asked why he did it, Blyden said ‘We just get one chance to live our lives and do good things. If this will give Alan his life back, then I’m going to do it.

Alan struggled to comprehend what his friend wanted to do for him. He said: ‘Thank you seems so inadequate.’

It’s a great story of friendship—of generosity and selflessness. These two guys who met in the 5th grade ended up being a part of each other’s lives forever.

The main point of the story is pretty simple: In order to save his friend, Blyden had to give something up—he had to enter into his friend’s life in a sacrificial way. He responded to his friend’s emergency by doing something beyond what anyone ever expected.

That’s what we see in the coming of Jesus.

That’s what we celebrate in the birth of the Messiah.

Sometimes, in order to save someone, you have to enter in, like a transplanted life-giving organ, in order to make it happen.

Christmas is one of those seasons in the year when we celebrate and reflect on something that’s really beyond our ability to understand. This miracle, though—this supernatural event—is God’s response to our need for reconciliation and restoration.

This is God’s answer to our emergency call, and my prayer for all of us is that we can accept the amazing gift being offered to us.

If you’re hearing this for the first time, then make this Christmas the year you accept the gift of Jesus Christ in your own life.

If you‘ve heard this story a thousand times before, but it’s making sense to you for the first time or in a new way, make this Christmas celebration personal as you commit yourself to Christ’s Kingdom.

Mostly, wherever you are in your journey of faith, don’t let another Christmas go by without seeing the Christ Child as the answer to your needs—the place where the hopes and fears of all the years are met.

May God bless you and keep you as we remember the birth of his son. Merry Christmas!

This Thing That Has Happened

2009-12-21T03:45:00.000-08:00

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Luke 2:8-15

I’ve been watching and reading a lot about the Copenhagen Conference this past week.

When it ended a few days ago most of the headlines read something like: ‘Climate conference ends in discord.’

After getting leaders from all over the world to gather for a conversation about climate change, the end result seemed pretty disappointing. Whatever any of us might believe about the issue itself, it wasn’t exactly encouraging to see the way the nations of the world got together for a discussion. The results ranged from hyper-bureaucratic legalese on one hand, to a shouting match on the other.

This morning I want to read you an account of a different gathering, with an entirely different impact on the world.

8And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

13Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

The shepherds would have been aware of the promises God made to his people. Promises for a Messiah who would come and make things right—make things just—restore the Shalom God intended from the beginning. They would have known that they didn’t deserve God’s grace, but they hoped for it anyway.

In the Old Testament we learn a lot about the way God responds to our sin and rebellion—we learn a lot that we tend to forget when we only read the New Testament books. Maybe that makes sense. We don’t really like words like wrath and judgment, and yet they’re an important part of how God interacts with his people.

It would be a mistake to say that wrath and judgment are the only way God deals with his children—that would be a distorted picture of the God we see in the Scriptures. But we also give an incomplete picture of God when we leave his judgment out.

As we worked through Paul’s letter to the Romans this past fall we learned something about God’s wrath. We didn’t see God throwing lightning bolts or causing floods or wiping people out with his ‘terrible swift sword.’

The wrath Paul talks about shows God taking a step back and letting things play out as we think we want them. He allows us to have what we think we want, and by doing that we create our own misery. God’s wrath, when we think about it that way, comes when he pulls back—when he makes himself remote from us.

That’s why the Christmas miracle matters so much. At Christmas we celebrate the way God enters into our lives through the birth of this one, single baby. We remember that this baby grew up to love and teach and serve and die for us—all of that was done here, on earth, close to us. The birth of Jesus is the opposite of wrath, because it represents the gift of Emmanuel, of God coming to be with us.

But why did he come?

That’s what made me think of the Copenhagen conference this week. Saving the earth is one thing, and there’s no doubt that important work has to be done to create a healthier balance between natural resources and human industry.

Saving the earth is one thing, but saving the world is another.

The gift of the Messiah offers healing and peace and restoration not just to the earth, not just to people, but to every level of God’s creation.

We talked earlier this year about how the Atonement—God’s work of reconciliation through Christ—the Atonement offers reconciliation for the relationships we have with God, with ourselves, with each other and with the earth.

That means that the gift of the Christ-child—the birth of Jesus Messiah—all of what we do at Christmas is a celebration of God’s reconciling work at all levels—it’s a celebration of what God has done not just to save the earth, but to save the world.

This past week Americans celebrated the anniversary of the ratification of the 13th amendment to the Constitution. Passed in December of 1865, the 13th Amendment made slavery illegal anywhere in the United States. Here’s how the text of the amendment reads:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

This was a huge step forward for the United States, which hadn’t been all that united on the subject for years. At the end of a complicated and bloody Civil War, a war fought over national unity, to preserve a system of government that was still feeling its way, and also over the issue of slavery—at the end of that war the American states approved a law that made it illegal to own another person—to treat them as property.

But it’s the little clause in the middle that we don’t notice quite as much. Even after the amendment was passed, it was possible to force convicted criminals into hard labor for a period of time—that’s still the law today.

There’s a huge difference between that and what God offers to us through the Messiah. The US made slavery illegal, unless you committed a crime, while God offers freedom and forgiveness and reconciliation and a fresh start, even though we’ve all committed sins—we’ve all done things that put a wedge between us and God.

The 13th amendment was a little like the Copenhagen conference. It offered limited solutions to a problem that was a lot bigger than that. The 13th Amendment made exceptions, and it didn’t do anything about racism or hatred or even about the everyday injustices that make people feel as though they’re still enslaved. Even if Copenhagen had accomplished everything its planners had dreamed, it still would have only given us tools for saving the earth.

It wouldn’t have saved the world. It wouldn’t have healed broken relationships and transformed the culture or offered hope and meaning for a life beyond this one.

That’s what Jesus came to do. The Jesus we celebrate at Christmas heals our relationships and offers real hope for a hurting world.

When those shepherds met the angel of the Lord out there in the fields, remember what the angel said:

‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy for all people.’

And after the rest of the promise was made and a heavenly choir sang the first true Christmas carol: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all people on whom his favor rests.’

When all of that was done, remember what the shepherds did?

They looked at each other and said: ‘Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened.’

What could you see or experience this Christmas that would make you respond the same way? What song could you hear or Scripture could you read or vision could you have—what would make you say, as if it were all unfolding for the first time, ‘Let’s go and see this thing that has happened’?

My prayer for all of us, as we make this final turn and head into the homestretch before Christmas—my prayer for us is that we can get a sense of just how huge a thing God accomplished in that tiny baby 2000 years ago.

The truth is there in one of the Christmas hymns we sing each year.

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Whatever it means or ends up meaning for us to say that Christ came to save the world, somehow that promise is offered to all people in all places. ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met’ in the Christ child.

If that’s news to you then find one of us and ask us to share the rest of the story with you.

If you’ve heard that a thousand times but it’s starting to get under your skin, don’t let another year go by without doing something about it.

The angels that spoke with those frightened shepherds are still singing that same song. Only now we get to sing it with them.

Let’s stand and sing together: ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’