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.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Best News We Almost Missed
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wants and Needs: Palm Sunday
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…
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…
Monday, March 22, 2010
An Unusual Kindness
(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.
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.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Room for Reason on Health Care?
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.
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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
As We Forgive our Debtors
(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.
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.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
More (but not less) Than Sorry
(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.
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.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
The Lent Challenge: Prayer
(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.
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.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Mission: More Than a Check
(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.
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.
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